Carl Perkins
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Year:
1987
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Inducted by:
Sam Phillips
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Category:
Performers
Introduction
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.
Sam Phillips Inducts Carl Perkins
Sam Phillips Inducts Carl Perkins at the 1987 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony-
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Sam Phillips Inducts Carl Perkins00:01:34 -
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"Blue Suede Shoes"00:02:35
Hall of Fame Essay
1987
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.
Blue Suede Shoes was a rockabilly masterpiece
