Born: July 5th 1938, Tin Town MO.
Died: August 28th 1981, Springfield MO.
Ronnie Self was born the first of five children of Raymond Self, a farmer-turned-railroad worker, and Hazel Sprague Self. Self had a reputation as a wild boy, with incidents of vandalism and assault in his background. He became interested in music while still a boy, and began writing songs while in his teens. Why Ronnie Self never made it as a performer is one of the great mysteries and injustices of pop music history. He had the look and the sound - a mix of country, rockabilly and R&B that sometimes made him sound like a white Little Richard, but mostly like the young Elvis or Carl Perkins - and he wasn't lacking for good songs, which he mostly wrote himself. He should have been there, thought of in the same breath as Perkins or Jerry Lee Lewis; instead, he's a footnote in rock & roll history outside of Europe, where he's treated as a legend.
Self had a unique and tortuous career in the music business. He eventually gained a fairly steady income from his songwriting but, with the exception of Bop-A-Lena, he was capable of much more than the larynx-searing Bop-A-Lena, though, and could move with ease from country to pop and onto R&B, leaving his imprint on it all. However, a mixture of problems and sheer bad luck conspired to keep his name no more than a by-word among a few.
