Sleepy LaBeef, an early and enduring rockabilly artist who helped fuel a resurgence of that genre in the 1970s and ’80s, especially with his propulsive live shows, died on Thursday at his home in Siloam Springs, Ark. He was 84.

His daughter Jessie Mae Lynn LaBeff confirmed his death. A cause was not given.

In 1991, at which point Mr. LaBeef was 35 years into his musical career, The New York Times called him “a living, breathing, guitar-picking history of American music.” He claimed to know 6,000 songs and played, as he put it at the time, “root music: old-time rock ’n’ roll, Southern gospel and hand-clapping music, black blues, Hank Williams-style country.”

Elvis Presley was a contemporary (six months older), and, like Presley, Mr. LaBeef made his first records in the 1950s. He was living in Texas at the time, recording on small labels there, but in the mid-1960s he moved to Nashville. Eventually he signed with Presley’s original label, Sun Records.

In the 1970s and ’80s Mr. LaBeef maintained a particularly exhausting touring schedule — 200 to 300 shows a year — playing clubs all over the United States and also finding surprising success in Europe, which embraced rockabilly.