Rockabilly cats Deke Dickerson and Kevin (Jittery Jack) Patey used to be the leaders of the bands Untamed Youth and Raging Teens. They’re not quite youth anymore, and well out of their teens. But still untamed and raging? You bet.

The two will join forces for a wild evening at the Burren in Somerville this Saturday. But they’re also longtime friends who’ve spearheaded roots/rockabilly scenes, respectively in Los Angeles and Boston. “I think Deke is a national treasure,” Patey said this week. Reached in a separate interview Dickerson counters, “Anything that Kevin does has always been a blast. But hey, you’re in Boston and every national hero is buried there. I’m just a guy who plays guitar and sings. I don’t even have a beer named after me like Sam Adams.”

Patey and his musical partner, guitar slinger Amy Griffin, have worked together since Raging Teens days three decades ago; and they’re still keeping the faith. “I love a broad spectrum of music,” Patey says. “But to me that primitive rock and roll, and that upbeat hilllbilly country are the raw spark. They’re the bricks that everything has built on, up to electronica and Taylor Swift. Everything else connects from there and it will always excite me, get my heart going and make my feet want to move.” Jittery Jack’s latest album, “Tonight’s the Night” (on the local Rum Bar label) combines the usual high spirits with a few resonant jabs at the music biz. “I’m not doing this for the money anymore,” Patey says. “That would make it a job, and I have a job. This is about having fun.”

Dickerson had a similar epiphany in his formative years. “My whole thing is that ever since I started playing music, I just hated what was popular,” he says. “But I found that you can go anywhere in the United States and play a Johnny Cash song — or anywhere in the world, for that matter — and people are going to like it. For me it’s a part of American cultural history, and the country’s history in general, that this mix of cultures came together, Black blues and white country, and created this music called rock and roll.”

Dickerson may be a party-thrower onstage, but he’s something of a music scholar offstage. He’s written a book about country guitar maverick Merle Travis; and a couple more about a subject close to his heart: Vintage guitars. “I could go on all day about how they’re superior, and it was important to me to recreate those details of the past. But I’ve changed my position lately, because I realized that there’s a lot of guys who have all the right vintage equipment, and their playing does nothing for me. Then I see some crazy kid playing a cheap guitar, and it sounds great. So I realized that all this stuff we obsess about means nothing if you don’t have the feeling.”

Dickerson’s also been a viral star in recent weeks, with many Facebook shares of a story he told about being interviewed by a very attentive Bob Dylan on his satellite radio show, “Theme Time Radio Hour.”  The joke is that the interview was accomplished by tape editing — he’s never met Dylan, though he narrowly missed him in the studio once. “When I told that story on Facebook someone said, ‘Bob knew exactly when you were around and didn’t want to meet you,” Dickerson laughs. “And I thought yeah, he’s probably right.”

Kevin (Jittery Jack) Patey and Amy Griffin. (Photo courtesy artist management)