**** Charlie Feathers

GET WITH IT: ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS, 1954-'69

(Revenant)

Among other things, Charlie Feathers -- who died last month at the age of 66 -- claimed (against evidence to the contrary) to have come up with Elvis's arrangements, taught Jerry Lee how to pound the piano, and invented rockabilly. "You know the secret to the sound of Sun records?" he asks Peter Guralnick in a 1976 profile reprised in the liner notes of Get with It. "Slapback!" Feathers may have imagined himself a keeper of secrets, but in practice he was not a very good one -- every time he opened his mouth to sing, the truth leapt out. Irrespective of his Forrest Gump-like assertions later in life, Sun was held aloft on the backs of characters like Charlie Feathers -- a man of enormous and largely unrewarded talent whose emotional radiance illuminated the big truths of small things.

The tracks he released on Meteor, King, and Sun -- compiled here -- remain the genre's zenith. When Feathers's lithe, sinewy, rail-solid wail bursts into ecstatic hiccups, it's like ball lightning. His finest hillbilly lament, "Defrost Your Heart," is the best evidence that he might've had a career in country if he'd wanted it. He often recorded novelty songs, but even on such disparate attempts as "Tongue-Tied Jill" and "We're Getting Closer To Being Apart," he absorbed the absurdity into the revelation of the song -- nonsense becomes a plea to be understood, distance evaporates.

Get with It also includes unissued takes and delves into Feathers's tape library; most notable are two tracks he recorded with the late Junior Kimbrough, who taught him to play guitar. Kimbrough's hill-country strangling and Feathers's percolating bluegrass add a new step to an ancient dance, each man testing the depths of the other's chaos, suggesting that there were other, stranger ways rock and roll might have evolved. "Rockabilly is the beginning and the end of music," Feathers once declared to Robert Gordon. "Lord, I'll never live that sound down in my ears. It will die with me, boy."

-- Carly Carioli