Fortysomething years and several social/sexual revolutions later, the best-known members of the rockabilly club are still the ones with members: Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash. Which is peculiar, because " rockabilly’s a very androgynous form of music, " as cultural anthropologist Mary Bufwack points out in Beth Harrington’s documentary Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly, which airs at 10 p.m. this Friday, June 14, on WGBX Channel 44. " The women were able to be a little bit more assertive because of the driving quality of the beat. "

That point gets slammed home when Wanda Jackson is shown in archival TV footage shimmying and snarling through " Hard Headed Woman, " her voice brawny and wild. But that freewheeling confluence of beat and voluptuousness was too much for a society with inflexible expectations regarding gender. When Jackson played at the Grand Ole Opry in 1956, Ernest Tubb told her she couldn’t go on stage unless she covered her shoulders.

Each of the four " rockafillies " featured in Harrington’s film — Jackson, Janis Martin, Lorrie Collins, and Brenda Lee — had to contend with such asinine attitudes. And rockabilly’s melding of country, blues, hillbilly, and rock and roll tends to get overlooked by the mainstream. So the women who helped originate it suffer a double dose of obscurity, and that makes Harrington’s film all the more welcome. Last year’s PBS documentary Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun Records was superb, but it didn’t give the impression that women were active in making the music. (In Welcome to the Club, narrator Rosanne Cash notes that Sun Records founder Sam Phillips never managed to find a rockabilly " queen. " )

Harrington, a Bostonian transplanted to the Northwest, became interested in rockabilly women years ago, when she was singing in the Modern Lovers and went digging for songs for the band to cover. " I came across this Rounder record called ‘Wild Wild Young Women,’ and there were all these women . . . most of them I’d never heard of. And I thought, who the heck’s Janis Martin? Why don’t I know who she is? Who the heck’s Lorrie Collins? So then I started to scratch away at it a little bit. I hadn’t made films of my own at that point, and I thought, well, that’d be a great film someday. " (Harrington’s 1996 film The Blinking Madonna and Other Miracles, shot in the North End, has screened in town on several occasions.)

She discovered that Janis Martin had been an RCA Victor labelmate of Elvis who, with his blessing, had been billed as " The Female Elvis. " She’d toured widely with the likes of Hank Snow, Faron Young, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins; she’d made numerous TV appearances; she’d had a hit with her self-penned single " Drugstore Rock and Roll. " Chet Atkins was a mentor, and Billboard voted her " Most Promising Female Artist of 1956. " But then she eloped and got in a family way. At eight months pregnant, she made one more recording for RCA. " [RCA executive] Steve Sholes was standing in the control room, tears pouring down his cheeks, " she relates in the film, " because I had burst the whole teenage image that they had created for me. How do you promote a 16- or 17-year-old that’s expecting a baby? "

Lorrie Collins, of the Collins Kids (with her brother Larry), faced a similar predicament when as a teenager she eloped with Johnny Cash’s manager, who was in his 30s. After that, despite the wave of success she and her über-precocious brother had earned with their hopped-up stylings, it was curtains for her rock-and-roll career. Years later, after much bitterness, the siblings started playing the Las Vegas circuit together.

As for " Little Miss Dynamite " Brenda Lee, she was a pre-teen in the mid ’50s when she recorded the devastating rocker " BIGELOW 6-200. " Maybe because she was so young and nonthreatening and had a style that defied pigeonholing, Lee went on to enjoy plenty of success in the early ’60s with pop sugar like " Sweet Nothin’s " and " I’m Sorry. "

Just when it seemed that the women in the " Club " would be forever overlooked, rockabilly revivalists, first in Europe and then in the US, fell in love with their early material. These days they’re playing again, and enjoying the adulation of young rockabilly fans all over the world. Janis Martin headlined this year’s huge rockabilly weekender, " Viva Las Vegas, " and in Welcome to the Club her story is the most poignant. In the ’60s, her husband demanded that she give up music, and she suffered a nervous breakdown as a result. Finally, he agreed to allow her to get a band together, but then he gave her the same ultimatum: him or the music. " By this time, 13 years had passed, and I said, ‘You gave me that ultimatum before and I chose you. This time I’m choosing the music.’  " She’s such an irrepressible old cookie, it’s enough to make you want to shout, " Hell, yeah! "