Rock'n'roll was very much a man's game in the 1950s, and female rock singers were a rarity. The best of them was Janis Martin, who has died of cancer, aged 67. The vigour and dynamism of her singing style and stage movements earned her the soubriquet the "Female Elvis" - and that from Elvis's own recording manager. She was, in many ways, the forerunner of such stars as Brenda Lee and LeAnn Rimes.
Martin was born into a musical family in the tobacco county of Sutherlin, Virginia. Her father and uncle were amateur performers and, with a junior-sized guitar, she was playing and singing at the age of five. According to Janis herself, she had a "typical show business mother who put me in the business when I was eight years old. I never was allowed to play with other children my age. She was grooming me."
The grooming worked, and Janis won almost every talent contest she entered. At 11, she was featured on the Barndance country music show of local radio station WDVA, and soon afterwards toured with the band of Glen Thompson. Next, she became a regular member of the Old Dominion Barndance in Richmond, Virginia, a radio show second only in popularity to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. But the teenager tired of the conservatism of country music and was drawn to rhythm & blues, shocking some with her rendition of Ruth Brown's Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean.
Meanwhile in Tennessee, country music was being revolutionised by the emerging rockabilly typified by Carl Perkins and Elvis. Early in 1956, two Richmond disc-jockeys wrote a novelty rockabilly number called Will You Will- yum, and got Martin to sing it for a demonstration tape to be sent to a New York music publisher. Impressed with both, the publisher took the tape to Steve Sholes of RCA Records, the man who had bought Elvis's contract from Sun Records of Memphis.
Sholes wanted to expand his roster of rock'n'rollers, and arranged for Martin to record the song in Nashville with his regular session musicians, led by guitarist Chet Atkins - in the same studio where the same musicians had accompanied Elvis on his first big hit, Heartbreak Hotel, a few months earlier. Released as a single, the song sold more than half a million copies; and Martin appeared on US network television shows, undertook national tours with country stars like Jim Reeves and Hank Snow, and became one of the first American rock stars to tour Europe.
One of her later recordings was Let's Elope Baby, which Atkins had chosen because it would appeal to Martin's teenage audiences. What neither he nor the singer's parents knew was that she had already secretly married her boyfriend before he was called up for military service. A conjugal visit to an army base in Germany during a 1957 tour left her pregnant and ended her first career as a rockabilly star. She was summarily dropped by RCA, for whom a rock'n'roll mother was a contradiction in terms. Sholes told her mother: "She could have been as big as Elvis or bigger."
Martin briefly returned to the recording studio for a Belgian label, Palette, in 1960, but by then rockabilly was declining in popularity and her second husband disapproved of her career. After that marriage ended in divorce, Martin returned to music, encouraged by Atkins, who told her that a rockabilly revival was on its way.
That revival was strongest in Europe, and from 1979 Martin and other 50s veterans, such as Sonny Burgess and Mac Curtis, performed there frequently. British rockabilly fans were among the most committed, and when Martin played her first concert in England - on her 42nd birthday - she found it was like stepping back in time. "Those kids dressed like we did in the 1950s," she said. The German record company Bear Family reissued all her RCA tracks on two LPs in 1979 and subsequently on CD.
Supported by her third husband, Wayne Whitt, and championed by the younger country singer Rosie Flores, Martin eventually made a triumphant comeback in America. She duetted on Flores' 1996 album Rockabilly Filly and had recently completed her own album, co-produced by Flores. She had been due to appear at the Americana international festival in Newark, Nottinghamshire, last July, but had to cancel due to her worsening health, which friends believed was brought on by the death of her son earlier this year. Wayne survives her, as do a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter.
· Janis Martin, rockabilly singer, born March 27 1940; died September 3 2007
