About Me
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.
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. The relationship between Ronnie and his parents is somewhat clouded. "When I first met him," recalled his wife Dorothy, "he carried a Bible in his pocket and talked of being able to make enough money to get his folks out of poverty, but as the years went on he showed an increasing hostility toward them that I never really understood."
On December 16, 1957 Self entered the cavernous Bradley's studio in Nashville and, armed with a composition from the unlikely team of Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis, turned in one of the most frenetic performances from the early days of rock & roll. Quite what Columbia's debonair expatriate Englishman, Don Law, thought as he sat behind the console is open to conjecture. Session stalwarts Marvin Hughes, Ray Edenton and Buddy Harman probably left the session shaking their heads. But when Bop-A-Lena, was released early the following year, during the height of the short lived vogue for primitive, energised rockabilly, it broke into the 'Billboard' charts, peaking at number 68. Unfortunately, it was Ronnie Self's only chart entry as a performer, a statistic that galled him as the years passed.
