Rockabilly Singer Glen Glenn: 50 Years of Classic Jump Music

Although running into the California rockabilly singer Glen Glenn backstage at the Henry Fonda Theatre last January was no surprise — it was the Elvis birthday bash at which he faithfully appears — his sleek, black-leather-clad, fighting-trim appearance was. The 72-year-old Glenn’s characteristic mixture of down-home congeniality and tenured rocker’s cool is boundlessly engaging, and any time spent with him inevitably yields a high-impact barrage of reminiscences. Whether it’s Johnny Cash, Tex Ritter, Elvis Presley or Glenn’s cousin, Porter Wagoner, the singer has a trove of deep-inside stuff, all of which he recalls with a zealous relish.

Photo by Art Fein

Photo by Art Fein

Troutman cometh, again.

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More About

• Glen Glenn
• Elvis Presley
• Fred Maddox
• Gary Lambert
• Porter Wagoner

(Click to enlarge)

Troutman cometh, again.

Fifty years ago, Glenn was the purest homegrown salesman of rockabilly primitivism in Los Angeles, but held such allegiance to country music that he almost never made the upshift. In 1954, Glenn and his high school pal, guitarist Gary Lambert, were working a straight hillbilly act, the Missouri Mountain Boys, and had little trouble getting a start, as the area’s full-time slate of C&W radio and television shows had literally dozens of hours to be filled. “Cliffie Stone put us on the Hometown Jamboree the next Saturday. Gary was so nervous that he dropped his pick but Jimmy Bryant jumped right in and played for me.” They had soon won a regular slot on Foreman Phillips’ County Barn Dance, a live TV broadcast from a Baldwin Hills dance hall. By then, “Eddie and Hank Cochran had started playing,” Glenn recalls, “and they tried to be just like us, copying us, followed us around everywhere we went, tried to take our jobs — but they never did.”

Glenn and Lambert went nonstop, playing their spot on the 7 p.m. TV broadcast, then rolling over to the El Monte Legion Stadium, where Hometown Jamboree originated (“I’d hang out backstage and bug all the artists”), then back to Baldwin Hills, where they would play until after midnight. Phillips had been running the L.A. scene since World War II, when he promoted the fabled Santa Monica Pier Swing Shift dance with Bob Wills and Spade Cooley, and routinely featured the biggest stars: Hank Snow, Tex Ritter, Lefty Frizzell and California’s top-drawing sensations, the Maddox Brothers & Rose. “That was where I really got to know the Maddoxes,” Glenn said. “I was writin’ a few songs, but we hadn’t recorded at all, and Maddox liked the way I entertained.”

Fred Maddox was a kingpin in the West Coast country realm, already a legend whose cracked, off-color sense of the absurd, high-octane showmanship with his bass fiddle and inimitable zest for after-hours roaring both endeared him to and deeply influenced just about everyone in the business (not least among them, Bill Black, the bassist for Elvis Presley, both of whom knew Maddox well from their Louisiana Hayride days). To Maddox, Glenn and Lambert were prime fresh meat crying out for exploitation, and he took full advantage of them. Soon, Glenn and Lambert were invited up to the rented house the Maddoxes shared on North Curson Street. Glenn was dazzled. “Fred tore me up. I was just a young singer, got real nervous,” he said. “I’d go home and couldn’t sleep.”

“Fred was telling me about this guy down south, Elvis Presley, and I said, ‘Who in the hell is that?’ They didn’t play him out here, no Sun Records available. So, I ordered ’em through the mail and the first time I heard it, well. ... ‘This isn’t hillbilly, it’s a different sound.’” The stone-country Troutman (Glenn’s family name at birth) initially didn’t want anything to do with it, but he and Lambert were intrigued enough to accept Maddox’s invitation to meet Presley at his California debut at the San Diego Arena. The effect, as Maddox had counted on, was immediate: “I just changed my style, started doin’ that — and one of the reasons was the girls. They liked you more if you did one of those rockabilly songs, they really went nuts, and Gary liked fast songs, and the crowd seemed to like us better.”

More pussy and bigger paychecks were hard to beat, but the Elvis-infused Troutman recognized an important aspect: “I know who started rockabilly,” he stated. “It was the Maddox Brothers & Rose. It’s just hillbilly with a beat; Hank Williams did a little rockabilly, but the Maddoxes were before Hank, doing that stuff.” Ironically, Troutman had done his first recording session only weeks before, straight-up hillbilly numbers of the type that, he now found, no one in Los Angeles had the slightest interest in. “I took ’em to all the record companies in town and they said, ‘We don’t want country, we want Elvis music.’”