Rock It (George Jones song)

"Rock It" is a rockabilly single by country music singer George Jones. Not wanting to use his real name and jeopardize his reputation as a country artist, Starday Records released it under the pseudonym "Thumper Jones."

Background

With the explosion in popularity of Elvis Presley in 1956, country music lost a sizeable portion of its young audience and scrambled to adapt. As biographer Bob Allen put it in his book George Jones: The Life and Times of a Honky Tonk Legend, "It temporarily sent the country music industry sprawling flat on its ass. Sales figures for country music plummeted dangerously, and soon even the most dedicated country artists - as a matter of sheer professional survival - were all rushing to pump some Elvis glottal bestiality into their own music." Jones, who had played with both Elvis and Johnny Cash on the Louisiana Hayride, and his producer Pappy Daily decided to give rockabilly a shot, recording two songs Jones wrote: "Rock It" and "Dadgumit, How Come It." As Jones explained to Billboard in 2006: "I was desperate. When you're hungry, a poor man with a house full of kids, you're gonna do some things you ordinarily wouldn't do. I said, 'Well, hell, I'll try anything once.' I tried 'Dadgum It How Come It' and 'Rock It', a bunch of shit. I didn't want my name on the rock and roll thing, so I told them to put Thumper Jones on it and if it did something, good, if it didn't, hell, I didn't want to be shamed with it."

Jones and Daily came up with the name Thumper Jones, but the single failed to chart. Jones retained a lifelong disdain for the rock and roll sides he cut during this time, joking in his 1995 autobiography I Lived to Tell It All, "During the years, when I've encountered those records, I've used them for Frisbees."

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