*Raggare: Swedish word roughly corresponding to the English term "pick-up artist", i.e., a person seeking sexual contact with someone) is a subculture found mostly in Sweden and parts of Norway and Finland, mostly in rural environments and smaller villages. Raggare have existed since the 1950s and haven't changed much since then. Their culture is based on American popular culture of the 1950s, and typically centres on a "rebel" image. James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffiti are a popular sources of influence.

Cars are very important to raggare; they like large U.S. cars from the 1950s, although any large American V8-powered car will do. If one is not available some substitutes are used; for instance, the Volvo Amazon, fintail Mercedes, or some other car with U.S. styling, but never a Japanese car. If that too fails, an older Volvo may be used (usually in the 200-series).

The music of choice is rockabilly. The clothes and hairstyle are that of 1950s rockabilly. Blue jeans, cowboy boots, white t-shirts, sometimes with print (also used to store apack of cigarettes by folding the sleeve), leather or denim jacket. The hair is styled using Brylcreem or some other pomade.

One of the most popular artists among raggare is Eddie Meduza.

Raggare often use the confederate flag (possibly inspired by The Dukes of Hazzard) and the peckerwood, but are often oblivious to their meanings and are not necessarily racists. In the late 1990s the skinhead neonazi culture intermixed with the raggare culture and even their old sworn enemies, the punks. In Sweden today the raggarculture tends to be more racist and xenophobic than it was before.

** Rockabilly is the earliest form of rock and roll as a distinct style of music. It is a fusion of blues, hillbilly boogie, bluegrass music and country music, and its origins lie in the American South. As Peter Guralnick writes, "Its rhythm was nervously uptempo, accented on the offbeat, and propelled by a distinctively slapping bass....The sound was further bolstered by generous use of echo, a homemade technique refined independently by Sam Phillips and Leonard Chess in Chicago with sewer pipes and bathroom acoustics." While recording artists such as Bill Haley were playing music that fused rhythm and blues, western swing and country music in the early 1950s, and Tennessee Ernie Ford performed in a somewhat similar style on songs such as "Smokey Mountain Boogie," they were not playing rockabilly. As Nick Tosches writes, "By the early 1950s, it was not uncommon to encounter simultaneous country and rhythm-and-blues recordings of the same song." And he points out that the Delmore Brothers and Hank Williams were performing, in the late 1940s, music that could be called rock and roll. But rockabilly was a stripped-down version of its various sources, and thus a specific stylistic moment in the evolution of music that before had existed in many forms.

Bill Flagg was the first to name the music when he recorded for Tetra Records in 1955 - 1956. His song "Go Cat Go" went into the National Billboard charts in 1956. He is a member of the Rockabilly Hall Of Fame.

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.

Guralnick writes, "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....".

In 1997, the Rockabilly Hall of Fame was founded by Bob Timmers to present early rock and roll history and information relative to the artists and personalities involved in this pioneering American music genre.