Chart position: #1 Country, #2 R&B, #2 Pop
Category: Rockabilly
Writer: Carl Perkins
Label and number: Sun Records 234, Memphis, Tennessee
Flipside: "Honey Don't"
When and where recorded: Probably December 18, 1955, in Memphis
When released: January 1, 1956
Why Important: It was the first rockabilly hit, and the first record
to chart near the top of Billboard's pop, country and R&B charts. It also
established Sun Records as the headquarters of rockabilly, thus attracting Jerry
Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and a host of other, less successful talent.
Influenced by: Hank Williams, guitarists "Butterball" Page and Arthur
Smith and bluesman John Westbrook
Influenced: Dozens of rockabilly songs celebrating flamboyant teenage
clothing styles, such as Gene Vincent's "Red Bluejeans and a Ponytail" (1956)
and Perkins's own "Pink Pedal-Pushers" (1958), not to mention Dodie Stevens's
pop hit, "Pink Shoe Laces" (#3 Pop, 19S9). His records also impressed Ricky
Nelson, who referred to Perkins as his idol, and Beatle George Harrison
Important cover versions: Elvis Presley (#20 Pop), Boyd Bennett (#63
Pop), Pee Wee King, Lawrence Welk
Important remakes: Johnny Rivers (#38 Pop, 1973), John Lennon (1975),
the Toy Dolls (1983), Con Hunley (#49 C&W, 1986)
The story behind the record: In seventeenth-century France, Swedish gloves
made of undressed kid leather became quite the rage. The French called them
gants de suede-gloves of Sweden-and the last part of the name stuck
to the soft-napped surface. By the early 1950s shoes made of suede leather,
or suede cloth (a fabric that looked like suede) became popular among sharply
dressed American blacks. In 1951 alto saxophonist Charlie Parker recorded a
tribute to "My Little Suede Shoes" for Mercury Records. Within a couple of years,
young white hep cats around Memphis were hitting the black clothing shops on
Beale Street and dressing up in pink and black clothes favored by pimps and
dandies. One item that became de rigueur for the well-dressed cool cat was suede
shoes, dyed in various colors.
Carl Perkins was playing at a Jackson, Tennessee, honky-tonk when he observed a dancer in the crowd who paid more attention to keeping his new shoes from getting scuffed than he did to the pretty girl he was dancing with. The episode reminded Carl of something his fellow Sun artist, Johnny Cash, had told him recently at another show they'd done together. Cash was laughing about a black guy he had known in the air force who jokingly warned people not to step on his spit-shined government-issue footwear, which he called his blue suede shoes. Several nights later Perkins awoke with the two incidents stomping and kicking around in his head. "Suedes were getting to be hot footwear down around there," he remembered later. "It was about three o'clock in the morning, and I'm laying there thinkin' about this boy and how much he loved his shoes. But I didn't know how to start it. Then it came to me, the old nursery rhyme, 'One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.' " He went downstairs, grabbed his guitar and started writing with a pencil on a potato sack, and within fifteen minutes he'd written "Blue Swaed Shoes" (sic).
"Well you can knock me down, step in my face, slander my name all over the place, do anything that you wanna do, but uh-uh baby, lay offa my shoes." "My wife called downstairs," Perkins told writer Gary Theroux, "and said, 'Carl, you're playing too loud, you're going to wake the kids up. But whose song is that?' I said, 'It's ours.' And she said, 'Well, that's a hit song.'"
Carl Lee Perkins was born on April 9,1932, near the banks of the Mississippi in the northwest corner of Tennessee. Though several small towns have been credited as his birthplace, his birth certificate lists his sharecropper father's residence as "Route 1, Ridgely." "My first guitar was a thing my dad made for me when I was about four or five. It was a cigar box with a broom handle, but I loved that thing."
Perkins's life and music were influenced by the "Grand Ole Opry," which he and his father listened to on a battery-powered radio (the family didn't have electricity), and by a black sharecropper who lived nearby. The "Opry" provided him with two guitar heroes: "Butterball" Page, who played single-string leads in Ernest Tubb's band, and Arthur Smith, whose "Guitar Boogie" in 1948 [see #12] established a new standard for "git-fiddle" pickin'. The program also introduced him to singer-songwriter Hank Williams, whom he would later emulate on his earliest records. But the man who made the biggest impression on young Carl was a bluesman, Uncle John Westbrook, who lived just across the field from him.
"He used to sit out on the front porch at night with a gallon bucket full of coal oil rags that he'd burn to keep the mosquitoes off him, and I'd ask my daddy if I could go to Uncle John's and hear him pick some," Perkins told guitarist Lenny Kaye in Guitar World magazine. "It was his inspiration that made me know what it was I wanted to do for the rest of my life . . . I could never get away from what was buried in my mind of the sound he made on that simple little guitar."
It was this experience of mixing blues and country music that put him in company with country's two greatest exponents, Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, who also had each learned the blues early in his life, at the knee of an older black man. And despite the strict color line between whites and blacks in the South, Carl's economic hardships in a sharecropper household were not that different from what his black neighbors endured.
Backed by his brothers Jay and Clayton on guitar and bass, and W. S. Holland on drums, Carl began recording for Sun Records producer Sam Phillips in late 1954. His first two records, "Turn Around" and "Let the Jukebox Keep on Playing," were hillbilly performances solidly in the Hank Williams vein, but one of the flip sides, "Gone Gone Gone," a rockabilly number, hinted at Perkins's blues pedigree. "That's what rockabilly music is," he said. "A country man's song with a black man's rhythm."
A day or two after he wrote "Blue Suede Shoes," Carl Perkins called Sam Phillips on a neighbor's phone and sang the song to him. "He said, 'When can you come down to record it?' " Perkins and his band were there two days later, and he brought along his brand new Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster electric guitar, a present he'd made to himself as a symbol of his growing success.
Sun's session details are sometimes sketchy, and discographers disagree what songs were recorded when, but we do know that "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Honey Don't" were recorded together before December 19probably the day before. Two other songs, "Sure to Fall" and "Tennessee," were recorded either the same day or the day before. In any event, the musicians gathered around a single microphone and recorded "Blue Suede Shoes" a month after Sun's most popular artist, Elvis Presley, departed for RCA Victor Records. With Elvis gone, Sam Phillips decided to let Perkins record in the full rockabilly style. He put at least three takes of "Blue Suede Shoes" on tape, each one gradually moving the performance from hillbilly bop to rockabilly. "Go, boy, go" on take one became "go, cat, go" by take three, and "drink my corn" evolved into "drink my liquor."
On the first day of 1956, Phillips set the tenor of the year's music when he released "Blue Suede Shoes," backed by "Honey Don't," also a rockabilly number, instead of one of the two slower country songs they'd recorded. Traditionally, up-tempo songs were coupled with ballads, so Phillips was clearly banking on either side to supply the growing demand for rockabilly. Perkins soon accomplished what Elvis had failed to do during his eighteen months at Sun Records: he had a hit record. "Blue Suede Shoes" entered Billboard's national country chart six weeks later, in mid-February. (Ultimately the record reached number one, stayed there for three weeks, and lingered on the country chart for nearly half a year.) "Blue Suede Shoes" also entered both the pop and R&B charts three weeks later, on March 10, where its success was most remarkable. Country music did not commonly visit the so-called race market, so black listeners obviously heard the blues in Carl's performance and could relate to the down-home materialism of a poor boy who values his spiffy new shoes above all else. "Blue Suede Shoes" stayed at number two on the R&B chart for four weeks. As for the pop market, buyers had already begun to respond to R&B-flavored music because of Little Richard and Chuck Berry. "Blue Suede Shoes" tottered at number two for four weeks, and the only thing keeping it from cresting the peak of American pop music was Elvis's first hit, "Heartbreak Hotel," which booked into the number one slot from April to June.
Still, "Blue Suede Shoes" has been acknowledged as the first true rock 'n' roll smash because it kicked up dust in all markets. Occasionally an R&B or country record strayed onto the pop charts, and big pop songs often sloshed over into one of the specialized charts, but Carl Perkins's little paean to fancy footwear was the first to capture them all (followed closely by "Heartbreak Hotel," which broke faster than "Blue Suede Shoes" in the pop field but lagged behind it on the country and R&B charts). A new genre of American music was at hand.
Elvis recorded "Blue Suede Shoes" in late January 1956, but he reportedly asked RCA to hold it back because he didn't want to take the hit away from either Perkins or his old friend Sam Phillips, a generous gesture that Carl has always appreciated, especially since Elvis sang the song three times on national television-twice on the Dorsey Brothers' "Stage Show" in January and February and again on his famous April 3 "Milton Berle Show" appearance. (Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes," included on his first 45 ep and lp and afterward released as a single, backed with "Tutti Frutti," reached number twenty in May.) In all, "Blue Suede Shoes" was covered early that year by a dozen artists, from Western swing's Pee Wee King to R&B saxman Sam "the Man" Taylor to schmaltzmeister Lawrence Welk.
In the years since, "Blue Suede Shoes" has been recorded by everyone from John Lennon to British punksters the Toy Dolls. Johnny Rivers walked them back into the Top 40 in 1973, and Con Hunley had a small country hit in 1986. But Perkins's original version remains the standard, and many critics call it one of the signature recordings of the '50s. No other record captures the optimistic postwar tastes of America's newly enfranchised working class, whose lack of sartorial sophistication spawned thousands of outlandish fads and fetishes like shoes made from dyed-blue suede.
Perkins cut several dozen outstanding records after "Shoes," but he never returned to the pop charts. A serious auto accident in 1956 halted his momentum, but more significantly, Perkins was too old and too much of a hillbilly artist to ever cross over into the teen market. As Sam Phillips put it: "I saw Carl Perkins as one of the great plowhorses of the world. There was no way Carl could hide that pure country in him. "
He would have to settle for having a momentous effect on two other teen idols. Ricky Nelson, who included two Carl Perkins songs on his first album, once said that Carl Perkins inspired him to become a rock 'n' roller. And George Harrison learned guitar listening to Carl's records. When Perkins toured Great Britain in 1964, the Beatles invited him to a recording session, where they cut three of his songs-"Honey Don't," "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" and his adaptation of an old Blind Lemon Jefferson blues called "Matchbox."
Over the years Carl Perkins has sung and picked "Blue Suede Shoes" well over a hundred thousand times, and it sometimes wears on him. "But then," he said, "I just think back what my life might've been like without 'Blue Suede Shoes' and I'm happy to do it again!" (Carl's performance of "Blue Suede Shoes" on Perry Como's TV show in 1956 is available on videotape.)
"The stuff when I was coming up, Carl Perkins's 'Blue Suede Shoes,' we'd call that rock 'n' roll."-Eugene Pitt, the Jive Five
"For me, 'Blue Suede Shoes' opened everything up. You never get tired of it no matter how many times you hear it. Rock 'n' roll will never die because songs like 'Blue Suede Shoes' will never die."-Bruce Springsteen