Learn psychobilly: the rockabilly under it, what the wrecking crews did with it, and everything the Reverend plays

1. Where it comes from

Rockabilly, 1954–58. The foundation was laid in one room. On 5 July 1954 at Sun Studio, Memphis, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black cut "That's All Right" in a break between takes, all three parts live to one track with no drums, Arthur Crudup's blues "at least twice as fast as the original" — the bass slapped so hard it was the drum.^{[20] [21]} Moore's hand was Merle Travis and Chet Atkins — a thumbpick and fingers, an alternating bass under chord "chicks", the walking pickup line into every change, 6ths and 9ths — through the Ray Butts EchoSonic amplifier with its built-in tape echo from 1955, the slapback every player on this page uses.^{[7] [22]} Carl Perkins brought finger picking, pedal-steel imitations, palm muting, bends found by accident round the knots in his re-tied strings, 6th, 9th and 13th chords and crosspicking;^[19] Cliff Gallup, in nine Nashville sessions with Gene Vincent in 1956, brought a flatpick with fingerpicks behind it, the Bigsby under his little finger, triplet pull-offs on open strings, octaves climbing by semitones, the major 6th where a blues player would put the ♭7, and the 6/9 chord he ended solos on;^{[8] [24]} Paul Burlison, with a power tube worked loose after a fall, brought the first distorted guitar on a rock record;^[25] and Luther Perkins, behind Johnny Cash, brought the boom-chicka with the heel of the hand on the low strings that the country side of this music still runs on.^{[11] [27]} Link Wray's "Rumble" (1958) added the power chord and the distortion; Dick Dale, from 1961, the tremolo picking and the reverb.^{[28] [14]}

The word, and the Cramps. "Psychobilly" is Johnny Cash's, from Wayne Kemp's "One Piece at a Time" (1976), a "psychobilly Cadillac" built from stolen parts; the Cramps took it for their New York flyers the same year, alongside "rockabilly voodoo", and Poison Ivy later insisted they "weren't even describing the music … we were just using carny terms to drum up business".^[1] What they were describing, on Songs the Lord Taught Us (recorded 1979 at Sam Phillips' later studio in Memphis with Alex Chilton), was rockabilly and garage covers beside originals, played by two guitars and no bass — Ivy's Twin-Reverb twang against Bryan Gregory's fuzz — with Link Wray, Hasil Adkins, Dick Dale and the Ventures under the horror.^{[30] [29]} Ivy: "to us all the '50s rockabillies were psycho to begin with … a crazed, sped-up hillbilly boogie version of country"; Lux Interior: "one-half hillbilly and one-half punk".^{[29] [2]}

The Meteors and the Klub Foot, 1980–88. P. Paul Fenech and Nigel Lewis left a rockabilly band called Raw Deal in south London in 1980 to mix horror and science fiction with punk and rockabilly, and the Meteors — "initially shunned for being too spooky and mean" by the neo-rockabilly clubs — became the first band to call their music psychobilly; In Heaven (1981) and Wreckin' Crew (1983) are the landmarks, their fans the "wrecking crew" who invented the dance, and their apolitical rule became the scene's.^{[31] [1] [32]} The Klub Foot, in the ballroom of the Clarendon Hotel in Hammersmith from 1982 until the building came down in 1988, was the scene's home — the Meteors, Demented Are Go, Guana Batz, Batmobile, the Sting-rays, the Klingonz, King Kurt with their flour and eggs — and the six volumes of Stomping at the Klub Foot its record.^{[55] [54] [3]}

The second wave, the third, and Dallas. Demented Are Go's In Sickness & In Health (1986) opened a second wave that crossed the water: Batmobile in Rotterdam (the first non-UK band at the Klub Foot, in 1986 — "We didn't get into psychobilly, but that got into us"), Mad Sin in Berlin ("a sped-up combination of rockabilly, punk, white-trash blues"), the Nekromantix in Copenhagen with Kim Nekroman's coffin-shaped bass and, in Buffalo, the Quakes, who had to move to London to find a scene at all.^{[35] [56] [57] [36] [58]} The third wave, from the mid-1990s, put the music in southern California — Tiger Army out of 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, HorrorPops moved from Copenhagen, Hellcat Records — and in Australia, where the Living End's "Prisoner of Society" was the highest-selling Australian single of the decade.^{[1] [39] [40]} In Dallas, James C. Heath, from Corpus Christi, was christened Reverend Horton Heat by the owner of the Deep Ellum club he worked at in 1985; he had seen the Cramps around 1979 expecting punk and heard "rockabilly licks — fuzzed-out Duane Eddy-type guitar" — "This is it. I can make this thing work." — and decided to "take rockabilly and express to a punk rock crowd".^{[44] [63] [64] [76]} "Psychobilly Freakout" (1990) taught American alternative-rock audiences the word; Heath has said ever since that "We're not really Psychobilly … a rockabilly band that was just a little bit more turned up and more aggressive", and "I've never considered Reverend Horton Heat to be a psychobilly band, because we can do country, we can get bluesy" — which is exactly why he is all over this page: his hand has every one of its feels in it.^{[15b] [63]} Kimberly Kattari's decade of fieldwork (Psychobilly: Subcultural Survival, 2020) reads the scene as a response to marginalisation and a way to "resist normative expectations and survive"; the music, she says, is "wild energy and a fast tempo".^[61]

The Reverend's own roots: Corpus Christi, Cash, the Chess records, Jerry Lee. "The first song I tried to learn to play was 'Folsom Prison Blues'" — he thought he was learning Johnny Cash and was learning Luther Perkins; there were cousins who played, Carl Perkins on the radio, American Graffiti.^{[76] [50]} Growing up in Corpus Christi he "played in bands with Mexican-Americans and was influenced by Tex-Mex music, authentic Mexican music, and Chicano music" — the conjunto's polka is one of this page's feels because of it.^[71] He was "a blues kid" who preferred "the late 50's, Chess Records stuff", Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters records and a B.B. King instructional book, Freddie King;^{[75] [96] [64]} his father's country was Buck Owens' "I've Got a Tiger by the Tail", and the hands he says he still studies are "Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and that finger-style" — "a monumental task because Chet Atkins is really good".^[77] For the 2009 country record he named Ray Price and Willie Nelson as the models — "It leans country. But I've been telling people we're not going country" — and Willie's "golf, bar-b-que, recording sessions, benefit gigs and parties" are in the liner notes of the 2023 covers album beside Ronnie Dawson, who recorded Heath's "Rockin' Dog" first, and Carl Perkins, who told him funny stories in a dressing room for an hour and a half.^{[68] [78]} And the straight eighths: "I always have liked the 'edge' performers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry"; "The Ramones doing straight 8ths on the guitars and the Sex Pistols doing straight 8ths like Jerry Lee Lewis. That's kind of my thing."^{[71] [75]}

2. The hands: the boom-chicka, the pick and the fingers, the slapped bass, the Bigsby, the crosspick

The boom-chicka. One hand, two jobs. The thumb — or the pick, held as a thumb — takes the root on a bass string on the beat and the 5th on the next, palm-muted, while the fingers strike the top three strings on the swung "and": the boom and the chicka, the rhythm of every Sun side and of the country two-step.^{[4] [5]} On E the chicka is G♯, B and E; put the pinky on the B string's 2nd fret and it is G♯, C♯, E — E6 — and lift it again: E, E6, E, E6 is the sound of "Blue Suede Shoes" and everything after it, and a fret higher (D, the ♭7) is the chicka on the way to the IV.^[5] Luther Perkins played the same figure with the three low strings muted under the heel of his hand and the chord dead on the "and" — a technique "inspired by Merle Travis" — so the boom is a thud and the chick a click; he kept it for "Folsom Prison Blues" and everything Cash cut.^{[11] [27]} Buck Owens chopped the chord on two and four instead, the sock, over Ray Price's walking bass; the conjunto's bajo sexto plays the bass note on the beat and the chord on the "and", straight; the bluegrass guitar plays the boom-chick with the bass notes ringing. In the app the boom is the strum voicing bass or fifth (the thumb's note), the chicka the top three strings, and the 6th a color tone marked free, so it stays a 6th in every reading.

The pick with the fingers behind it. Moore played "with a Merle Travis/Chet Atkins-inspired thumb-pick and fingers technique";^[7] Gallup held a flatpick between thumb and forefinger with metal fingerpicks on his middle and ring fingers and his little finger on the Bigsby;^{[8] [24]} Setzer's rockabilly is "hybrid picking — a combination of pick and fingers" with economy picking for the arpeggios;^[9b] and Heath describes his own as "hybrid style using a flatpick", crosspicked "to emulate Merle Travis and Chet Atkins licks" for "fast, banjo-style 16th notes", with a heavy Dunlop pick on .010s.^{[13] [13b]} Travis picking proper is the thumb alternating two bass notes, palm-muted, while "the fingers pick out melody notes based on chord shapes on the higher strings" — Travis with one finger and a thumbpick, Atkins with three.^[89] The fingers do two things the pick can't: they pluck a treble string while the pick holds the bass, and they snap a note — the chicken-pickin' pop the country side lives on, "a biting attack" from the middle finger pulling the string out and letting it go, which the app plays as a note marked pop, a brighter front for a few milliseconds; a note a free finger takes under the pick is marked m.^[90] And Heath's open strings: "I'm a cheater. Sometimes I'll do a chord change and realize that if I let an open string ring out it will become a whole different-sounding chord."^[48] Every card on this page says which hand it is written for: the boom-chicka, the sock, the oom-pah and the boogie are the pick; the Travis card is the thumb and fingers; the chicken pickin', the crooner's arpeggios and the crosspick are the pick with the fingers behind it.

The slapped bass, and the kit. The upright is the sound. The string is pulled out and let go so it snaps back against the fingerboard — a note with a click on its front — and between the notes the hand is slapped against the strings for a click with no pitch, landing where the snare lands. Rockabilly plays the single slap: a note on the beat, the slap on the "and"; psychobilly plays double and triple slaps, two clicks on the sixteenths after each note, at tempos that need the "drag triplet" — "for extremely fast slapping, like that in Psychobilly, you will definitely need to learn" it, says Dr. D's column.^{[17] [38]} Bill Black is the first name; Lee Rocker taught Scott Owen by his right hand; Wikipedia names Kim Nekroman, Geoff Kresge, Owen and Jimbo Wallace for "rapid triplet slaps combined with walking basslines".^{[38] [41] [60]} The kit is small: a swung ride with the kick on all four and the snare on two and four for the shuffle, sixteenths on the snare with brushes for the train beat, a straight backbeat at speed for the stomp, "spooky" tom fills for drama; the Bakersfield bands moved the shuffle "to a tightly closed high-hat" with "an aggressive half-rimshot, half-click on the snare" for the offbeat; the bluegrass two has no kit at all.^{[16] [21] [84]} The app's band has all of it: every bass note snapped (bassSnap), the slaps where the pattern puts them (slap), the wire brush on the snare (brush), the rim click — and the feels below use them.

The Bigsby. Gallup's little finger was on the bar while the others picked; Setzer's stabs are "embellished in a typical Setzer fashion with dips on the whammy bar" — "very subtle changes to the guitar's pitch", the Bigsby being a gentle machine; Heath's signature 6120 has one, and he asked for locking tuners because of it.^{[8] [9] [91] [13]} The app writes it as dip: the chord or the note pulled a semitone (or two) flat over a tenth of a second and let back, "dip" over the tab; the slow shake of a held chord under the bar is bar~.

Crosspicking: the banjo on a flatpick. The hand Heath names most often is the one he crosspicks with — "to emulate Merle Travis and Chet Atkins licks" for "fast, banjo-style 16th notes" — and he describes it step by step for the lick on "Revival": hold a three-note chord, hit a note with the flatpick, pull up with a finger for the middle note, come back over the top of the middle string and hit the high string with the flatpick, back up with the finger, then down with the flatpick.^[13b] Crosspicking as the bluegrass players do it is "a rolling, syncopated style across three strings" with the flatpick alone — "three pitches played within a four-pulse rhythm", the 4th, 3rd and 2nd strings 4-3-2, 4-3-2, 4-2 to the bar, picked down-up-down-up or down-down-up for the banjo's bounce — George Shuffler's invention for the Stanley Brothers, Doc Watson's, Clarence White's and Tony Rice's after him, and "when you're playing the melody, it gets a little displaced and sometimes gets put on the offbeats".^[88] The bluegrass feel on this page is that roll over the boom-chick.

The grips

Most of these are the open chords of the keys of E, A and G with one finger moved, the swing side's jazz grips with the root on the A string, the three-note sock chords on the low strings, the boogie hand, the crooner's barre and the Chess comp's 13th. Every one is in the Chord finder, tagged Psychobilly with the name given here; the E6 and the 9th are tagged Hendrix too, and the 13th SRV, since a grip is a grip. The fingering is in the dots and the number beside a diagram is the fret it starts at; a shape with no number sits at the nut, where a ring above a string is an open string and an x a string left out. Where the hand is not obvious — the pinky on the chicka, the ring finger's barre on the 9th, the muted 5th string of a sock chord, the pinky's reach for the boogie's 6th — a line under the grip says where the other fingers go.

The changes, with the grips

The forms each feel runs on, played with these grips: the chords alone — the boom and the chicka, the sock, the stabs, the muted eighths, the oom-pah, the boogie, the arpeggios — with no fills or runs, so the hand can learn the changes before the lines between them. Each is fixed: the same tab every time it is opened. Open in drills puts the same changes on the Drills tab with the part's own strumming pattern at any tempo; Neck on any card draws the chord as it's fretted and lights each note as it sounds.

3. The scales: where the notes live, box by box, each with its riff

The Sun box. Rockabilly lines are chord-based rather than scalar — Moore "mix[ed] Travis picking with some ear-twisting note choices based on chords, rather than using an obvious scalar approach" — and the box they come from is the major pentatonic of the chord under the hand, with the ♭3 hammered up to the 3rd (TrueFire's "minor-to-major hammer-on") and the 6th leaned on.^{[6] [5]} Gallup "favored the sweet sound of the major sixth over the bluesier minor seventh"; a half-step bend from the ♭3 was as far as he bent.^[8]

The blues scale and the surf. The stomp's riff and the psychobilly lead are the minor pentatonic with the ♭5 let through — the box at the 12th fret, or the same notes at the nut — and the surf side adds Dick Dale's tremolo and the "chromatic runs" and "dissonant intervals" the guides describe: the ♭2 leaned on against the root, a descent by semitones.^{[12] [14]} Dale's family's Arabic music "played a major role in his development of surf music", and "Misirlou" is a folk tune from that world; the ♭2 and the 3rd together are its color.^[14]

The swing side: Mixolydian, bebop, the 6/9. Over a 7th chord the scale is the Mixolydian, and Guitar World hears Setzer adding the major 7th "between the root and the ♭7" — the bebop scale — so a line runs by semitones and lands its chord tones on the beat; chromatic passing notes in a pentatonic line do the same job.^[9b] The Strut walks a minor key down by whole steps through 7th chords, Cm, B♭7, A♭7, G7, in swung eighths.^[10] Western swing's lead is the chord's arpeggio with the 6th and the 9th in it — the 6/9 chord spread along the neck — with the notes a semitone under the chord tones passed through, the way the twin guitars and Shamblin's "athletic single-note solos" went.^{[81] [80]}

The country boxes: Bakersfield and the accordion. Don Rich's notes over the open A are the major pentatonic "mixed with the blues scale for hybrid major/bluesy qualities" — the ♭3 and the ♭5 passed through — with "open-string ringing on the low-end": "a little more blues-based, a little more pentatonic" than the Nashville pickers, and "just play something simple", as Buck told him; the 3rds on the B and e strings, the 6ths on the G and e, the 2nd bent up to the 3rd "within chords" the way a pedal steel would.^{[85] [86]} The polka's tune is the accordion's and the trumpets' in parallel 3rds, which on the guitar is the major scale on two adjacent strings, one downstroke a pair.^{[87] [67]}

Berry's box, the crooner's, B.B.'s, and the roll's three strings. The rock and roll lead is the minor pentatonic over the major chords in the E shape at the 8th fret in the piano's key of C, with the major 3rd let in and Berry's 4ths on the top two strings under the index; the lounge ballad's melody is the natural minor in the position its barre chords sit in, with the harmonic minor's 7th over the V; the slow blues lead is the box the B.B. King book teaches, the root on the B string under the index at the 10th fret with the 2nd, the ♭3, the 4th, 5th and 6th round it; and the crosspick's "scale" is three open strings and the G run.^{[92] [96] [88]}

The horror minor. The third wave's minor keys are the natural minor with the V made a 7th, so the major 7th sounds against it: the harmonic minor's pull, the ♭6 beside it. Nick 13 names Duane Eddy first — "I'm mostly attracted to stylists" — and the lines are Eddy's low-string twang with the echo on it.^[18] The app writes the 7th and the ♭2 and ♭5 as free notes — exact pitches the reading may not otherwise offer.

The shapes on the neck, and the drills

Each drawn in the key of the feel it belongs to. The ringed notes are the roots; a hollow note is a color let in beside the box; a dimmed one is in the scale but not in the chord it's played over. Under each figure the box is played as a drill over its feel's band — up and down — and then as a riff written from that box note by note, so the scale is learned as music: every note of the riff is the drill's or is marked as the one note outside it, and every riff ends on the root. Neck on a card shows where each note is as it sounds; Open in drills puts the same scale, box and tempo on the Drills tab.

The Sun box, and the ♭3 slid in

The surf and stomp box at the 12th, and the surf color

The jump side

The bebop scale, and the Strut's walk-down

The horror minor

The chicken-pickin' box

The Bakersfield box

The swing box, and the sock chords walking

The accordion box

The Berry box

The crooner's box

The B.B. box

The roll's three strings and the G run

4. Exercises

In order, and before the parts: each is a part or a piece of one, at a tempo to start from, and each is fixed — the same tab every time it is opened, so it can be learned note for note. Play it here, then open it in Jam, turn it up as it settles, and change the key. The neck (on the card, or in Jam) lights the notes as they go; Fingering on a card puts a chord diagram over each change of grip; Fingering and technique and Troubleshooting fold under every card.

5. The feels: rhythm, lead, and both at once

Each feel below is a way of playing the sources describe, with its cards beside it: the rhythm part the app's engine plays over the feel's band — the upright snapped and slapped, the brushes or the rim click where the feel has them — drawn as tab with the rhythm under it; the lead part, a pure line written against the chord it sits on so it follows the changes; and the mixed card, the rhythm part with the blend on Mixed: the figure in the figure bars and a lead line in about half the fill bars, the way the one guitarist in a trio does both. Play loops a card here; Open in jam opens the Jam tab with the same key, progression, feel, part and roll; New roll on these cards gives the same part another realization, so the fills you learn are the part's, not one tab's. The rockabilly and swing parts stay major (the 6th, the 9th, the ♭3 passing); the wrecking, surf and rock and roll parts play the blues scale over the major chords; the stomp, the horror minor and the ballad stay in their keys with the ♭2, the ♭5 and the harmonic 7th let in.

Boom-chicka (the Sun way)

The foundation of everything on this page. The thumb (or the pick) takes the root and the 5th on the bass strings, palm-muted, on the beats; the fingers strike the top three strings on the swung "and" — the boom and the chicka — with the 6th on the B string every other time, so E becomes E6 and back. The bass walks 1–3–5–6 under it, snapped, the slap on every upbeat; the kick on all four, the snare on two and four, the ride swung. Slapback on everything. The lead lines are Moore's double stops on the third and second strings with the ♭3 hammered to the 3rd, and the walking pickup line — 5th, 6th, ♭7, 7 — into every change.^{[4] [5] [6] [7]}

Jump and swing (the Blue Caps and Martini way)

Rockabilly's jazz side, the one Setzer and Heath both lean on: four chords to the bar on the top strings with the 6th on top, a stab on the "and of 2" with the Bigsby pressed, 9ths on the IV and the V, a walking bass in quarters under it all, the ride swung. The lead language is Cliff Gallup's — open-string triplet pull-offs, octaves climbing by semitones, the major 6th where a blues player would put the ♭7, a half-step bend and no more.^{[9] [8] [46]}

Stray descent (the Strut way)

The revival's slow one: a minor key walking down by whole steps through 7th chords to the V, in a swung eighth-note feel at a strut's pace, the chords stabbed on two and four with the Bigsby pressed on the way into the change, the bass in a two-feel with the slap on the backbeat. The lead is bebop over rockabilly — the Mixolydian with the major 7th passing, chromatic approaches, pull-offs on two strings, economy-picked arpeggios — which is what the sources hear in Setzer's lines.^{[10] [9] [9b]}

Train two-step (the Cash and country way)

The country in the Reverend's "country-fed punkabilly": Luther Perkins' figure — the bass note on the beat with the heel of the hand on the strings, the muted chord on the "and", the 5th on the next beat — under a train beat: brushes in sixteenths on the snare with the backbeat struck, the kick on one and three, the bass in two with the slap on two and four. The fills are chicken pickin': notes snapped by the fingers, 6ths on the D and B strings, the 2nd bent to the 3rd the way a steel would. "Bales of Cocaine" is the record's own two-step, at 148.^{[11] [16] [13b] [70b]}

Honky-tonk shuffle (the Cowboy Love way)

The country in the Reverend's country: Ray Price "propelling the country beat from 2/4 to 4/4" with a walking bass ("Crazy Arms", 1956), and the Bakersfield band Buck Owens built on it — the shuffle "moved to a tightly closed high-hat, and the off-beat accented by an aggressive half-rimshot, half-click on the snare". The guitar's rhythm is Buck's: the root on one, the chord chopped short on two and four with the heel on it — the sock — the 5th on three, and a bass run into every change. The lead is Don Rich's Telecaster: "double stops and string bending", 3rds on the B and e strings, 6ths on the G and e, the 2nd bent up to the 3rd under a held note the way a pedal steel would, and the rule he played by: "just play something simple". "Cowboy Love" (with steel on the record), "Honky Tonk Girl", "Someone in Heaven" and the Ernest Tubb cover are the Reverend's; the feel is written in A at the nut, where the open strings give the Bakersfield hand its 3rds and its bend.^{[83] [84] [86] [85] [70h]}

Texas swing (the Eat Steak way)

The Texas swing under the Reverend's "country ditties" and his swing side: the western swing rhythm guitar as Eldon Shamblin played it for Bob Wills — four to the bar, "brisk downstrokes on each beat", "beats 2 and 4 a little heavier", three-note chords on the low strings with the 5th string muted, the chord slid in from a fret below, and "a lot of runs in his rhythm chords to keep up with the bassist" — over a walking bass in four with the ride swung. The form is the I–VI–II–V the standards run on, 7ths all the way round so the three-note grip stays one shape. The lead is the swing lead: the 6/9 arpeggio, the major 6th where a blues player would put the ♭7, chromatic approaches, 6ths on two strings the way the twin guitars harmonized. "Eat Steak" — "a humorous country ditty" on a debut that draws on "classic western swing" — and "Drinkin' and Smokin' Cigarettes", "an upbeat swing", are the Reverend's.^{[81] [80] [82] [72] [70a] [67]}

Tex-Mex polka (the Saguaro way)

The Corpus Christi in the Reverend: the conjunto polka the bands of his youth played — the button accordion on the melody, "the bajo sexto provides rhythmic accompaniment through bass notes and chord chops", the polka the German settlers brought, "a bright 2/4 with the classic oom-pah bass pattern" on I, IV and V — under the "polished, Nashville-style country music mood" PopMatters hears on "Ain't No Saguaro in Texas": "a mariachi/polka beat". The guitar is the bajo sexto: the root on the beat, the 5th on the next, the chord chopped on every "and" as a short upstroke, straight, and the country bass run into each change. The lead is the accordion's and the mariachi trumpets': the major scale in parallel 3rds on two adjacent strings, a triplet pickup, the chop between phrases. The kick on every beat, the snare and the slap on every "and". The feel is the Saguaro way of playing; its notes are its own.^{[87] [71] [67] [68]}

Bluegrass crosspick (the Show Pony way)

The bluegrass instrumental on a Reverend Horton Heat record — "the fleet-fingered bluegrass of the instrumental 'Show Pony'", the "country-pickin'" closer reminiscent of Chet Atkins — and the hand behind it in his own words, the crosspick. Under it the rhythm guitar's boom-chick — the root on one ringing, the chord on two, the 5th on three, the chord on four — and the G run into the changes: root, 2nd, ♭3, 3rd, 5th, octave; no drums, the upright in two, the brush on the chop. The lead is the roll itself, three strings of the chord side by side — the D, G and B over the G, the G, B and e over the C and the D7 — picked 4-3-2, 4-3-2, 4-2 in eighths so the melody falls off the beat, and the tempo ladder is the point.^{[70g] [67] [13b] [88]}

Straight-eight rock and roll (the Jerry Lee way)

"Straight 8ths like Jerry Lee Lewis. That's kind of my thing." The rock and roll of 1955 as the drummers' histories tell it: "certain R&B musicians created a relentless, driving 'chuck-chuck-chuck' of eighth-notes by speeding up the feel of a boogie-woogie shuffle" — Little Richard's right hand, Chuck Berry's guitar — and the Reverend's records keep going back to it: a "Jerry Lee-influenced boogie" on "Whole New Life", "Big D Boogie Woogie", the "Professor Longhair lifts" of "Tchoupitoulas Street", Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint". The guitar plays the piano's left hand — root and 5th, root and 6th, root and ♭7 in straight eighths on the low strings, the heel on them — or its right, the triad pumped on every eighth, and Berry's double stops on the top two strings with the lower note bent. The bass walks the boogie in eighths, snapped; the kick on one and three, the snare cracking two and four, the comp on the offbeats where the piano would be.^{[75] [92] [70j] [70f] [79]}

Slow blues in 12/8 (the Gin and Tonic way)

"A blues kid" who preferred "the late 50's, Chess Records stuff", who learned from Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters records and a B.B. King instructional book, and who puts a blues at the end of a side — "Gin and Tonic Blues" with its tape trick, "Bath-Water Blues", the minor-key "Loaded Gun": the slow twelve in 12/8 with the quick change, the way a Chicago trio plays it. The comp is the 13th and 9th grips slid in from a fret below on one, struck again short on three, the bass walked into every change on the last beat's triplet; or the two-string shuffle of the Chess rhythm guitars — root and 5th, root and 6th on adjacent strings in triplets, muted. The lead is the B.B. box at the 10th fret: the root on the B string shaken with the fast, narrow vibrato, the ♭3 curled toward the 3rd, the 4th bent to the 5th, the 6th and the 2nd let in as the sweet notes, one note struck three times. The kick on one and three, the ride in triplets, the bass in two with the walk. The feel is written in A; the records' keys are not in the sources.^{[75] [96] [64] [70b] [94]}

Lounge ballad in a minor key (the Wildest Dreams way)

The gentle ballads beside the rockers — the "lounge territory" the reviews keep finding, the "suave entertainer pose" of the swing-side record — as a guitar plays them in a trio: a minor key in a slow 12/8 ("In Your Wildest Dreams" is Cm to G with the A♭ in the chorus and "a swaying rhythm", its intro picked), the chord rolled as an arpeggio in triplets with the pick on the bass strings and the fingers on the rest, the 6th and the 9th let in for the crooner's colors, the whole chord struck and held under the Bigsby's slow shake, and a melody with slides into its notes, 6ths on two strings, wide vibrato. The brushes keep the triplets, the bass plays in two with long notes, the band comps jazz grips quietly; the slapback is on everything, and there is room.^{[71] [69] [94] [13]}

Psychobilly stomp (the Meteors way)

The first wave's own rhythm: rockabilly's eighths straightened out and doubled in weight, in a minor key, at a pace the Sun players never went — power chords palm-muted on the low strings, the riff underneath in the minor pentatonic with the ♭5 let through and the ♭2 leaned on for menace, the kick on every beat, the snare hard on two and four, the bass snapped on the beat with two slaps on the sixteenths after it (the psychobilly "double slap"). The lead is tremolo-picked and chromatic; a stop-time bar hits the One and leaves the guitar alone with the crowd.^{[1] [12] [17] [31]}

Wrecking pace (the second wave)

Punk's tempo with rockabilly's changes: the twelve bars run at over two hundred, every chord a downstroke, palm-muted eighths that break into gallops — sixteenth, sixteenth, eighth — the kick on one and three, the snare on two and four at full weight, the bass in root and 5th with two slaps on the sixteenths after every note, the "drag triplet" the slap-bass columns say the genre needs. The lead is the blues scale in sixteenths across the strings, a double stop bent, and a dip to end. The Reverend's "Wiggle Stick", "Death Metal Guys", "Smell of Gasoline" and "Slow" ("a rockabilly tune retrofitted with a speed metal engine") are this side of him.^{[12] [17] [2] [3] [69] [67]}

Surf-billy (the Freakout way)

The surf in psychobilly, and in the Reverend's instrumentals — "Big Sky", "Victory Lap", "Zombie Dumb"'s "big surf rockabilly output", the "reverb-laden spaghetti western Dick Dale-isms" of "Duel at the Two O'Clock Bell": the picking hand as a drum — sixteenth-note tremolo on the low strings, Dick Dale's "pulsation" — with the twelve bars' changes under it, a dive on the bar at the end of a phrase, a rake into the high root, the descent by semitones surf players use for drama. The kit is the surf beat, kick on one, the "and of 2" and three, with the tom roll standing in for the drum break on the last bar; the bass in snapped eighths.^{[14] [15] [15b] [74] [70g]}

Horror-minor twang (the third wave)

The third wave's minor key: a melody played clean on the low strings with the slapback on it — Duane Eddy's twang, which Nick 13 names first among his influences and which Heath heard "fuzzed-out" in the Cramps — over the minor key's own chords with the V a 7th, so the major 7th of the harmonic minor sounds against it; arpeggiated chords in eighths under the voice; the Bigsby dipped at the end of a line. The band drives straight: kick on one and three, the snare on two and four, the bass in snapped eighths with a slap here and there, no comp — a trio.^{[18] [18b] [63]}

6. The players, wave by wave

A genre rather than a player, so the roster matters: who, where, what they played, and the records that show it — the foundation, the country, the swing and the blues behind the Reverend, the precursors and the revival, the first wave at the Klub Foot, the second in Europe, the third in California and beyond. The Reverend has a row of his own; his side of the story is in section 1, his gear in section 2, and his records in the songs and the catalog.

7. The songs, as reference points — and the Reverend's catalog by style

What happens in each record, with its key and feel where the sources give them, its form and the devices to listen for. The parts on this page draw on the way of playing in each; none copies its lines. Tempos from the tempo sites are given as measured and read as half- or double-time where a fast two is obviously what is meant. Chord progressions are common stock, so the forms are given as they are, under Psychobilly in the Jam tab's preset list. The Reverend's records are grouped by the side of him they show: the psychobilly, the country, the swing, the rock and roll, the blues, the ballad, the bluegrass, and the covers of the people he learned from.

The catalog by style

Every song of the Reverend Horton Heat's a source describes, album by album, with the style the source gives it and the feel of this course that covers the way of playing. A song no source describes is not here: the tools that made this page cannot listen, so a style is only claimed where it was read. Counted, the sources describe fifteen ways of playing on these records — eight the first version of this course had, and seven added for the styles the catalog turned up: the honky-tonk shuffle, Texas swing, the Tex-Mex polka, straight-eight rock and roll, the lounge ballad, the slow blues, the bluegrass crosspick. Three things are named and not covered, and say so: a piano rag, an exotica number, a pedal-steel piece; and the "jungle beat" of "Marijuana" waits on a kit with toms.^{[70] [69] [67] [72] [94]}

8. Studies

Whole forms to play through: the presets from the Jam tab's Psychobilly list, with a part from the library realized over them, its fills and lead lines rolled once and fixed — the same tab every time, the one the review read. Not the songs — the app's own writing over the forms the music runs on. The last lesson of the course leaves the fill bars of these to you.

9. For teachers

What each lesson is for, what goes wrong first, and how to tell when it is learned. The lessons are the ones in Start here; each names its cards, and every card folds its own fingering and troubleshooting under it. Every fingering on this page says whether the sources describe it or it is the usual way (the tag under each grip), and every claim about the records is cited; the playing itself was never heard by the author (see How this was made), so treat the tab as an account of the idiom, not a transcription.

Common faults, and how to hear them

When it is learned

• The boom-chicka steady at 120 for eight bars on E, A and B7 without looking, then at 176 with the band.
• The 6th and the ♭7 in the chicka on cue, E–E6–E7–E6, the pinky moving with the stroke.
• The thumb alternating root and 5th unbroken while the fingers play a melody above it, in two keys.
• The walking pickup line into every change of a twelve-bar, the new root on the beat, at 176.
• Four to the bar with the 6/9 and the stab dipped on the "and of 2", at 152, swung.
• Gallup's triplet pull-offs even at 152, and a run of octaves climbing by semitones.
• The strut's walk-down with the stabs on two and four and the bar on the way into each change.
• Luther's figure under the brushes at 168, the boom a thud and the chick dead.
• Chicken-pickin' pops louder than the picked notes beside them, and the 2nd bent to the 3rd in pitch under a held note.
• The sock on two and four dead by the "and" at 132 on A, D and E7 over the walking bass, and the country run into every change.
• The sock chords four to the bar round the circle at 184, three strings each, two and four heavier, the runs in the last two beats.
• The oom-pah straight at 176 with a click on every "and", and the accordion's 3rds in tune in one stroke each.
• The roll — 4-3-2, 4-3-2, 4-2 — as a machine at 150 through G, C and D7, and the G run into every change.
• The boogie in straight eighths at 176 on C, F and G7 with the pinky reaching the 6th on time, and Berry's bent 4th in pitch.
• The slow twelve comped with the 13th and the 9ths slid in and the bass walked into every change, at 62 in 12/8.
• The crooner's arpeggio even in slow triplets, pick and fingers, and the held chord shaken under the bar without going out of tune.
• Muted downstroke eighths even at 192, then gallops at 212, the heel never lifting.
• A bar of tremolo picking at 164 as a pulse, then the riff falling to the ♭3.
• The twang line clean into the echo, the 5th shaken, the 7th over the V, in E minor and in A minor.
• Any study on this page played through twice at its tempo with the band, the fill bars left to you.

10. How this was made

What was done, and what was not. This page, the fifteen feels added to the app's Psychobilly style, the Psychobilly presets, the grips tagged in the Chord finder and the engine's new sounds were written by Claude (an AI model, working in Claude Code) at the owner's request, in September 2026 — first as eight feels and eight lessons, then rebuilt to the method written down for the Stevie Ray Vaughan course (docs/COURSES.md) and widened to cover every style the Reverend Horton Heat's records are described as playing (docs/PSYCHOBILLY-RESEARCH.md). The research was reading: the sources in the list below were fetched and read as text — the Wikipedia articles on the genre, the players, the bands, the records and, for the rebuild, on western swing, Eldon Shamblin, Ray Price, Don Rich, the conjunto and crosspicking; the A.V. Club's guide and HTF's history; the guitar lessons (Premier Guitar on Scotty Moore, Brian Setzer, the Bakersfield sound and chicken pickin', TrueFire's twelve licks, Guitar Wiz, Riffhard, Jon MacLennan, scottymoore.net, the Johnny Cash guitar page, Acoustic Guitar on western swing rhythm and on crosspicking, Guitar World on Travis picking); Keith Wyatt on Cliff Gallup, Guitar World on Setzer and on Jim Heath, Vintage Guitar on Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and on Heath, read through a reader proxy because the pages themselves are behind a wall; Dr. D's slap-bass columns for No Treble; the rockabilly drumming pages; Jim Heath's interviews with Premier Guitar (2013), Vintage Guitar (2007/2010 and later), Guitar World (2019), Style Weekly (2016), The Vinyl District (2014), Juice (2002), Tape Op (2019), ListenSD, Diffuser, the San Antonio Current and Boulder Weekly; the album reviews at AllMusic, Trouser Press, PopMatters, Sputnikmusic, Glide and The Fire Note, which are where the catalog's styles come from; Fun-Guy Records' notes on the covers album; P. Paul Fenech's 2026 interview with Louder Than War; Nick 13's with Gretsch and Guitar World; the tab and tempo sites for keys and tempos; and the publisher's description of Kimberly Kattari's book. No recordings were listened to and no videos were watched: the tools used cannot play audio or video, so the video lessons the course links — including Jim Heath's own four-part guitar.com lesson — are named by their titles and not relied on. Where a fact came only from a search engine's summary of a page, the source list says so. The rest is the model's own knowledge of the music, checked against the sources where they overlap.

The parts were then written the way every part in this app is written (docs/STYLES.md): from the idiom — where the weight falls, which strings, which notes, how a phrase ends — never from a transcription, and with no signature riff reproduced; the boom-chicka, the walking pickup line, the twelve-bar, the walk-down by whole steps, the sock rhythm, the oom-pah, the 5–6 boogie, the crosspick roll, the B.B. box and the gallop are the common property of the music. Each part is a figure with variants, fills that know whether the next bar changes, lead lines, and a beginner's version, in the interval notation the engine realizes into notes on the neck. The engine gained what these parts needed — the 6th kept as a 6th in the chicka in every reading (a color tone marked free, placed on the B string where the chicka has no room above it), the Bigsby dip, the finger-snapped note, and in the band the snapped bass note, the slap between the notes and the wire brush on the snare — and each is held by a test that was broken on purpose and seen to fail. The machinery of this page and the Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan pages is one module (js/deep-dive.js); the data of this page has no DOM in it (js/psychobilly-guide-data.js), so node tools/dive-check.js psychobilly --print realizes every card exactly as the page does and prints every bar as strings and frets, and the rebuild read every one of them against the research before the page was drawn: the review found the swing feel's I as a 6th chord spread over two skipped strings (the I became a 7th), the swing lead written an octave low, the polka's top 3rds needing a fret the nut window hasn't got, a steel bend placed on the open B string and so dropped, the rock and roll lead's double stops folding onto the bass strings over the IV and V, and a walk-up needing a reach — every one invisible in the code and plain in the printout, and every one fixed before the page was drawn. The tabs are realizations of those parts, rolled from a fixed seed so the page reads the same each time; the changes, the exercises and the studies are fixed outright; the sound is the app's own recorded guitar and synthesized band. Tempos are approximate; keys are as fingered. Where the page says "the Saguaro way" or "the Eat Steak way", it means the way of playing on that record, not its notes.

11. Sources

Numbered as cited above; the first sixty-six are the first version's, 67 on were read for the rebuild. "Read" means the page was fetched and read as text; "summary" means only a search engine's summary could be read; "through a reader proxy" means the page refused the tools directly and was read through a text-extraction service.