The crowd on the honky-tonk dance floor spanned the generations.

A gaggle of retirees rocked beside a cluster of high-schoolers. A man in his 70s twirled a partner. A middle-age mom did a moonwalk.

And onstage at the Ashland Cafe in Cockeysville, a 21-year-old Baltimore County singer with a round face and rosy cheeks reeled off a glissando on the piano, finishing his Jerry Lee Lewis-style “smear” with a high C and a vocal flourish.

“We was reelin' and a-rockin' and a-rollin' till the break of day!” Josh Christina wailed.

It was a Friday night in early summer, and Christina, a Dulaney High School graduate and emerging Nashville recording artist, was headlining a concert to celebrate the release of his third solo CD.

Backed by his band, Good Old Stuff, the pianist-singer spent four hours rocking the joint with the kind of music that hasn't dominated the pop charts since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.

Ask Christina whether he can make a career in early American rock 'n' roll — that upbeat blend of rock, country, gospel and blues that Little Richard, Lewis, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and others pioneered in the 1950s — and he'll tell you he has no doubt he can mine the old to forge something new.

What guitar wizard Stevie Ray Vaughn did with blues in the 1980s; what Brian Setzer did with swing in the 1990s, and what pop diva Meghan Trainor is doing with doo-wop today, Christina intends to do with the style that gave the world “Johnny B. Goode,” “Great Balls of Fire” and “No Particular Place to Go.”

“What I love [about rockabilly] is the raw authenticity, simplicity and passion you always hear in Chuck Berry's lyrics, in Elvis' voice, in B.B. King's guitar,” he says. “People still love this music. All that's missing is a dynamic new artist to make it relevant again.”

Christina, a friendly, bespectacled fellow with an updraft of blond hair above his forehead, has yet to hit the top of the charts. But there are signs his star is rising.

He was 18 when he rented a White Marsh studio to record his first CD, “Man From Another Time.” The eight-song effort caught the attention of the Nashville producer and bandleader Kent Wells, whose best-known client is Dolly Parton.

Christina drove to Nashville with his family in 2013 to meet with and perform for Wells.

“When Josh first sent me some of his material, I thought it was really impressive, but when he came [to Nashville], sat down at my piano and played, it blew me away,” Wells says. “He could have easily held his own with Jerry Lee, Mickey Gilley and Fats Domino back in the day. He's an old soul, and the music just pours out of him.”

Wells produced his next two offerings, the eight-tune CD “Good Old Love” in 2015 and “I'm 21” this year.

One of Christina's originals, “Cry You A River,” hit the secondary radio market last year, leading to a three-week performing tour of small radio stations in the South.

A second, “Kayla Ann,” made No. 74 on the high-profile MusicRow Country Breakout chart — enough to qualify him as an officially “charted” artist — and No. 1 on the international Indie World Country Record Chart.

That led to a two-week tour of medium-size stations in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and other states.

Christina also met and befriended the granddaughter of legendary Sun Records executive Sam Phillips at a station in Alabama and played one of Lewis' old pianos. His mother, Patti, a retired rock and pop vocalist, helped do the driving both years.

“He got a great reception everywhere we went,” she says.

As he sat in the courtyard of the Ashland Cafe days after the release party, Christina — who plays about 90 shows a year in and around Maryland — sounded pleased but in no way satisfied.

His mother has cautioned him about the twists and turns every music career follows, and it grounds him without dashing his dreams.

“Success is out there,” he says. “I can see it. I just can't touch it yet.”

His start in life was marred by tragedy.

Christina's birth father, a carpenter and part-time drummer named Vernon Arthur Smith, was fishing at Loch Raven Reservoir one day in 1995 when, police say, he stumbled onto an illegal gun sale.

He was beaten to death with a barbell; another man was fatally shot.

The high-profile case led to the arrests and convictions of two Baltimore brothers.

“It's not as if I've had to grieve him a whole lot,” says Christina, who was 4 months old at the time. “I never knew him. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Two years later, Patti married podiatrist James Christina, and the physician adopted the boy.

“He's a great dad — the only dad I've ever known,” Christina says.

Another thing he knows is music.

Both of his grandmothers were vocalists, one a church singer, the other a big-band crooner who toured with Perry Como.

Patti, who sang for years with the local band Impulse, and James kept the family home awash in many forms of music.

When Josh was 7, though, he saw the Disney film “Lilo & Stitch,” which features “Hound Dog” on the soundtrack, and Patti says the sound transfixed him.

He and a friend started a “Junior Blues Brothers” act a year later, and the pair performed for six years.

For a time, he tried formal piano lessons, but he hated the discipline required and quit.

But when his parents took him to the Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet” at age 15, his dream coalesced.

The show re-creates a jam session Presley, Lewis, Johnny Cash and rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins had in 1956; it includes covers of “That's All Right, Mama,” “I Walk the Line” and “Long Tall Sally.”

Christina was blown away.

“The simple, raw sound — it just struck me as unbelievable,” he says. “That's when I knew what I wanted to do.”

The kid who'd hated lessons — and school — couldn't wait to teach himself the right-hand slams and boogie parts in “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On.” Then came Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Little Richard videos on YouTube.

He came to regard his lack of formal training as an asset.

“I play by feel,” he says in the slight Elvis-like drawl he has developed. “If it sounds right, it is right. Like a friend of mine says, ‘Jerry Lee plays the same 12 notes Beethoven did.'?”

His parents supported his decision not to go to college. An outlier at Dulaney, Christina took HVAC courses, qualified as a carpenter and mechanic, and has worked as a part-time car mechanic and groundskeeper.

Combined with the roughly $20,000 he rakes in from gigs, it's enough to keep the dream going.

It helps that he lives in an attic apartment on his grandparents' Phoenix farm. That's where he spends hours banging out riffs, searching for hooks and studying everything about “the masters” he can get his hands on.

The composer of more than 40 tunes, he learned one principle from Berry's work: Mine the culture for appealing images.

Where Berry wrote about souped-up cars, Josh talks about social media (“Text Message” laments a woman's delayed reply). In “21,” he celebrates newly minted adulthood with a raunchy night out.

He has also taken to adding progressive musical colors, weaving nontraditional notes into conventional rockabilly patterns.

“Josh is smart. He wants to play American roots music, but he also knows if you don't adapt and modernize, you won't stay current,” says his friend, Silver Spring pianist Daryl Davis. “He has a lot of years to go, and he has only started to evolve.”

Davis should know. He spent 32 years playing with Berry during the legend's East Coast tours.

Davis recently shared the stage with Christina at Bethesda Blues and Jazz, as he does regularly, and says the crowd loved the energy.

“They can't believe a guy this young can play Hank Williams, B.B. King, Fats Domino and Jerry Lee the way he does,” the 58-year-old says. “They come up to him afterward and say, ‘Are you reincarnated?'?”

Christina's short-term goals include scoring a tour in Europe, where rockabilly remains popular, and breaking into the MusicRow Top 20, considered a benchmark for arrival on the national countryscene.

That could land him a deal with a bigger label than Go Time, the one Wells runs as a vehicle for up-and-comers.

He'd like to sell out Baltimore's Royal Farms Arena within a decade or so, Christina says, and in the longer term be able to make a good living as a writer, recording artist and performer.

He's taking his early steps. The crowd of 150 at the Ashland Cafe is more than enough to fill the place and keep it rocking.

As he and the band play the bar-band covers that pay the bills, Christina's voice goes wide of a note or two as he seeks to raise the mood.

But his new material — “21,” “Kiss Me When You're Sober,” “Rockabilly Saturday Night” — finds the right rhythm, and a refrain in “Text Message” gets a laugh worthy of Chuck Berry: “Tell me, baby, why don't you make me vibrate no more?”

He plays another Jerry Lee “smear.” His fans keep dancing. You can almost see where Josh Christina is headed next.

jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com