【Rockabilly Playlist】Ruby Rocks the Jukebox 🌟 50s Rock 'n' Roll Guitar — Ruby & the Top of the Bill

32 original songs. The singer plays the lead guitar herself — every solo on this record — and every voice you hear is a woman. ▶ THEY WERE NOT ADDED LATER. There is a way of telling this story where a door opens somewhere around the sixties, and a lot of women walk through it into a house that men had finished building. Every part of that is backwards. Go and find the earliest thing you can. Somebody is standing there with an electric guitar, playing the difficult parts, in front of paying people, years before the word for this music existed. Nobody hid her. Look at the posters — she is on them. Third line down, in the smaller letters, under two names you already know. The evidence was never destroyed. It was printed small. And the young men at the front of the room were taking notes, and they said so at the time, in interviews, when they were nineteen. It was not the players who forgot. It was everybody who came after the players — a hundred people writing short pieces, each with room for four names, all picking the same four. Every telling shorter than the last. The least famous trimmed first. Adding is a generous word. Adding sounds like progress. The actual verb is the other one. ▶ THE ONE TO LISTEN TO Track 25 — "I Found Out Late." I grew up with the four names, like everybody else. I loved them and I still do, and not one person ever told me there was anybody before them. I was already singing this music when somebody played me a recording from years earlier, and there was a woman with an electric guitar doing the thing I thought I had learned from somebody else. This is not my history and I will not pretend it is. The only honest thing I can do with it is say the part I was not told, out loud, on a record. If you are hearing this before you are twenty, you are hearing it earlier than I did. ▶ AND SINCE THE RECORD ASKS YOU TO Track 31 says to put the name in the sentence where it always should have been, so: **Sister Rosetta Tharpe** (1915–1973). Gospel voice, hard electric guitar, sang the line and played the answer herself, church on Sunday and a theatre on Saturday, and both sides telling her to pick one. ▶ TRACKLIST 00:00 Ruby & the Top of the Bill 02:02 Look at the Poster Again 04:06 She Played the Solo Herself 06:09 Nobody Let Her In 07:53 She Was Already There 10:12 The Photograph They Cropped 12:56 Church First, Then the Theatre 14:50 A Woman with an Electric Guitar 17:20 Second Billing, First on Stage 19:19 They Called Her a Novelty 21:05 And Then They Copied Her 22:49 The Boys in the Front Row Took Notes 24:43 Somebody's Mother Told Them to Sit Down 27:39 They Were Not Added Later 29:59 The Story Got Told Without Her 32:27 Take It — She Is Taking It Herself 34:29 History Keeps a Short List 36:11 Louder Than the Room Expected 38:13 She Booked the Van 40:41 The Record That Was Not Reissued 43:32 Play It Like Nobody Is Writing It Down 46:05 A Guitar Is Not a Costume 48:03 Same Circuit, Same Miles, Smaller Print 50:00 Turn It Up, They Will Say You Are Difficult 52:38 I Found Out Late 55:19 The Ones I Was Never Played 57:23 She Did Not Need Discovering 59:08 Print It the Same Size 1:00:54 Everything I Do, Somebody Did First 1:03:11 Show the Kid Who Played It First 1:05:35 Say the Name Out Loud 1:07:17 The Top of the Bill ▶ GOOD FOR Working · driving · the kitchen · and anybody who has ever been told they were the first to do something they learned from somebody else 🎵 All 32 songs are original — music and lyrics written for this record. Made in Japan. Inspired by America. Built by hand. #Rockabilly #RockAndRoll #GuitarMusic #WomenInRock #50sMusic #RhythmAndBlues #FullAlbum #OriginalMusic