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Celebrating Rock's Unsung Heroes
By Jennifer Odell

Over the course of its 40 years, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival has basically outgrown its own borders of the Fairgrounds Race Track during the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May.

"Jazz Fest time," ... moreas locals call that special time of year, has sprawled into a whole season that celebrates the roots of New Orleans music.

Of course, New Orleans, along with Memphis, Nashville, Shreveport, LA. and beyond, provided many of the musical ideas that rock's biggest stars would later borrow and use to build the very genre.

Enter the Ponderosa Stomp, a two-day music festival and conference that showcases rock's "unsung heroes" between Jazz Fest weekends in New Orleans.

The Stomp is unique in its mission to highlight the vast swath of soul, R&B, doo-wop, rockabilly and country musicians whose work helped engineer the sound of what we know today as rock.

Here, we take a look at some of the stars of the 2009 Ponderosa Stomp--and the hit records and rock stars that might never have made it to the top without them.