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Carl Perkins

CARL PERKINS

YEAR

1987

INDUCTED BY

Sam Phillips

CATEGORY

Performers

The widely influential pioneer of rockabilly.

Carl Perkins transformed his humble sharecropper roots into jumping, jiving rockabilly hits. His song “Blue Suede Shoes” launched a label and a movement.

Carl Perkins

Carl Perkins

HALL OF FAME
ESSAY

By Michael Hill

In 1954, Carl Perkins, a country and western singer by trade, was gigging around and doing a local radio show in Jackson, Tennessee, when he heard Elvis Presley’s version of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

Here, for the first time, the major strains in Southern music – hillbilly boogie, country and western, rhythm and blues — came together.

Perkins had been moving in that direction himself, so he headed straight to where Presley was working, Sun Records, in Memphis, and offered his services to owner-producer Sam Phillips.

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Class of 1987
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