Carl Perkins

Genres:	Country & Bluegrass • Holiday & Seasonal • Music Videos & Concerts • Musicals & The Arts • Pop / Rock • Television
Descriptive "tags":	rockabilly • rock and roll • 50s • rock n roll • country
Decades Active:	1950s • 1960s • 1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s
Links online:	BBC Music • IMDb • Wikipedia

Biography

Carl Lee Perkins, 9 April 1932, Ridgely, Tennessee, USA (his birth certificate misspelled the last name as Perkings), d. 19 January 1998, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Carl Perkins was one of the most renowned rockabilly artists recording for Sun Records in the 50s and the author of the classic song ‘Blue Suede Shoes’. As a guitarist, he influenced many of the next generation of rock ‘n’ rollers, most prominently, George Harrison and Dave Edmunds. His parents, Fonie ‘Buck’ and Louise Brantley Perkins, were sharecroppers during the Depression and the family was thus very poor. As a child Perkins listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, exposing him to C&W (or hillbilly) music, and he listened to the blues being sung by a black sharecropper named John Westbrook across the field from where he worked. After World War II the Perkins family relocated to Bemis, Tennessee, where he and his brothers picked cotton; by that time his father...

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