In 1954, Elvis Presley recorded at Sam Phillips' Sun studios in Memphis, the regional hit "That's All Right, Mama." Elvis played a rock and country & western fusion called rockabilly, which was characterised by hiccupping vocals, slapping bass and a spastic guitar style. He became the first superstar rock musician.

It was the following year's "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets that really set the rock boom in motion, though. The song was one of the biggest hits in history, and frenzied teens flocked to see Haley and the Comets perform it, even causing riots in some places; "Rock Around the Clock" was a breakthrough for both the group and for all of rock and roll music. If everything that came before laid the groundwork, "Clock" certainly set the mold for everything else that came after. With its combined rockabilly and R & B influences, "Clock" topped the U.S. charts for several weeks, and became wildly popular in places like Australia and Germany. The single, released by independent label Festival Records in Australia, was the biggest-selling recording in the country at the time. In 1957, Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly became the first rock musicians to tour Australia, marking the expansion of the genre into a worldwide phenomenon. That same year, Bill Haley & His Comets toured Europe bringing rock 'n' roll to that continent for the first time.

Elvis Presley's 1954 Memphis sessions for Sam Phillips's Sun Records produced arguably the first rockabilly recordings. "That's All Right," first performed by Arthur Crudup, was a reworking of a blues tune, done with overtones of country music. "Blue Moon of Kentucky," by Bill Monroe, was a bluegrass standard, done with overtones of blues.

During roughly the same period of time, a young singer/songwriter down in Lubbock, Texas named Buddy Holly was busy taking elements of various musical styles (blues, country, gospel, south of the border, etc...) and melding them into what later became the "Tex-Mex" sound. Holly's pioneering efforts are legendary, and the rockabilly sound was a strong element in much of his work.

Carl Perkins, who also recorded for Sun, is another performer whose recordings helped to define the genre. "Blue Suede Shoes", written by Carl, is considered a classic of the style. The early recordings of Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Dale Hawkins, Charlie Feathers, Hasil Adkins, Gene Vincent, Billy Lee Riley and Roy Orbison are also considered essential, although Cash, Vincent, Lewis and Orbison each went on to perform in other styles. Eddie Cochran and Ricky Nelson also are considered rockabilly performers; they were not, however, from the South, although Nelson's guitarist, James Burton, grew up in Shreveport.

Although the influence of rockabilly, both as a musical style and as a set of attitudes and gestures, has never waned, Holly's death in a plane crash in 1959 tended to mark the end of the classic rockabilly era. In the 1980s, The Stray Cats led a brief revival of interest in rockabilly, while another revival followed in the 1990s with bands like High Noon, Big Sandy and the Fly-Rite Boys, the Dave and Deke Combo, The Racketeers, and many others. And bands like The Cramps, Tav Falco's Panther Burns, Reverend Horton Heat, Southern Culture on the Skids, Batmobile and more importantly The Meteors merged the music with Punk rock/Horror, forming a distinct sub-genre referred to as psychobilly. Dire Straits did a rockabilly track, The Bug, on their 1991 album On Every Street.

"Rockabilly is the purest of all rock 'n' roll genres. That is because it never went anywhere. It is preserved in perfect isolation within an indistinct time period...."