Carl Perkins was one of the giants of post-war popular music, and the undisputed King of Rockabilly. Yet, of all the big names from the era of genuine, raw Rock and Roll – roughly 1955-1959 – Perkins is both one of the most influential and the least well-known. There are a number of reasons for this relative obscurity. On the plus side, Perkins was the first of the R&R giants to meld country, bluegrass, rock and roll and rhythm and blues, invent a unique guitar style, write his own songs, and be able to sing the hell out of them. When he heard Elvis’s Blue Moon of Kentucky on radio in 1955, Perkins – already a well-known performer in the Jackson, Tennessee area - said: “There’s a guy in Memphis who understands what I’m trying to do and I’ve got to see him”. When Elvis finished recording the track – a regular part of Perkins’s stage act - he’s alleged to have commented, “That sounds like Carl Perkins”.
Born into crushing, “down a coal-hole for minus a farthing a lifetime”, guts-rumbling-with-hunger poverty in rural, cotton-picking, Gospel Music-drenched Bible Belt Tennessee, Perkins in his early 20s looked and sounded like a 40-year old farm-hand togged up in his cat clothes, hair greased, ready for a spot of alcohol-fueled Saturday night mayhem. His is the pure unadulterated sound of hard-working, hard-drinking, white Southerners joyously grasping the opportunity to cut loose once a week and let off steam, big time: there’s girls involved, sure, but essentially it’s about getting rid of accumulated frustration through dancing, drinking, and fighting.
And that’s what makes his records so visceral, so hard-edged: he’s smiling, but you know he’s about to turn mean. Elvis looked like he could just about handle himself in a fight, but we always knew the tough-guy persona was an act: Perkins looked as if he packed a knife and regularly woke up in jail with a sore face and blood on his shirt. You could see Elvis’s blue-suede shoes emerging from a pink Cadillac, but you knew Perkins’s would smell of cow-shit as he kicked open the door of his Pappy’s dilapidated ’38 Ford pick-up truck.
Elvis had energy: Perkins had seething, high-octane aggression.
The lyrics bear this out. The A side of his biggest hit finds him warning people to keep off his blue suede shoes: the title of the B-side says it all – "Honey Don’t". In "That’s Right", when he discovers that his girlfriend has been two-timing him, he promises, “when I find the cat that’s getting my sugar/it’s gonna be rough when I catches that booger”. But compared to these, "Dixie Fried" is genuinely X-rated:
Well, Dan got happy and he started to rave
He jerked out his razor but he won’t shave
And all the cats knew to jump and hop
Cause he was born and raised in a butcher’s shop
We’re definitely not pitching woo at the High School Prom here. If Perkins had set out to scare the teenagers away, he couldn’t have done a better job: it’s hard to imagine any pimply youngster – male or female - feeling much kinship for this boozed-up farm-hand.
“So how was you date, honey?” “Okay, Mom, I guess.” “Why didn’t Carl bring you home?” “Oh, he’s in jail. He drank a quart of gut-rot whiskey, ripped up some guy’s face with an open razor, and it took six cops to arrest him.” “Hmm, sounds like fun, sweetie!”
Apart from his looks, his slightly psychotic lyrics, and the relentless juke-joint roughness of his music, there was also some truly appalling luck to contend with along the way. Perkins’s first big hit, "Blue Suede Shoes", was on its way to No.2 on the national charts, and he was travelling to the Perry Como Show to perform it, when a band member crashed the band’s car into the back of a truck and they ended up in a ditch (the truck driver died). Perkins was badly injured. By the time he was back recording and performing, it was basically all over – Elvis had performed Blue Suede Shoes on three separate TV shows, Heartbreak Hotel had changed music forever, and Perkins’s time in the sun was basically over.
Ultimately, his greatness resides in the grooves of seven Sun singles released between 1955 and the end of 1957, plus a classic track unreleased until the 1970s – Put Your Cat Clothes On – and an album track (Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby) released on an album in 1958, by which time Perkins had left Sun for Columbia Records.
The first sign of genius was Gone, Gone, Gone, the B-side of his first Sun single, released in September 1955. (Perkins was a brilliant country singer, and that’s how Sam Phillips was trying to promote him in those early days). It’s all there – slapback base, huge beat, real bite, great guitar and sensitive lyrics, e.g. “I know my baby, she’s so round and fat”.
Apart from recommending the splendid double-A sided single featuring "Boppin’ the Blues" and "All Mama’s Children", I’d point readers at possibly Perkins’s greatest track - his version of the old Blues standard, "Matchbox". which sees his guitar-playing reach new heights of aggression, and is simply magnificent.
Some great singles followed, but Perkins was never to reach such heights again. The Beatles recorded versions of three of his classics after meeting the Great Man on a tour of England in 1964, and asking his permission. He toured with Johnny Cash for ten years, and wrote hits for several country stars. The 1980s saw the release of more albums and, in 1985 a number of rock stars (including George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Dave Edmunds) joined him on a special tribute programme – Carl Perkins: A Rockabilly Session – filmed for British TV (it’s inevitably Europe that cherishes and honours old American rockers and bluesmen). Another album and any number of inductions into any number of Halls of Fame followed in the 1990s – whatever he lacked in terms of commercial success in his later years, Perkins made up for in the recognition of his greatness by the music industry: fellow musicians and rock and roll fans had always seen him as a Colossus.
Carl Perkins died of throat cancer in 1998, at the age of 65, still the King of Rockabilly, and, by all accounts, a very nice chap.
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