Song of the Day 2/21: Brian Setzer, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”
Man, old rockers are dropping like flies. I don’t mean they’re all dying. Some are just hitting the rock and roll disabled list. Just the other day rockabilly revivalist Brian Setzer of Stray Cats fame announced on social media that an autoimmune disease has left him unable to play guitar. “There is no pain,” he wrote, “but it feels like I am wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play.” Setzer is receiving treatment at the Mayo Clinic, near his Minneapolis home, and is making progress, so there’s some hope he’ll recover.
Setzer is best remembered for helping resuscitate popular music forms that were fading into the past. He grew up on Long Island developing his rockabilly style with a band called the Tomcats. They became the Stray Cats in 1980 when they sold their equipment to pay for plane tickets to London. There they hooked up with Dave Edmunds, who produced their debut album the next year. It spawned two hit singles in the UK, “Rock This Town” and “Stray Cat Strut,” that became hits in the America the next year – Setzer’s blond pompadour looked great on MTV – when they were re-recorded for their first U.S. album, “Built for Speed.”
The Cats broke up by 1984 and Setzer became a mainstream rocker, then a got into the blues, especially Louis Prima’s jump blues. That paid off when the music made a comeback in the ’90s; the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s cover of Prima’s “Jump, Jive and Wail” became the highest-charting single (No. 23) of the whole swing revival.
What’s sometimes overlooked because of his pop success is that Setzer’s got some chops. Check out this performance of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” from the 2018 Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival in Annapolis. Here’s hoping the folks at Mayo Clinic can get him back to his old self again.
