So which rock and roll bassists were sounding like this before him?




I see they did throw him a bone with "Don't Be Cruel" down in the 170s.

Many of the rockabilly bassists played like that, but the point here is that nothing much that Bill Black did back then lives on in contemporary bass playing but it was terrific back then...certainly deserving recognition for his place in the food chain of modern bass.

Yeah, after they heard him.

No, that's NOT the point. The criteria says nothing about influence:

These are the songs where the bassist gets to show their full tallent. The best bass performances.

The list is "Greatest Rock Bass Performances," not "Most influential bass players," although Black was arguably more infuential than most of these heavy metal scrubs, who have only influenced other heavy metal scrubs.

Bill's Performance on "Baby Let's Play House" should be top ten on this list, maybe even # 1.

i agree with bruce more 50's more r and b basslines more james jamerson ,why is this list jammed with metal and prog rock crap that came out later down the line, and we should change the criteria, who gets to define great bass peformance, if you played yyz by itself , its not that great compared to heard it through grapevine to my ears.

Bruce...sorry if you entirely missed my point or didn't read what I said. I was kind of agreeing with you when I stated that I thought Black has been overlooked on the GREATEST BASS GUITARIST (PLAYERS) list and deserved a spot in that regard. As for Greatest basslines...guys like Black played a lot of umm pa pa. I'd have to say that Bob Moore was much more influential in the Nashville-Rockabilly style than Black (and like Black much of it on upright). Moore certainly played for a greater variety of artists from Elvis to Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, Roy Orbison, Willie Nelson, Brenda Lee, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Roger Miller, Bob Dylan, Webb Pierce, and many more. Black just didn't have near that kind of versatility or Moores musical proficiency..

I guess if you've been around long enough ariel LOL.

What rockabilly did Moore play on? I'm talking "rockabilly," as in slap bass being used in place of percussion. There's no drums on the first few elvis singles on Sun, or on other REAL rockabilly, like Charlie Feathers records. Don't know how much you know about this stuff, but there were hundreds of Bill Black imitators in 1956, on records like this:



Black created an entire style of playing rockabilly. Moore may have been a much better musician in general, but he didn't invent anything, he was just a very strong studio musician.

Black modeled his "slap bass" technique after one of his idols, Fred Maddox of Maddox Brothers and Rose

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPeAT7jx ... re=related

What "Rockabilly" did Moore play on? Are you SERIOUS Bruce?...Just to name a few of the estimated 18,000 sessions (not songs) Moore played on include...

Battle Of New Orleans & North To Alaska (johnny Horton)
Break It To Me Gently & Rockin Around The Christman Tree (Brenda Lee)
Crying, Dream Baby, Only The Lonely (Roy Orbison)
All Shook Up, Teddy Bear, Return To Sender, Stuck On You (Elvis)
El Paso, Devil Woman (Marty Robbins)
He'll Have To Go (Jim Reeves)
Big John (Jimmy Dean)
King Of The Road, Chug A Lug (Roger Miller)
Crazy, I Fall To Pieces, Walkin After Midnight (Patsy Cline)

I could go on and on...Moore recorded and toured with Rockabilly legends like Jerry Lee Lewis, Ronnie Hawkins, Johnny Burnette, Johnny Horton, earning Moore a spot in the "Rockabilly Hall Of Fame". He even replaced Rockabilly legend Dorsey Burnette in the famed Rock&Roll Trio.

Also...among the hundreds of Rockabilly bass pioneers let's not forget guys like Marshall Grant who came up with the "boom-chick-a-boom" technique while working with Johnny Cash, as well as Marshall Lyle...one of the early slap bass creators in Rockabilly who added hiis patented "clicking slap" style with Bill Haley & The Comets. Willie Dixon, who was known primarily as a "blues" player also contributed to rockabilly based on hios work with Chuck Berry. Naw...I guess I don't know too much about Rockabilly

You could go on and on, but you still have not mentioned one rockabilly record that moore played on. Elvis on RCA is not rockabilly and neither are any of these other records you've listed. Not only that, but all of these are long after Black created rockabilly bass playing in the spring of 1954.




The Rockabilly hall of fame has nothing to do with rockabilly, unless you think Clarence Frogman Henry was rockabilly, he's in there too. It's a bogus organization started by a nice old guy who wanted to honor some old musicians and wasn't allowed to use the name rock and roll hall of fame.

From what you've written so far it's clear that you don't know shit about rockabilly. Chuck Berry is not rockabilly.

18,000 sessions?

That's one session EVERY DAY for over 49 years, without taking a day off.

You don't expect anybody to believe that number, do you?

Dorsey Burnette was replaced in the group by Bill Black's brother Johnny. That's him in this video.

Yeah...I suppose that anything that doesn't agree with your viewpoint is "bogus" like The Rockabilly Hall Of Fame". Berrys early stuff...Maybelline Johnny B Goode, , No Particular Place To Go, etc was heavily influenced by Berrys astute knowledge of Country music which was a major part of the confluence of styles of which Rock&Roll and Rockabilly were strongly tied to.

As for Moore and his session work...it's been said that he played on more sessions than any MUSICIAN in history...period. I just dug up a few articles and here's Moores own explanation on his volume of studio work when asked how many recordings he figures he's done...

"About 18,000. Now that's not songs-that's record sessions. I was doing 20 sessions a week for a long, long time, and you figure about three songs per session; that's 50,000-some songs. I used to work a lot with gospel quartets, and those guys would have a piano and their piano player on the bus when they toured, so when they came in to do a session they would knock out six songs and be out of there. We did a whole bunch of that"

Meantime...Happy Thanksgiving to everyone...