
Carl Perkins
1
-
Year:
1987
-
Inducted by:
Sam Phillips
-
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-
Sam Phillips Inducts Carl Perkins00:01:34
-
"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