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Brian Setzer

For over three decades, singer-musician Brian Setzer preached the gospel of American roots music, from rockabilly to swing, through a variety of successful groups, including the hard-charging Stray Cats, his big-band Brian Setzer Orchestra, and a handful of solo efforts that established him as a leading player on the retro-revival scene. He first parlayed his dizzying guitar work as a member of the Stray Cats, a rockabilly trio that found fame in England before striking it rich in America in the early 1980s with such classic Fifties-styled rave-ups as "Rock This Town," "Stray Cat Strut" and "(She's) Sexy +17." Following the band's demise, he tried his hand at the brand of working-class Americana parlayed by Bruce Springsteen, but found few takers. Setzer then returned to the past with the 17-piece Brian Setzer Orchestra, which touched down in the midst of the swing revival in the late 1990s to score a huge hit with "Jump, Jive an' Wail," a song that received much attention for its use in a popular GAP commercial. The enduring popularity of rockabilly, jump blues and swing/jazz kept Setzer busy for the better part of the next two decades, which found him fronting not only his Orchestra and two new bands but also releasing a string of eclectic solo work which flirted with bluegrass, instrumental rock and more introspective work. Setzer's tireless dedication to the flame of classic rock-n-roll made him one of the more prolific talents in popular music.