Carl Perkins

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Carl Lee Perkins grew up in the cotton fields of Tiptonville, Tennessee, dragging a homemade guitar fashioned from a cigar box and a broomstick. He was born on the 9th of April, 1932, to sharecroppers so poor they could not buy a real instrument. And yet, by the 1st of January, 1956, a song he had written in an autumn night's inspiration would hit record stores and eventually sell more than a million copies. How did a barefoot boy from Lake County get there? And why, when Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix all recorded his songs, does his name sit in the shadow of theirs? That tension - between Perkins's outsized influence and his relative obscurity - runs through everything that follows.

• 2. A Guitar from a Cigar Box

  ›

  John Westbrook, a Black field worker in his sixties, was the first real guitar teacher Carl Perkins ever had. Westbrook played blues and gospel on an old acoustic guitar in the same cotton fields where the Perkins family worked. He told the young boy, "Get down close to it. You can feel it travel down the strangs, come through your head and down to your soul where you live. You can feel it. Let it vib-a-rate." That instruction shaped Perkins's physical approach to the instrument for the rest of his life.

  The strings on his neighbor's worn-out Gene Autry guitar kept breaking, and Perkins could not afford replacements. When they broke, he retied them. The knots cut his fingers when he slid to another note, so he started bending notes instead - accidentally stumbling onto a technique rooted in the blues. He taught himself Roy Acuff's "Great Speckled Bird" and "The Wabash Cannonball" from Opry radio broadcasts. Bill Monroe's fast playing also drew his attention early.

  In January 1947, the family moved from Lake County to Madison County, seventy miles from Memphis. Perkins was fourteen when he wrote a country song called "Let Me Take You to the Movie, Magg." Years later, that song alone was enough to convince Sun Records founder Sam Phillips to sign him.

• 3. The Sun Records Years

  ›

  Perkins successfully auditioned for Sam Phillips in early October 1954, just a few months after hearing Elvis Presley's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the radio. Presley's version made Perkins say, "There's a man in Memphis who understands what we're doing. I need to go see him." Phillips saw something specific in Perkins: a player who, in Phillips's own words, could "rock" and had been doing it before Presley ever cut a record.

  In the autumn of 1955, Perkins wrote "Blue Suede Shoes" after watching a dancer grow furious when his date scuffed his shoes. On the 19th of December, 1955, Perkins and his band recorded the song at Sun Studio. Phillips suggested the lyric change that produced "Go, cat, go," and the band reworked the song's ending into a boogie vamp.

  Sun released "Blue Suede Shoes" on the 1st of January, 1956. It reached number one on Billboard's country music chart - the only chart-topper Perkins would ever have - and number two on the Billboard Best Sellers popular music chart. On the 17th of March, Perkins became the first country artist to reach number three on the rhythm and blues chart. By mid-April, more than a million copies had sold. It was the first record by any Sun artist to hit that milestone.

  Then came a moment that altered the trajectory of his career in ways he could not have foreseen. On the 22nd of March 1956, the day after a show in Norfolk, Virginia, the Perkins Brothers Band was headed to New York for a Perry Como Show appearance. Their vehicle hit a pickup truck on Route 13 between Dover and Woodside, Delaware. The driver of the truck, a forty-year-old farmer named Thomas Phillips, died. Perkins sustained three fractured vertebrae in his neck, a severe concussion, a broken collar bone, and lacerations across his body. His drummer W.S. Holland pulled him, unconscious, from about twelve inches of water. His brother Jay fractured his neck and suffered severe internal injuries; Jay later developed a malignant brain tumor and died in 1958.

  While Perkins lay in hospital, Presley performed "Blue Suede Shoes" three separate times on national television. The song's momentum belonged to someone else.

• 4. The Million Dollar Quartet

  ›

  By late 1956, Perkins had returned to recording. One session in particular stands as the most talked-about informal gathering in rock and roll history. When Perkins recorded "Matchbox" at Sun Studio, he was accompanied on piano by Jerry Lee Lewis. Later that same day, Presley dropped by, and Johnny Cash joined the session. The four of them fell into an unplanned jam of gospel, country, and rhythm and blues songs. This gathering became known as the Million Dollar Quartet. Sun released the full recordings in 1990.

  Cash's influence on Perkins ran deeper than a single afternoon. Perkins co-wrote the B-side of "Boppin' the Blues" with Cash. He wrote "The Ballad of Boot Hill" for Cash in 1959. He wrote "Daddy Sang Bass" for Cash in 1968, which incorporated parts of the gospel standard "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" and stayed at the top of the country chart for six weeks. Perkins also played lead guitar on Cash's live recording of "A Boy Named Sue" at San Quentin prison, which went to number one on the country chart and number two on the pop chart.

• 5. The Beatles on the Floor

  ›

  In May 1964, Perkins toured Britain with Chuck Berry. He had been deeply reluctant to go, convinced he was forgotten and that the UK would be worse. Berry persuaded him that they had stayed more popular in Britain than in the United States since the 1950s. On the last night of the tour, at a party, Perkins sat on the floor with the Beatles - playing guitar, sharing stories, and singing songs.

  Ringo Starr asked that night if he could record "Honey Don't." Perkins answered, "Man, go ahead, have at it." The Beatles went on to record covers of "Matchbox," "Honey Don't," and "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby." Starr sang lead on the first two; George Harrison sang lead on the third. The royalties from those recordings allowed Perkins to buy a farm for his parents.

  The connection to Beatlemania was not new. "Blue Suede Shoes" had already reached number ten on the UK singles chart in 1956. John Lennon originally sang "Honey Don't" in the Beatles' live set before handing it to Starr. Lennon later performed the song on The Lost Lennon Tapes. Fellow musician Charlie Daniels later summed it up: "Carl Perkins' songs personified the rockabilly era, and Carl Perkins' sound personifies the rockabilly sound more so than anybody involved in it, because he never changed."

• 6. Sobriety and Second Life

  ›

  On tour with the Johnny Cash Show in 1968, Perkins went on a four-day drinking binge that ended with florid hallucinations and a blackout. When he came to, he walked to the beach with his last bottle of alcohol. In his autobiography, he described falling to his knees and declaring, "Lord,... I'm gonna throw this bottle. I'm gonna show You that I believe in you," before hurling it into the sea. Cash, who had his own substance-abuse problems, and Perkins supported each other in staying sober from that point on.

  The sobriety opened a productive stretch. Perkins and Bob Dylan co-wrote "Champaign, Illinois" in 1969. Dylan, recording Nashville Skyline between the 12th and the 21st of February, had writer's block and could not finish the song. When Perkins contributed the rhythm and some lyrics, Dylan told him, "Your song. Take it. Finish it." Perkins registered it as co-authored and recorded it on his 1969 album, On Top.

  A strong advocate for child welfare, Perkins worked with the Jackson Exchange Club to establish the first center in Tennessee for the prevention of child abuse. Proceeds from a concert he organized, combined with a grant from the National Exchange Club, established the Prevention of Child Abuse center in October 1981.

• 7. Blue Suede Forever

  ›

  In October 1985, Perkins performed at Limehouse Studios in London for a television special called Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session, joined by George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Lee Rocker, Rosanne Cash, and Ringo Starr. Perkins sang sixteen songs plus two encores. The show was broadcast on Channel 4 on the 1st of January, 1986. When the session closed with everyone singing "Blue Suede Shoes" - thirty years after he had written it - Perkins was moved to tears.

  Recognition accumulated steadily from that period forward. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Rolling Stone ranked him number 99 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time in 2004. The National Recording Preservation Board placed his "Blue Suede Shoes" in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2006. The Hall of Fame had already chosen it as one of its 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

  His last album, Go Cat Go!, released in 1996 by Dinosaur Records, featured duets with Bono, Johnny Cash, John Fogerty, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, Paul Simon, and Ringo Starr. His last major concert appearance was the Music for Montserrat charity concert at London's Royal Albert Hall on the 15th of September, 1997, four months before he died.

  Perkins died on the 19th of January, 1998, at Jackson-Madison County Hospital. At his standing room only funeral at Lambuth University, George Harrison closed the service by singing an acoustic version of "Your True Love." In 2025, Sun Records released Some Things Never Change, a Perkins album recorded in 1990 whose tapes were believed lost until they were rediscovered in 2024.