Don’t Put ‘50s Rock Past Big Sandy : The band’s leader and crew take the best aspects of roots music and, rather than being mere recyclers, deliver them with vitality.

If they could find a working contraption like the one H.G. Wells imagined, the two co-founders of Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys know where they would end up: Back in the 1950s, when the world was just learning to rock.

This would be no visit, says bassist Wally Hersom, who, at 25, can’t remember the ‘60s, let alone the ‘50s. He would set the controls circa 1954, the year of Elvis Presley’s famous Sun Sessions, and never return.

“I’ve talked about it a lot with friends,” said Hersom, a gangly scarecrow of a man whose angular face, toothy smile, slicked-back hair and thick, squared-off tortoise-shell eyeglass frames make you think instantly of Buddy Holly.

Some friends who share his passion for the music, cars and clothes of the 1950s would rather pursue their fascination retrospectively, while continuing to live in the more tolerant 1990s, Hersom says. But given the chance, he would trade the present for the past and not come back.

Robert (Big Sandy) Williams, the tall, barrel-shaped bandleader, says that he would do the same.

With time travel unlikely, Williams, Hersom and the three other members of the Orange County-based Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys have done the next best thing. Their live shows and their just-released album, “Jumping From 6 to 6,” retrieve some of the best aspects of the roots-music past and pull them alive and gleefully kicking into the present.

Putting together elements of the rockabilly of Presley and Gene Vincent, the Western swing of Bob Wills, and the honky-tonk music of Hank Williams and George Jones, Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys sound as if they themselves had just stepped out of a time machine.

Their sound is an authentic representation of its period-piece inspirations, yet the delivery is so infectious and brimming with vitality, native enthusiasm and assurance that they sound less like rehashers of past music than discoverers of some eternal wellspring of high spirits.

In concept, Big Sandy can be labeled a retro act. In concert, or on compact disc (a format still little-known to Williams, who is an avid and encyclopedic collector of old vinyl), the beholder will be too busy grinning and tapping toes to categorize.

Hersom thumps a bass fiddle while poker-faced drummer Bobby Trimble, 23, ignites the beat with explosive fills that have antecedents in big-band swing. Guitarist Ashley Kingman and steel-guitar player Lee Jeffriess, both transplanted Englishmen, play off each other in lively skittering dances.

Williams, 29, is the key to the band’s ability to sound fresh while sounding old. His singing is smooth, rich and creamy, full of unstudied, unforced pleasure. Williams never strains for an effect, sounding natural and completely at home with everything he sings.

Much of it is original material with simple, innocent lyrics about the pleasures of rocking or the human comedy of falling in love, getting dumped, then starting the cycle all over again.

The question of whether his band is creating something fresh or just exhuming the past “only comes up in interviews,” Williams said recently between bites of arroz con pollo during an al fresco lunch in Orange. He is a genial, soft-spoken man who forms his thoughts slowly and deliberately, then unleashes them in staccato bursts.

“People can be into any new band, (yet) they can come and see us and enjoy it. To these kids, it’s new music. Our point of view is (to play) as if this is all new music.”

Williams and Hersom both began playing 10 years ago in bands on Orange County’s rockabilly revival scene.

Williams already had a good grounding in roots music: “There was always a lot of music in my family. Coming from a mixed (background), my mother being Mexican, my father being Anglo, we listened to the R&B; and doo-wop she listened to, while my dad was very much into rockabilly.”

Big Sandy’s own tastes leaned toward New Wave when he started buying records in junior high. Hersom teases him about knowing all the words to songs by the Knack. But it was rockabilly that pulled him in when he decided at 19 that he wanted to be in a band.

Hersom wasn’t interested in music until he heard the Stray Cats and other rockabilly revival bands. That, he says, is when “I first found out what it feels like to love music.”

Quickly, Hersom and Williams fell into what they refer to as a subset within the neo-rockabilly movement--the fans and musicians who weren’t content with the recycled forms of the music, but wanted to delve back deeply into its origins.

It took them a few years to form a band around their idea of playing music that would have the feel of the real thing, rather than being a contemporary re-creation.

“We wanted to be more traditional, but it was difficult to get a group of guys together that shared that vision,” Hersom said.

“We never had the right people,” Williams chimed in. “We needed a guitar player who was not so influenced by Brian Setzer (of the Stray Cats) but was more into Cliff Gallup (Gene Vincent’s lead guitarist) or Merle Travis.”

In 1988, they found T.K. Smith, a guitarist well-versed in the authentic rockabilly sound, and Trimble soon joined in place of original drummer Will B. The band’s name was inspired by the name-patch on a hand-me-down uniform jacket Williams had gotten from his uncle Santiago, whose nickname is Sandy.

In 1989, they issued “Fly Right With Big Sandy and the Fly Rite Trio,” on a tiny Burbank label, Dionysus Records. Favorable reviews in the English music press prompted the band to tour there and win a respectable following.

The band’s connections with the English rockabilly scene led to the recruitment of steel player Jeffriess, a nimble instrumentalist whose arrival allowed them to pursue the Western-swing influences they had long wanted to explore.

“On the Go,” an album recorded before Jeffriess joined, appeared in 1992 on a London-based label, No Hit Records. That fall, British rock star Morrissey found himself in need of an opening act for his U.S. tour. His guitar player, Boz Boorer, had come up on the British rockabilly-revival scene, and pointed him toward Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys.

The band’s month of cross-country touring with Morrissey won it some new fans but cost it a talented guitarist when Smith became tired of the touring life that the other members avidly wish to pursue. Again tapping their English rockabilly connections, they came up with Kingman, who joined about a year ago.

With two releases on obscure labels, the next goal was to land a higher-profile record deal. But there was no clamor for a young band that wove various venerable influences into a hard-to-categorize style that fit no radio format.

In November, Big Sandy and his band found an influential champion in Dave Alvin, the respected Los Angeles roots-rock singer-songwriter who had moved from the Blasters and X to a productive solo career on HighTone Records.

Alvin liked what he heard on stage, and helped Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys land a deal with HighTone.

In a separate interview, Alvin said that he had been a fan for several years. His interest became more urgent after he heard Big Sandy sing Hank Williams’ honky-tonk lament, “Weary Blues From Waitin’,” at a show last fall at the Palomino in North Hollywood.

“That’s when I was convinced,” Alvin said. “It was as close as someone could get to the intensity of Hank Williams, but it didn’t sound like a knockoff, and it floored me.”

Alvin was impressed that the band was not limited to the energetic, lighthearted jumping swing and rockabilly that was its signature, but could also pull off a song with deeper feeling. “It kind of showed their depth, what they’re capable of and may (achieve) in the future.”

The album was recorded live in January at Capitol Records Studio B in Hollywood, which Alvin picked for its large-room atmosphere and its association with classic recordings by Gene Vincent, Buck Owens and others. Alvin came away impressed by Williams’ consistency and staying power.

“The recording was four days in a row, 11-hour days, cutting live. Most singers I’ve known and worked with or seen in the studio, as professional as some of them are, will bitch or lose it after several hours. Sandy never complained and maybe once or twice hit a flat note. I’d say, ‘You’ve been in here 10 hours nonstop, and your voice hasn’t shredded, you’re hitting every damn note, and you’re doing it all day long. You’re a great singer.’ And he’d say, ‘No, man, you’re kidding me.’ ”

If that time machine did exist, Big Sandy and company could go back to the mid-’50s and stand a very good chance of making it big with such songs as “Hi-Billy Music,” a thoroughly engaging and catchy Williams original. “If you don’t dig hi-billy music. . . . It’s the sound that’s sweeping around most anywhere,” he sings with cool-cat charm over a swinging backup.

In 1994, though, the alternative-rock world is consumed with much darker musings. It’s hip to sound infected, not infectious. Country radio, meanwhile, treats the music’s deepest roots as if they were an embarrassment.

Fans of Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash and George Jones may well do back flips when they hear “Jumpin’ From 6 to 6,” but that won’t get the album played on contemporary country stations, which seldom depart from music with a slick, modern sheen.

“There’s no set niche they can fit us into,” Hersom acknowledged.

The plan now is to go on the road--with an eye toward landing bookings at country and roots-oriented music festivals--and plow a furrow of their own. Williams and Hersom say the band aims to keep expectations low while stepping up its touring efforts.

As Hersom put it, “If we can just get it out there in the stores, and we’re out there playing and in people’s faces, they’ll hear it and like it, and it’ll create a market.”

* Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys play Friday at 9:30 p.m. at Linda’s Doll Hut, 107 S. Adams St., Anaheim. $5. (714) 533-1286. The band also plays April 30 at Jack’s Sugar Shack in Los Angeles, (310) 271-7887, and May 7 at the Tiki Room in Costa Mesa, (714) 548-3533.