In our Lowdown on Carl Perkins, we celebrate how the legendary rocker lit the rockabilly fire with classics like Matchbox, Blue Suede Shoes, Dixie Fried, Pink Pedal Pushers and many more. When he toured the UK with Chuck Berry in 1964, fans unravelled a banner proclaiming him ‘The King of Rock’. Today, he’s seen as one of the music’s founding fathers…
It’s an odd fact that Carl Perkins was one of the architects of rock’n’roll and yet, in pop chart terms, a one-hit wonder. Blue Suede Shoes was his sole Top 10 hit in either the US or Britain. lt was Sun Records’ first million seller, but nothing else he cut for the Memphis label or Columbia, to which he decamped in early 1958, would get near the Top 30.
Earmarked by Sun boss Sam Phillips as the next Elvis, Perkins lacked the latter’s natural ease and adaptability. He couldn’t match Presley’s way of assimilating different styles and making them his own. Lacking that crossover appeal, it’s impossible to imagine him charming his way through dozens of enjoyably lightweight Hollywood movies as Elvis did.
But his was the authentic voice of rockabilly, the early blender of hillbilly, blues and R&B that ultimately led to rock’n’roll. It was said that Perkins and his brothers Jay (rhythm guitar) and Clayton (string bass) were playing up-tempo hillbilly bop, or what he termed country with a beat, before they’d ever heard Elvis. It was only when his wife heard the radio one day and told Perkins that Elvis sounded just like him, that the brothers headed for Memphis.
King Of Rockabilly
Actually, Perkins sounded more rugged and mature than Presley, as well as the likes of Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Burnette, and other early southern rockers. Raw-boned and awkward, he wasn’t cut out for teen stardom. Still, Perkins’ singing had an earthy soulfulness, plus he was a fine guitarist, knocking out brilliantly choppy, staccato licks. He was a decent songwriter, too. Along with Blue Suede Shoes, one of the key tracks to break down the barriers between country and R&B, several other of his compositions became rockabilly or rock standards, including Matchbox, a blues oldie so reimagined by Perkins it seemed like an original, as well as Boppin’ The Blues, Honey Don’t and Put Your Cat Clothes On.
Perkins had his personal issues, but touring Britain in 1964 with Chuck Berry, to his amazement he found out there were still many who adored his music, and that these included The Beatles, who frequently played his songs in their sets. Asking his permission to record some of them, a bemused yet humbled Perkins was hardly going to say no. For several years a part of his friend Johnny Cash’s touring roadshow, the pair helped each other battle their demons.
Perkins didn’t make old age, dying at 65 in 1998. But he lived long enough to see the revival of interest in the music he’d helped create. Never one for histrionics, ill health took some of the fire out of his later performances. But those who knew Perkins in his pomp revere him, also describing Carl as a true gentleman – thoughtful, kind and generous with his time. A real legend, in fact, and so much more than a one-hit wonder.
KEY SONGS
Perkins’ most creative years, though largely confined to the 1950s, yielded several rockabilly perennials
Movie Magg
Paired with the country weeper Turn Around, this was Perkins’ first 45, issued on Sun subsidiary Flip in 1955. It’s an extraordinary hillbilly shuffler, offering a clue to the spirit in which he and his brothers played before arriving in Memphis. Perkins’ emotional vocal brings its fretful ploughboy character to life. The beat is fast honky tonk and the references to horses, ploughing, double-barrel guns and a western movie are country. The energy is rockabilly.
Gone, Gone, Gone
When Billboard published their review of Perkins’ Sun single Gone, Gone, Gone, still grappling to describe the new sound, they called it “bounce blues in a flavoursome combination of country and R&B idioms”. The reference to “bounce blues” accurately describes the subtly swinging vibe that underpins a lot of Perkins’ rockabilly. More obvious was the way that he drove songs along via throaty yells and aggressive guitar.
Blue Suede Shoes
The Big One. Not just Perkins’ breakthrough disc, but a rare rockabilly creation that was a crossover hit, both in the US and Britain. Contains major rockabilly identifiers, including excited shouts over the break, the upfront sound of Clayton’s string bass, as key to the song’s pulse as the drums, a danceable backwoods feel and, despite good guitar licks, no instrumental showboating. Elvis’ faster, glossier RCA version, is a different animal.
Honey Don’t
Only the B-side to Blue Suede Shoes, but another revered entry in the Perkins songbook. On the back of a country boogie rhythm, the good ole’ southern boy delivers a ripping solo, innovative in rockabilly terms for its chord progression. Included on the Dance Album, it appeared alongside Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby on The Beatles 1964 LP Beatles For Sale, Ringo Starr supplying the vocal and George Harrison the solo.
Tennessee
The rockabilly pioneer was also a majestic country singer. Turn Around and Let The Jukebox Keep On Playing were steeped in the barroom weeper tradition. Sure To Fall featured harmonising of the type popular among ‘hillbilly brother’ acts of the day. Tennessee, a would-be single that got pulled, is quirkier. The rhythm comes from western swing while its lyrics celebrate the US state for its music and, weirdly, for making the atomic bomb.
Boppin’ The Blues
A song that does what it says on the tin. With its pounding beat, paired with the Johnny Cash co-write All Mama’s Children, Sam Phillips mistakenly thought it was a nailed-on smash hit follow-up to Blue Suede Shoes. Ricky Nelson, who once said he wanted to be Perkins, did a great cover on his first Imperial album Ricky with Joe Maphis on guitar. The same LP also featured Ricky’s take on one of Perkins’ poppier Sun excursions, Your True Love.
Dixie Fried
Co-written with Tennessee deejay Howard ‘Curley’ Griffin, who also had a hand in penning Boppin’ The Blues, this was one of Perkins’ best story songs. Homing in on the seamier side of rockin’ nightclub life, its lead character shouts at his mates to “Rave on, cats!” while flashing a quart of liquor and a razor, before getting dragged off by the law. With Perkins at his earthiest, it didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of success.
Matchbox
Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded this as Match Box Blues, a straight blues number, in 1927. However, Perkins claimed never to have heard it or any other versions by the likes of Ma Rainey and Big Bill Broonzy. His rocked-up cut thus feels like an original. In support was a young Jerry Lee Lewis, his pumping piano tethered but unmistakeable. Backed with Your True Love it was cut on the same day, coincidentally, as the Million Dollar Quartet session.
Pink Pedal Pushers
There’s no doubt that Perkins on Columbia was a tamed beast. Compare his earlier Sun version of Pink Pedal Pushers with the one for Columbia, his first single for his new label in 1958 and backed by Jive After Five. Perkins’ early Columbia singles, recorded in Nashville, were not bad records by any stretch, but lacked the electricity of his Sun work. He once admitted to being intimidated by Nashville’s ultra-professional session men.
I Don’t See Me In Your Eyes Anymore
Perkins never had Elvis’ way with emotional love songs. Yet he certainly excelled on this one, a soporific hit for Perry Como in 1949. Country crooner Jim Reeves had also sung it in 1957, lifting the tempo slightly. But Perkins gave it some real boot when he recorded it at Columbia in 1959, extracting new levels of emotion. Not even Al Martino or Charlie Rich could match the sincerity of Perkins’ interpretation.
KEY ALBUMS
Carl Perkins’ album legacy was not the greatest, but at least one proved highly consequential
Dance Album Of Carl Perkins (1957), his only long-player released while at Sun had a strikingly designed cover and combined some of Perkins’ singles with unreleased material. A steady seller, its UK release found a ready listener in George Harrison, who reportedly wore out his copy by continually playing it in his efforts to learn the guitar breaks.
While Perkins’ Columbia recordings lacked his earlier spontaneity, his first album for them, Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1958), is a real surprise. Although the appeal of Little Richard covers of the title track, Ready Teddy and Long Tall Sally is not immediately obvious, there’s a raging magnificence in the way Perkins charges through such material, as well as on the less familiar Where The Rio De Rosa Flows. Crucially, his brothers both backed him here.
Memorable Music
Perkins had two spells with Columbia as he struggled through the 60s to define a style. Typical of his meandering was 1969’s On Top, though at least it had new material. My Kind Of Country from 1973, released on Mercury, saw him working in a more suitable, straight country vein. Ol’ Blue Suede’s Back (1978), released through Jet, was stubbornly old school, revisiting such chestnuts as the inevitable Blue Suede Shoes, That’s All Right and Tutti Frutti via vaguely modernised backing. Given a television advertising campaign in the UK, it reached No.38, the only time one of his releases made the British albums chart.
Among the inevitable collaborative albums was 1982’s The Survivors, recorded live in Germany, on which he appeared with Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. On Class Of ’55: Memphis Rock & Roll Homecoming (1986) the three ex-Sun-ites were joined by another in the Big ‘O’, Roy Orbison.
Compilations vary from Acrobat’s affordable Carl Perkins: The Complete Singles & Albums, 1955-62 to the pricier Bear Family offerings, headed by The Classic Carl Perkins. In 2019, the label also released Discovering Carl Perkins – Eastview, Tennessee, 1952-’53, a compilation featuring previously unreleased pre-Sun recordings.
CARL ON FILM
Carl Perkins was not one of the great showman rockers. He was a modest man and preferred to let his music speak for itself. So he was never going to leave a lot of trailblazing performances on film. However, he did appear in 1957’s Jamboree, one of Hollywood’s lesser rock’n’roll movies, performing Glad All Over.
Perkins was a man with few enemies in the music business, and a measure of the respect and love peers felt for him is evident in Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session With Carl Perkins & Friends. This video offering was filmed in London in 1985 to mark the 30th anniversary of the writing of his most celebrated song. The “friends” that night included George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Rosanne Cash, Dave Edmunds and Earl Slick, and also found space for the later generation rockers via the inclusion of the Stray Cats’ Slim Jim Phantom and Lee Rocker. Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis offered brief spoken tributes.
ESSENTIAL READING
Perkins’ authorised biography Go, Cat, Go! The Life And Times Of Carl Perkins, The King Of Rockabilly by David McGee, was published in 1996. McGee wrote up more than 100 hours of taped reminiscences from the star, and it takes you through the tough life of the boy from Tiptonville, West Tennessee.
Perkins was born into poverty and picked cotton while listening to field spirituals and learning country and the blues, before graduating with his brothers to playing in the local joints where chicken wire separated the band from the rowdy drinking audiences. It also documents Carl’s rise to fame and failure to sustain it, his struggles with the bottle and pills, and a later battle with throat cancer.
An earlier book written with Ron Rendleman, Disciple In Blue Suede Shoes (1978), gave full vent to the sincere, strongly held religious convictions of the artist. The excellent writer Rich Kienzle also included a section on Carl Perkins in his 1985 book Great Guitarists: The Most Influential Players In Blues, Country Music, Jazz And Rock.
THE PERKINS SOUND
Amongst the most natural of the early generation of rock’n’rollers, the iconic artist owed little to studio trickery
Carl Perkins always handed a lot of credit to Hank Williams for being one of the rockabilly originators, via songs such as Kaw-Liga – which he pointedly featured on his 1978 album Ol’ Blue Suede’s Back – plus Honky Tonkin’ and Move It On Over.
All he lacked was a drummer, Perkins reckoned. When he and his brothers Jay and Clayton played clubs in the Jackson, Tennessee, area in the early 1950s, their sets featured the music of Williams and Lefty Frizzell. Eventually, the trio added a drummer to their set-up, initially Tony Austin and then, on a longer-term basis, W.S. ‘Fluke’ Holland, giving them a point of difference from most performing hillbilly bands at the time, when drums in country music were frowned upon.
With Perkins already hard-wired to gospel and blues, and Holland having experience of drumming in blues clubs, they developed a blues-country fusion which, allied to a jumping beat, was a staging post en route to what became known as rock’n’roll.
When David McGee wrote his Perkins biography, one of the things that he was keen to emphasise was the sometimes overlooked importance of Jay and Clayton, as well as Holland, to the records.
Go, Cat, Go
At Sun, Sam Phillips recognised Perkins as a country artist with soul in his voice in songs such as Turn Around and Let The Jukebox Keep On Playing.
But he detected that something different happened to Perkins’ voice on material like Gone, Gone, Gone, and encouraged the rockin’ sensibilities. However, as far as Perkins was concerned, Phillips shouldn’t be credited with developing his style. Reflecting on Phillips’ contribution to Melody Maker in 1978, he said: “He didn’t have anything to do with telling me to, ‘Come on, man, rock this song’. I sang the song the way I wanted to sing. He was concerned with sound.”
Phillips’ ear for sound was certainly valuable at the Blue Suede Shoes session, though. During the second take, Carl shouted “Go, cat, go” instead of the intended “Go, man, go” and made a mistake in his guitar-playing. He wanted another take.
But, noted Peter Guralnick in his book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll, Phillips then played the take back for Carl. “‘You see’, he said, ‘That one’s got all the excitement… No one’s ever going to hear that mistake but you’.”
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