Greetings From the Land of Blue Suede Shoes

A decade ago, Shawn Pitts joined a team doing a “cultural-asset inventory” of McNairy County, Tennessee. Along the way, he discovered unheard recordings made by West Tennessee’s favorite son, the rockabilly great Carl Perkins, made years before he started cutting hits at Sun Records in Memphis. They reveal a young man melding hillbilly music and African American music while Elvis was still a schoolboy. In October, they were released to the world.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison idolized the man, and the Beatles covered at least a half dozen of his songs. Harrison later went out of his way to attend Carl’s 1998 funeral in Jackson. McCartney observed, “If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles.” Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix, among dozens of other legendary figures, cited Carl as an influence. Toupee aside, I began to think I might have misjudged the man. It’s one thing to shrug off your father’s taste in music, but quite another to turn a deaf ear to the rock-and-roll pantheon.

I could almost hear my dad saying, “Who’s the cool one now, sonny boy?” 

In young adulthood I acknowledged the error of my ways and repented in sackcloth and blue suedes. A begrudging respect for Carl Perkins had grown into something more like pride and affection: pride a country boy from my neck of the woods had changed the course of popular music by just being who he was; sincere affection for his music, and by extension, the man who created it. If you seek an authentic Southern musical voice, you can’t do much better than Carl Perkins. 

Something as complex and emotionally freighted as a dispute about cultural ownership is never fully resolved. Elvis Presley devotees would never willingly see the “king of rock-and-roll” deposed from his throne. And yet, those who advocate for origin stories weighted more heavily toward African American artists like Fats Domino or Chuck Berry have strong claims. Interrogating stale and simplistic narratives is vital to improved understanding, and nuanced questions are almost always more valuable than final answers. If we can agree rock-and-roll grows organically from a Southern seedbed fertile with both traditions, Stanton Littlejohn and Carl Perkins complicate matters in some significant ways. That can only be a good thing.

A typical weekend jam session at the Latta Ford Motor Company in Selmer, Tennessee circa 1949. Stanton Littlejohn is the fiddler on stage to the far left. Carl Perkins is the young guitarist seen standing on the far right [photo courtesy of the Latta family].

I am not the first to observe that Carl never received his due credit as a musical innovator and guitarist, despite the praise of various musical luminaries. But Carl’s rockabilly anthem, “Blue Suede Shoes,” was the first single to top the country, pop and R&B charts simultaneously. It was the “Old Town Road” of its day, engendering just as much — if not more — controversy for blurring arbitrary racial lines created for ruthless commercial purposes by the music industry establishment. Sound familiar? 

“Blue Suede Shoes” was foremost a great tune, rightly recognized as one of the most influential recordings of the 20th century by everyone from the music press to the Grammy organizers to the Library of Congress. It was also a cultural game-changer that challenged long-standing institutional norms in the music business and sent shock waves through larger society. Eminent Memphis music historian and journalist Stanley Booth went as far as suggesting that African-American embrace of “Blue Suede Shoes” represented a grass-roots acknowledgment of a shared heritage between poor black and white Southerners, a gesture of forgiveness and redemption. 

Groundbreaking as it was, “Blue Suede Shoes” has little to do with my personal esteem for Carl Perkins. The raw energy in his Sun Records singles like “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t,” and “Dixie Fried” won me over. The pain and longing in a honky-tonk weeper like “Turn Around” clearly spelled out Carl’s genius. I loved Carl Perkins for his bona fide Tennessee twang and the boldness to play blues- and R&B-inflected tunes to white honky-tonk audiences — and then dare them not to dance.

When I finally surrendered, my conversion was complete. I’m not ashamed to say I own a pair of blue suede shoes. I would advise you to stay off of them. 

So, now, think what it might be like for a west Tennessee boy like me to learn that the first documented recordings of Carl Perkins’ storied career were not cut at Sun, as we have always believed. Imagine someone handed you a couple of dusty acetate discs from the early 1950s with Carl Perkins’ name scrawled across the labels. Imagine those discs were actually what they appeared to be — and that their contents challenged long-accepted narratives about the very origins of rock-and-roll. What if they provided incontrovertible evidence Carl Perkins was making full-throttle rockabilly music while Elvis Presley was still trying to make time with the girls at Humes High School? Wouldn’t that be something?       

Well, that’s my story.

“Check your email. I’m going to send over some of these digital transfers in a few minutes,” Martin said. “Give them a listen, and let me know what you think.” 

Martin Fisher, the lead audio engineer — ”sound wizard,” I call him — at the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University called and left me a message in the middle of a weekday morning. 

Martin rarely calls me, so his voicemail piqued my curiosity. 

“Sit down before you listen to them,” he finished in his droll way. I thought I detected a hint of excitement in his voice. 

If I was curious before, I was practically bursting to hear the freshly digitized audio files after that. I slogged through the rest of the morning’s work anxious to get to my inbox. 

2 years earlier — and 55 years after Carl Perkins first recorded at the legendary Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee — I found myself snooping around in the cultural attics and basements (figuratively and literally) of rural west Tennessee. I had committed to complete a “cultural-asset inventory” for the innovative young arts agency known as Arts in McNairy, in southwest Tennessee. We were interested in discovering the region’s contemporary and historic forms of creative expression, as well as learning more about local cultural heritage. McNairy County was a goldmine. I found myself in the middle of old-time music jams and quilting bees. I wound up in the workshops of fourth- and fifth-generation broom makers and other traditional artisans, and yes, more than a few dusty attics and dank basements. 

I had a blast. 

Besides the traditional artists and musicians I encountered, a couple of historical narratives kept emerging in my interviews.

“You know,” local contacts would say, “Stanton Littlejohn recorded Carl Perkins before he was a big star.” 

I must have replied “Stanton who?” more than once before I finally wrote the name down. Running down every tidbit of local lore that bubbles to the surface in such endeavors is a fool’s errand. It’s impossible to adequately explore every lead, and if there is one thing I’ve learned it’s this: The more outlandish the tale, the more likely it is to be a blind alley. 

“Hell yeah,” one enthusiastic old-timer told me, “Old Carl wrote that song ‘Blues Suede Shoes’ at Eastview, Tennessee, and recorded it on the spot. No kidding, man.” 

Despite my skepticism, Carl Perkins, Stanton Littlejohn and Eastview, Tennessee, just wouldn’t go away. Interviewees spoke openly and fondly about local folk and foodways. Others teared up reminiscing about their family’s fading handcraft and music traditions. Some were eyewitness to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash performances in local auditoriums when those men were just ambitious young artists with one Sun single under their belts. The antics of Dewey Phillips, the McNairy County boy who became a fearless deejay — the man who introduced white Southerners to R&B and Memphis rock-and-roll in its infancy — were a recurrent theme. 

But nearly every music-savvy local I asked had some version of the Carl Perkins and Stanton Littlejohn story.

Early photo of the Stanton and Minnie Bell Littlejohn home in Eastview, Tennessee, where Carl Perkins made his first documented recordings. At the time the photo was made, Stanton’s relatives, George and Esther Littlejohn, actually owned the home, which explains the handwritten caption [photo courtesy of Carolyn Bowman].

In the late 1940s and early 50s, Carl was known to haunt the honky-tonks scattered along Highway 45 south of Jackson, as well as the many community music jams and dances in the region. Interviews with Carl’s musical contemporaries placed him picking guitar with McNairy County friends on Jackson radio gigs and at organized jam sessions in Bethel Springs and Selmer, just a few miles north of Stanton Littlejohn’s makeshift studio at Eastview. Many of these same musicians recorded with Littlejohn, who had picked up a console around 1947 that allowed him to one-off acetate discs in the front parlor of his modest home near the Tennessee/Mississippi line. He was good at it. Bands and musicians sought him out almost immediately to cut demo material, or just to see what they sounded like on a record. The Littlejohn home was frequently the site of dances and musical house parties, and by all accounts Stanton relished the role of amateur audio engineer, using his recording capabilities to attract an astounding variety of musical acts to his home. During his most prolific period, between 1949 and 1954, he captured dozens of bands and solo acts on disc and left behind a trove of documentation that reflected the musical styles and tastes of postwar Southerners. 

So, was it possible that Perkins had found his way to Eastview? Certainly. 

Was it likely? I was inclined to say no.

Until I visited Marjorie Richard. 

Even when I held the discs in my hand, I would not allow myself the luxury of believing. Marjorie Richard, Littlejohn’s daughter, had preserved an incredible archive of her father’s acetates. Our preservation team rounded up many other discs from the families of musicians who recorded with him. I saw many familiar names on the labels: locally revered old-time fiddlers; bluegrass pickers; beloved regional radio personalities; popular gospel groups; and just as many aspiring unknowns. All of that was expected, and I would have been deeply gratified had we just documented and preserved that rare and precious slice of local music from such a pivotal moment in American history. 

But there was no denying that two of Marjorie’s discs were emblazoned with Carl Perkins’s name in Stanton Littlejohn’s familiar handwriting. What’s more, Marjorie, who was just a schoolgirl at the time, was an eyewitness to at least one of Perkins’s recording sessions. She had aided and abetted our preservation efforts in every conceivable way. She had been a reliable and truthful informant throughout. But still, my gut told me some things are just too good to be true. I had every reason to believe Marjorie, but I still had my doubts.

Until I heard the audio transfers.

The original Littlejohn acetates of Carl Perkins. Left: “Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”/”Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Right: “There’s Been a Change in Me”/”Devil’s Dream” [photos courtesy of the Center for Popular Music, Middle Tennessee State University]. 

I opened Martin’s email, drug the unnamed files onto my desktop and double-clicked the first one. A spirited electric guitar pickup — 2,3,4 — set the tempo into the opening lyric: “We got the news, everybody’s rockin’ tonight! Gonna hold my baby just as tight as I can, ’cause tonight she’ll know I’m a mighty man!” Roughly 40 seconds in, there was a withering guitar solo that left Carl Perkins’s stamp on the recording as indelibly as the youthful vocals. When my heart rate and respiration finally normalized, and I was again capable of normal cognition, it was startlingly clear to me that Stanton Littlejohn had indeed recorded Carl Perkins performing the R&B and rockabilly standard “Good Rockin’ Tonight” perhaps as many as two or three years before Elvis Presley made it a hit single for Sun Records. 

I was grateful for Martin’s advice to listen from a seated position. Recumbent with an oxygen mask might have been better still. Because there was more. 

“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” the widely known paean to New Orleans party culture, was the B-side of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” A transfer from a separate disc captured Carl Perkins doing Eddy Arnold’s country classic, “There’s Been a Change in Me,” with a bluegrass/hillbilly band called the Southern Playboys. The flip side of that gem was the old-time instrumental “Devil’s Dream,” presumably featuring the same lineup.

As the final tune faded, I sat there staring at four complete Carl Perkins tracks, expertly digitized and enhanced, preserved in MP3 files on my desktop — the first documented recordings of Perkins’ illustrious career. The earliest had been recorded in 1951, when Carl was just 19 years old. Martin Fisher and I were the first people, outside of the Littlejohn family, to hear those tracks in almost six decades. 

“You owe Marjorie Richard an apology,” I told myself.

What does it all mean? Tough question. For starters, these recordings further dispel the myth that Elvis Presley was the single architect of rock-and-roll. They are also irrefutable evidence Carl Perkins had quite naturally assimilated the sounds of his native west Tennessee — blues, R&B, gospel, bluegrass, and country — into his own music well before he’d even heard of Sam Phillips or Sun Records. Of course, nobody talks about the origins of rock-and-roll without addressing Presley. But Perkins had a different story, which he told with remarkable consistency throughout his life. 

“Rockabilly music was very popular and had been for a long time in the cotton belt area of west Tennessee, east Arkansas and north Mississippi,” he said in one interview. “Nobody was copying Elvis. … It’s just that that type of music was popular in the area. … [Elvis] started the whole thing because he recorded it first.” 

Perkins was right. Elvis did record it first for a record label. But if doubts remain about the origins of rockabilly, Stanton Littlejohn’s recordings put them to bed once and for all. 

Perkins’s unaffected vocal delivery of the country ballad, “There’s Been a Change in Me,” is a tour de force of honky-tonk seediness that bears little resemblance to Eddy Arnold’s smooth, country crooning on the original version. On first blush, Perkins’s rendition may appear to support narratives that depict him as a country artist who took a stab at rock-and-roll in the wake of Elvis Presley’s meteoric rise to fame. But it’s harder to frame Perkins’s other vocal performances during the Littlejohn sessions in that light. Both are straight-up rockabilly numbers comparable to some of his best Sun singles with one notable exception: These are R&B covers, songs written by African American artists, rather than original Perkins material. 

Now, “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” written by Roy Brown, and “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee,” by Granville Henry “Sticks” McGhee, are often associated with the rockabilly artists (most notably Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis) who popularized them with white audiences. But when Perkins recorded them for Littlejohn, they were relatively recent hits for African-American R&B and jump-blues artists. McGhee first recorded “Wine” in 1947 but a 1949 re-recording for Atlantic shot to No. 2 on Billboard. Brown’s “Good Rockin’” was nothing short of an R&B sensation. Wynonie Harris’ version of the song hogged the No. 1 spot on the charts for six months in 1947, and Brown’s original single made a rare second appearance on the charts in 1949. Both songs have been heralded as portents of the rock-and-roll revolution.

In other words, Perkins evinced an early and independent penchant for merging R&B and hillbilly music into what would later be known as rockabilly. The Littlejohn session that produced these two sides took place perhaps two or three full years prior to rock-and-roll’s “big bang” moment at Sun Records in July 1954. 

Due to his considerable skills as a songwriter, a penchant for recording his own material, and the retention of deep country strains in his music, Perkins has been less vulnerable to claims of cultural appropriation than many of his peers. These two Littlejohn tracks reawaken interest in that subject, not necessarily as it relates to Perkins personally, but in the question of just how much white Southern artists were adapting black-identified music into their own repertoires before the music industry turned that phenomenon into a commercial feeding frenzy.

Beyond these Perkins recordings, the rest of the Littlejohn archive holds considerable evidence that regionally influential old-time fiddlers and string bands were adapting blues and jug band tunes for predominantly white audiences through the first half of the 20th century, even as country greats like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and even Bill Monroe, showed strong elements of African-American influence in their music on the national stage. The recent Ken Burns documentary, “Country Music,” highlights this uniquely Southern cross-pollination of black and white musical cultures, but there has never been a shortage of scholarship on the subject. 

Truthfully, the cross-pollination was always there.

But superficial and unimaginative narratives have dominated the popular discourse about the development of rock-and-roll. The musical foundations on which the postwar generation would build were well laid, and it is no secret that the nascent rockabilly crew openly admired their African American contemporaries and performed blues and R&B tunes with wild, hillbilly abandon. But where their predecessors had borrowed musical phrasing, or a scrap of melody from black artists, the rockabillies — Perkins among the earliest — manifest a more assimilative tendency, to adapt an entire blues or R&B composition in their own countrified style. Critics who grappled with a label for Presley when he first burst onto the national scene finally came up with, “The Hillbilly Cat.” Hillbilly is self-explanatory, but “Cat” is a subtle reference to African-American jazz and blues culture. For what it’s worth, I still like that tag. 

Most of the white artists on Sun Records, including Perkins and Presley, were quick to credit an early exposure to blues and gospel with the development of their own sound. Presley grew up hearing the glorious black gospel of Shake Rag, the African American community bordering his white, working class neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi. His breakout single, “That’s Alright,” was a cover of a Delta blues tune by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Perkins, one of the strongest musicians and songwriters of the Sun cohort, always acknowledged an affinity for the blues and R&B he heard on regional radio, but he would wax lyrical about the personal touch of “Uncle John” Westbrook, a black sharecropper who patiently guided him through his first halting attempts to make music on an old flattop guitar. It’s evident that the old maxim, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, comes pretty close to describing the mindset of these white artists. Whether that amounts to cultural plunder largely depends on one’s perspective. 

Some have pointed out that there is scant evidence African Americans objected to their music crossing over into the white mainstream at the time, but that may ignore the fact that loud protestations by black artists were unlikely to be met with applause in the Jim Crow South where all this activity was taking place. And, of course, the full commercial potential of such musical blending was not immediately or equally apparent to everyone. It’s understandable if the clarity of hindsight caused some black artists to cast a jaundiced eye on the music business once obscene profits from their songs started rolling into record company vaults and landing in the pockets of white recording artists. All this is to say nothing of the dozens of black artists like Fats Domino, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ike Turner, and Junior Parker, who were already playing music eerily similar to what we call rock-and-roll, some of them as early as the 1940s. 

To be fair, when Carl Perkins covered two R&B tunes at a makeshift recording studio in rural west Tennessee — and even, to a degree, when Presley cut “That’s Alright” at Sun — cultural looting and extravagant revenues were not even imaginable to these unsophisticated country boys. It was clearly a genuine love for the music that drew them to those tunes and, in any event, crossing perceived cultural boundaries in the mid-1950s was more likely to elicit criticism than praise. Before its historic release, Scotty Moore, Presley’s guitarist, warned Sam Phillips if he put “That’s Alright” out as a single they might “get run out of town.” Moore didn’t have to have a prophetic revelation to realize that was a real possibility. 

It’s worth noting here that the earlier recordings of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” (as well as most of the R&B of that period) were marketed to black record buyers and the Sun singles to a young, white audience. Even so, both showed significant crossover appeal well before “Blue Suede Shoes” finally broke the mold. That is to say, America’s postwar youth, white and black, were already beginning to ignore artificial cultural constructs meant to keep them apart. Of course, that trend would accelerate rapidly as the 1950s and ’60s wore on. Another of rock-and-roll’s inventors, Chuck Berry, sagely observed that however successful segregationists’ efforts might have been, they utterly failed when it came to jukeboxes and radio programming — the crazy kids just couldn’t be trusted to self-segregate. A black R&B artist who was conversely criticized for sounding too country, Berry maintained the mishmash of black and white Southern musical traditions, which provided the soundtrack for the seismic cultural shifts of the 1950s, was instrumental in “bringing down the [race] barriers.” Who could disagree?

One prominent origin story goes like this: Sun founder Sam Phillips shrewdly sought out white artists to perform African American styles and tunes for release on his innovative record label, thereby giving birth to a whole new genre of American music. Indeed, Phillips is often quoted as saying, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a million dollars.” But that is now widely regarded as a revisionist account, and Phillips himself disavowed it in his later years. If he did say such a thing, it would be hard to imagine a more succinct description of crass cultural appropriation. Whether he uttered those exact words or not, Phillips projected similar attitudes, and certainly claimed credit for coaxing a bluesy hillbilly sound out of Carl Perkins and other Sun artists. Still, no sensible music historian would deny Phillips’s sonic genius, his uncanny ear for musical talent (black and white), or his pivotal role in the evolution of popular music. 

But the Littlejohn recordings reveal a more organic, and perhaps more satisfying, confluence of cultures taking place right under Phillips’s nose, quite apart from his Sun studio mojo. Littlejohn unquestionably demonstrates Carl Perkins, and presumably the other white artists who recorded at Sun, did not have to be goaded into anything. They showed up at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis with an electrifying, fully formed sound that emerged from decades of cultural cross-pollination on the back porches of the rural South.

The world has never been the same since.

Richard Weize is another legend in the music business. What started, by his own admission, as a crazed obsession with American roots music ultimately grew into the world’s preeminent label for reissuing early country, blues, R&B, folk and rockabilly. The founder and driving force behind the 40-year-old German label Bear Family Records, Weize built his company’s reputation by sparing no expense in repackaging and reissuing music that others might have relegated to the dustbin of history. Bear Family’s lavish box sets, with their exhaustively researched liner notes and slick packaging, set the standard for such projects. Over the decades, Bear Family’s releases became lifelines of sorts for serious record collectors, armchair ethnomusicologists, and others looking to engage more deeply with historically and culturally significant music. 

Though he is now in semi-retirement, Weize’s impeccable taste, fierce independence, and healthy disregard for the conventional industry norms have earned him the undying respect of a grateful roots music fandom. He still works on a handful of projects for Bear and their subsidiary imprints, but only when something stirs his spirit. 

The first documented recordings of Carl Perkins’s career stirred his spirit. 

On a drizzly February afternoon in 2018, I was on my couch committed to nothing more ambitious than light reading and napping when I learned that the Richard Weize was looking for me, in another email from the Center for Popular Music — this time from director Dr. Greg Reish. Weize had read an essay about the Littlejohn project, was fascinated by the Perkins recordings, and followed the breadcrumbs that led to my sofa. I bought my first Bear Family products when I was still in college, so seeing Richard Weize’s name in my inbox got my attention pretty quickly. 

The Littlejohn and Perkins families were intrigued by the possibility of a partnership with Bear Family, but they were most concerned with what these recordings add to the historical record. Thankfully, that was the primary motivation for everyone involved from day one. Veteran Bear Family producer Hank Davis, a brilliant music historian and Sun expert, signed on for the project, and we began an 18-month collaboration that has resulted in “Discovering Carl Perkins: Eastview, Tennessee 1952-53.” 

Hank and I fretted over the historical details, debated dates, traded war stories, squinted at period photos, and agonized over which Sun outtakes and alternate tracks best complimented the Littlejohn material. Long discussions and email threads with the Bear Family team in Germany ensued over the appropriate format for such a release. True to Bear Family form, the end product is a beautiful, limited-release package revisiting Carl Perkins’ earliest identity as an artist and exploring how the Littlejohn sessions impact our understanding of popular music history. The music is delivered on both 10-inch vinyl and CD, all in one neat package. Only 2,000 copies are slated for release.

The album title, “Discovering Carl Perkins,” is derived from an article I wrote in 2017 for “Southern Cultures,” the journal of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I’ve been asked about the meaning of that title on several occasions. Some have assumed I meant to imply Stanton Littlejohn discovered Carl Perkins. While there is a sense in which that might be true, Littlejohn would have been quick to take exception. He lived to see Carl Perkins achieve superstardom just a few years after he dropped the needle on these tracks, yet never attempted to claim credit for being the first to record the rockabilly icon, let alone the discoverer of Perkins’s prodigious talent. Neither do I claim credit for anything other than falling backward into a pile of cultural treasures generously offered by good people who trusted me to be faithful with their stories. I fervently hope I’ve done that. 

The title, as you may have guessed by now, is descriptive of my own journey of discovery. In many ways, it feels like I’ve been working backwards through one man's remarkable life. My experiences of Carl Perkins’ creative contributions to the world are bookended by watching him use his colossal talent for charitable purposes in his twilight years, and the rediscovery and first issue of recordings that reveal a raucous young rocker battering down walls with the raw power of his music. If you ask me, that’s pretty damn cool.

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