• Track Listing

For the second time the seemingly endless rockabilly CD series on Bear Family Records® is dedicated to the amazing recordings from the Starday label catalog. Launched as a country label, Starday signed some of the most important artists of the genre in the mid-50s: Sonny Fisher, George Jones, Rudy 'Tutti' Grayzell, Leon Payne, Frankie Miller and Sleepy LaBeef.. - Pappy Daily, Jack Starnes and Don Pierce initially intended their Starday label to be a purely country endeavor. But as time went on and rockabilly exploded during the mid-'50s, Texas-based Starday embraced the exciting new music just as fervently. Starnes had dropped out by the time Starday fully took it's proactive stance, it's rockabilly output so bountiful that this is Bear Family's second collection devoted to it in recent months. Like it's predecessor, the CD is chock-full of savage rockers. A sizable amount of the company's release slate was waxed in Houston at Gold Star Recording with a house band usually featuring Hal Harris on lead guitar, but by no means all. Some of these singers are legendary: Sonny Fisher, George Jones (as Thumper Jones), Rudy 'Tutti' Grayzell, Leon Payne (under his own name as well as that of Rock Rogers), Frankie Miller, the imposing Sleepy LaBeff (as he spelled it then). But an equal percentage are primarily known to aficionados only - Rocky Bill Ford, Truitt Forse, Utah Carl, Ray and Lindy, Rocking Martin, Cliff Blakley, Fred Crawford, Rudy Gaddis, Fuzzy Whitener, Jack Kingston. Some of these obscure performances were culled from the archives of the Starday Custom Series, which allowed aspiring rockers marooned in the hinterlands to pay a nominal sum for 300 copies of their creations if they supplied their own master tapes. No matter the source, all 34 of these Starday tracks have one crucial thing in common: just like the contents of Volume 1, they rock like crazy.