As a couple of y'all know I'm within easy reach of e-mail, so I'm responding to a bunch of things at once here. In every style of music that has some kind of community of listeners, there's a willingness on the part of those who participate to make significant distinctions between and among performances that sound virtually identical to listeners outside that community of listeners, i.e., those who haven't bought into the style under consideration. This is equally true for fans and performers of "rockabilly" as it is for fans and performers of "avant garde jazz" or anything else. Most, if not all, of the discussion about which musicians are really just repeating themselves can only make sense if you are ignoring this point, unconsciously for those listeners who, say, never cared for the Stones or King Crimson, willfully, for those who think they have developed a sensibility and/or sensitivity, beyond those of the musicians involved. Even (which term I use here with some conscious sense of irony) in the avant garde, musicians end up mining the same comparatively small area. There are very very few musicians in this field that I can think of as continually coming up with different approaches rather than refining an ongoing approach or putting their consistent approach into a new context by doing pretty much the same thing with different collaborators, different equipment, etc. The need to describe this kind of work as somehow infinitely creative without taking into account the very real stylistic, genre, cultural, social, etc. limitations that every artist in any field, not just music, deals with, is sort of naively Romantic. I probably won't see any responses to this til late Sunday night, so don't take my absence from any of the continuing discussion this prompts as ignoring it. Bests, Herb