Carl Lee Perkins was an American singer-songwriter who recorded most notably at the Sun Studio, in Memphis, beginning in 1954. Amongst his best-known songs are Blue Suede Shoes, Matchbox and Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby.
Background
Carl Perkins was born on April 9, 1932, in Tiptonville, Tennessee, Tne United States. He was born to sharecroppers Buck and Louise Perkins (misspelled on his birth certificate as "Perkings") and was soon out in the fields picking cotton and living in a shack with his parents, older brother Jay, and his younger brother Clayton. He grew up hearing Southern gospel music sung by white friends in church and by African-American field workers when he worked in the cotton fields. Beginning at the age of six, during spring and autumn, school days would be followed by a few hours of work in the fields. In the summer, workdays were 12 to 14 hours, "from can to can't." Perkins and his brother Jay together would earn 50 cents a day. All his family members worked, so there was enough money for beans and potatoes, tobacco for Perkins's father, and occasionally the luxury of a five-cent bag of hard candy.
Friendships with black people were strongly discouraged but that did not stop Perkins having a black best friend by the name of Charlie, even though they had to catch different buses to go to school and sit separately whenever they had the chance to see a show.
Education
Carl Perkins dropped out of school after eighth grade to help support the family.
Career
Perkins loved the guitar from an early age, but at that time workers would earn just 50 cents a day, and so his father made him one from a cigar box and a broomstick. Although hardly anyone believed in him, Perkins felt that the guitar could be his ticket out of the cotton fields, and when he listened to the radio he could “picture rhinestones, Cadillacs and big houses, and those dreams filled my little soul.”
Shortly afterwards a neighbor in hard times offered to sell the family a beaten up Gene Autry model guitar with spent strings. Perkins’ father bought it for Carl for a couple of dollars [plus a chicken, according to one of Perkins’ interviews], and it was his old cotton-picking colleague, ‘Uncle Westbrook’, who became prominent in his life once again to teach him how to play: "Get down close to it,” the old man said. “You can feel it travel down the strings, come through your head and down to your soul where you live. You can feel it. Let it vibrate."
Perkins’ mother wanted him to play in church but he never earned anything there and he desperately wanted some money to renew his strings, which he literally had to tie back together each time one broke.
Those were tough times, but Perkins never regretted any of it, because he had what he believed was most important: “When I look back I had a mum and a dad and two brothers that loved me,” he said in his interview with Tom Snyder.
In fact, Perkins’ brothers were key in his life in many ways. At around 13 he and his brother Jay, who was two years older, and Clayton, who was two years younger, formed a band and started to play honky-tonk. “People would come to listen to our music that other country bands were doing, but we were doing it in another gear,” he recalled years later.
The brothers first earnt money from customers’ tips playing once a week at the Cotton Boll Tavern on Highway 45, near Jackson, in 1946. As drinks were also part of the deal, it was here that Perkins first got a taste for alcohol that was to take him to the brink of destruction years later. Bar fights also featured regularly and it was not unusual for a night to end with one of the brothers throwing himself into the audience to ‘sort things out’; though Perkins later said that he always preferred to try to calm things by simply cranking the volume up on his guitar.
Perkins taught his older brother chords so that he could play the lead, and encouraged his younger brother to play bass to round off the sound. As the 1940s ended, the Perkins brothers had become an established act in the area.
At this time Perkins penned a song called Let Me Take You to the Movie, Magg, celebrating a girl he met in Lake County, which later helped him get his first recording contract with Sun Records in Memphis. Perkins explains that in 1954 he heard a DJ called Bob Neil on the radio say ‘I’ve got a brand new boy here by the name of Elvis Presley singing Blue Moon of Kentucky’ when he had been playing the same song for at least three years. “In my soul, it was pretty close kin to what I had been struggling with, and I set my sights on Memphis and went down, saw Elvis, and pleaded for an audition.” Movie Magg was recorded shortly afterwards and in February 1955 Perkins heard himself on the radio for the first time.
It was the start of close collaboration and friendship with Presley. “I think God sent him as a messenger, he came with a new type of music and way of moving,” Perkins said. “He didn’t know what he was doing at first: I heard him say he was very nervous and his legs would start shaking and he didn’t want the audience to know, so he’d throw them out - he’s history; he gave America what it needed at the time.”
And Perkins gave Presley what he needed with the song Blue Suede Shoes – but not before Perkins had had a hit with it first. The inspiration came from Perkins watching a boy and girl jitterbug near the stage during one of his shows. They caught his attention because they were dancing so well and, as the song ended, “he said to her in a good style tone ‘don’t step on my suedes!’ and she said ‘Oh, I’m sorry’. Coincidentally Johnny Cash had already suggested to Perkins that Blue Suede Shoes might make a good title for a song, and in that moment something sparked in his mind. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” he said, “I went down the concrete steps and started writing.” The noise he made woke his wife who came down the stairs to complain that he was going to wake the children up.
In fact, Perkins was about to wake the whole world up, as soon his song sold over a million and rocketed to the top of the United States Billboard charts. Presley’s advisers encouraged him to immediately record and release the song himself, but the man from Memphis did not want to spoil his friend’s moment and so he waited until Perkins’ song, which he recorded on a 1955 Les Paul Gold Top, was on the way down the charts before he released his own famous version. Even the B side, Honey Don’t, was later to be covered by the Beatles.
At this moment Perkins star was nearing its peak, and he was scheduled to sing his biggest hit on Perry Como's famous TV programme, and on Ed Sullivan’s show shortly after. However, on his way to Como’s studio, the car he was traveling in was involved in a terrible accident, killing a driver, and leaving Perkins and his brother close to death. He was about to be the first Rockabilly artist ever to appear on network television, but it was not to be. As Perkins lay in the hospital, doubts flooded his brain: “I talked to the Lord and said ‘you gave it to me, are you now going to take it away? Is this it? Am I gonna die? Is my brother gonna die? Am I going back to where I started?”
While Perkins convalesced, Presley became a household name. When Perkins was finally able to record the song on the Perry Como show, it was possible to see on the recording how badly the accident had affected the band. Clayton had not been so injured but his brothers both look gaunt, and Jay, in particular, looks incredibly stiff because he is still wearing a barely disguised neck brace.
"Million Dollar Quartet" is a recording of an impromptu jam session involving Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash made on December 4, 1956, at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee. An article about the session was published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar under the title "Million Dollar Quartet". The recording was first released in Europe in 1981 as The Million Dollar Quartet with 17 tracks. A few years later more tracks were discovered and released as The Complete Million Dollar Session. In 1990, the recordings were released in the United States as Elvis Presley - The Million Dollar Quartet. This session is considered a seminal moment in rock and roll.
In 1958, Carl Perkins left Sun Studios because he was ‘feeling overlooked’ but it was a decision he lived to regret. “I shouldn’t have ever left Sun…” he said in one interview, “I got mixed up in big studios with people who didn’t understand Rockabilly.” Often producers wouldn’t even let him play guitar on his own records and his despair, along with his dependence on the bottle, grew.
However, even though in the dark years, Perkins status always remained high among musicians. In May 1964, although initially reluctant because he feared his star had faded, Perkins successfully toured the United Kingdom with Chuck Berry.
In 1968, Perkins then toured with Johnny Cash; however, it was during this time that he returned to rock bottom. During a show in California, he saw "four or five of me in the mirror" during a four-day drinking binge. Later he fell to his knees on the beach and said "Lord,... I'm gonna throw this bottle. I'm gonna show you that I believe in you.” Cash, who had experienced similar problems, supported him on his quest.
Before Bob Dylan became famous he recorded Perkins’ Rockabilly classic Matchbox, on which Perkins had shone with his Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster. Dylan later went to the studio in New York City where Perkins was rehearsing in 1968 and they played guitar together. In one example of the affection that they had for each other, Dylan had written the song Champaign, Illinois, but didn’t know how to finish it; so Perkins did it for him and Dylan gave it to him for his album, On Top.
In 1981 Perkins recorded Get It with Paul McCartney, which appeared on the album Tug of War, and later the Beatle showed his enormous admiration for the Rockabilly legend on a video documentary about his life. A further highlight at the end of his career was a TV special shot in London with Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Dave Edmunds, and George Harrison. Perkins was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Perkins last big concert in 1997 was for charity, and one of his final great benevolent acts was to establish the Carl Perkins Child Abuse Centre in Tennessee. Perkins died four months later, on January 19, 1998, at the age of 65, at Jackson-Madison County Hospital in Jackson, Tennessee, from throat cancer. He had suffered several minor strokes the previous month. Among the mourners at his funeral at Lambuth University were George Harrison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wynonna Judd, Garth Brooks, Nashville agent Jim Dallas Crouch, Johnny Cash, and June Carter Cash. Perkins was interred at Ridgecrest Cemetery in Jackson.
Perkins's songs were recorded by artists (and friends) as influential as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, and Eric Clapton which further established his place in the history of popular music. Called "the King of Rockabilly", Perkins was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, the Memphis Music Hall of Fame, and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He also received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked Perkins number 69 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
Perkins was honored with the "Lifetime Achievement" award during the Tennessee Music Awards event in 2018 at the University of Memphis Lambuth in Jackson, Tennessee.
Religion was always important to Perkins. The music he heard sung in the fields was complemented by the southern gospel sung by white folk in his local church. “God put me in that situation for a reason and […] that was for me to dig deep in my soul and create my music,” he said.
Views
As a guitarist Perkins used fingerpicking, imitations of the pedal steel guitar, right-handed damping (muffling strings near the bridge with the palm), arpeggios, advantageous use of open strings, single and double string bending (pushing strings across the neck to raise their pitch), chromaticism (using notes outside of the scale), country and blues licks, and tritone and other tonality clashing licks (short phrases that include notes from other keys and move in logical, often symmetric patterns). A rich vocabulary of chords including sixth and thirteenth chords, ninth and add nine chords, and suspensions show up in rhythm parts and solos. Free use of syncopations, chord anticipations (arriving at a chord change before the other players, often by an eighth-note) and crosspicking (repeating a three eighth-note pattern so that an accent falls variously on the upbeat or downbeat) are also in his bag of tricks.
A strong advocate for the prevention of child abuse, Perkins worked with the Jackson Exchange Club to establish the first center for the prevention of child abuse in Tennessee and the fourth in the nation. Proceeds from a concert planned by Perkins were combined with a grant from the National Exchange Club to establish the Prevention of Child Abuse in October 1981. For years its annual Circle of Hope Telethon generated one-quarter of the center's annual operating budget.
Quotations:
"After all those days in the cotton fields, the dreams came true on a gold record on a piece of wood. It's in my den where I can look at it every day. I wear it out lookin' at it."
Personality
Perkins was a quiet, genial, devout man, rarely comfortable with the bad-boy rockabilly image, and bad luck and personal problems hampered his career. But well into his 60's, he was on the road, revitalizing even his most familiar oldies with an unmistakable twang.
Quotes from others about the person
"If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles." - Paul McCartney
"I worked with Carl Perkins on a number of shows. Live shows. He just showed up and played. He just killed. Killed! Man... he was amazing!" - Lesley Gore
Connections
Carl Perkins married Valda Crider on 24 January 1953. Perkins had one daughter, Debbie, and three sons, Stan, Greg, and Steve. Stan, his first-born son, is also a recording artist. In 2010, he joined forces with Jerry Naylor to record a duet tribute, "To Carl: Let it Vibrate". Stan has been inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame.
Perkins' widow, Valda Crider Perkins, died on November 15, 2005, in Jackson.
Carl Perkins was one of Johnny Cash's best friends, the two have become close when they were both on Sun Records' roster, and they even wrote songs for the other perform at the time. In unison, Cash developed his addiction to speed and Perkins developed his to alcohol, and (after a car crash ended Perkins career) Cash took him on as part of his touring band.
Perkins and Johnny Cash gave each other the ideas for two of their biggest songs. Perkins got the inspiration to write his best-known song "Blue Suede Shoes" from Cash, who told Perkins stories of soldiers on leave while Cash was in the military who would start a fight with anyone who got near their blue suede shoes. Cash got the idea for "I Walk the Line" when Perkins commented on all the groupies that they had access to now that they were famous and Cash countered, "Not me, brother, I walk the line". Perkins immediately responded, "Hey, I walk the line...that would be a great title for a song".
