The Legendary Shack Shakers

The rockabilly revival has always had a cartoonish element that, despite the quality of the players, creates a sort of costume show, making the music that much easier to dismiss. So when a no-frills group like the Legendary Shack Shakers arrives, the established rockabilly and juke-joint bands get a deserved kick in the ass, reminding us what rockabilly can sound like, instead of what it should look like.

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More About

• Joe Buck
• Reverend Horton Heat
• Legendary Shack Shakers
• Blazing Haley
• Tom Waits

So don't look for fashion tips here: It's only (brash) rock 'n' roll. Opening with a warm riff from guitarist Joe Buck and concluding with vocalist Colonel J.D.'s maniacal howl, Cockadoodledon't is to rockabilly in 2003 what the Reverend Horton Heat was in the early 1990s and the Cramps were in the early 1980s. Intimately connected to the rhythm of the blues but hell-bent on destroying rockabilly's constricting boundaries and image, the Bloodshot Records rerelease of Cockadoodledon't with another half-dozen tracks is a rush and a push.

The sound relies more on the hillbilly roots of rockabilly than on the predominant "rock" tone of contemporary rockabilly acts such as the Amazing Crowns, Blazing Haley, and the Atomic Men. If Tom Waits, Southern Culture on the Skids, and the brain trust behind Ren and Stimpy holed up in Johnny Cash's country cabin with an ample supply of beef jerky, moonshine, and chocolate-frosted mini-donuts, it might sound like Cockadoodledon't-- wild, irreverent, and urgent, a feat not often achieved among rockabilly and blues acts pigeonholed into nostalgia.