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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Terry Gross.
It's a Fresh Air tradition that the week leading into Labor Day we do a themed series of interviews from our archive.
This week's theme is R&B, rockabilly, and early rock and roll.
I got that idea while listening to a terrific podcast I recommend, called A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs.
While listening to the early episodes about the prehistory and early history of rock, I
I often found myself thinking, wait, that person is in our archive.
Those are the people we'll be hearing from.
Later today we'll hear my interview with one of the pioneers of rockabilly, Carl Perkins, who wrote and made the first recording of Blue Suede Shoes.
After that, Elvis made his hit recording.
We begin our series with the guitarist on Elvis' version, Scotty Moore.
He played with Elvis from 1954 to 1964.
He reunited with Elvis for his 1968 comeback special.
As Peter Goralnik, the author of the definitive biography of Elvis, wrote, quote, unquote.
Scotty Moore died in 2016 at the age of 84.
We're going to hear the interview I recorded with him in 1997 after the publication of his memoir about his years with Elvis, called That's Alright, Elvis.
The title is a reference to Elvis' first single, That's Alright, which was recorded in 1954 and featured Moore on guitar.
It was recorded for Sun Records, the label created and owned by Sam Phillips, who we'll hear from on tomorrow's show.
When we spoke, a box set of previously unreleased Elvis tracks had just been released.
We started with a previously unreleased take of Lordy Miss Claudy.
Listen for Scotty Moore's solo.
G2, WB, 1, 2, 9, 3, take 1.
Yeah, something like that.
Lordy, lordy, Miss Claudia, girl, you sure look good to me.
Well, please don't excite me, baby.
No, it can't be me.
Because I gave you all of my money, girl, but you just won't treat me right.
You like to ball every morning.
Don't come home till late at night.
Before Scotty Moore recorded with Elvis at Sun Records, Moore recorded at Sun with his own country band, the Starlight Wranglers.
That's how we got to know the owner and mastermind of Sun Records, Sam Phillips.
But we became just great friends through that connection.
We'd have coffee next door at a little cafe there and just discuss the business in general.
You heard so and so and the record they've got out and the way they're doing it and different sounds.
And Sam was always saying well, if we can just find something different, we can find that little niche, you know, to get in between all this other stuff that's happening.
And Marion, his secretary, was having coffee with us one day and she said Sam, what about that boy?
I was in about a year ago and cutting that estate for his mother.
And Sam said, yeah.
Best I remember, he had a pretty good voice.
And he turned to me and said give him a call and get him to come over to your house and see what you think about it.
I called him.
He came over on Sunday afternoon.
And it seems like he knew every song in the world.
Well, when you asked him to come over and do some songs for you, what songs did he sing?
Everything.
I mean, he did Billy Eckstine, he did Eddie Arnold.
I don't remember a specific song necessarily, but I mean, he just knew all these songs.
And did he do them in the style of the singer who had the hit version?
Yes.
So musically you thought he was versatile, but you couldn't tell who he was.
That's fair to say.
And in fact, after he left that day, I called and relayed that basic information to Sam.
I said, remember you told us to go out and get some original material.
And he said well, I'll call him and get him to come in for an audition and say just, you and Bill Black come in.
I don't need the whole band, just a little noise behind him.
So the next night we went in, which was the audition, and we were taking a break, is when the thing exploded.
Elvis just jumped up and started just frailing his guitar and singing That's All Right Mama.
Just nervous energy.
Now, that was a song by Arthur Crudup.
Crudup, yes.
Did you know the song when he was starting to play it?
No, I'd never heard it.
So you just started to feel in behind him?
Right, Bill started just slapping the bass and it sounded pretty good what he was doing, so I started just playing some kind of rhythm thing with him too.
And then Sam Phillips, the head of Sun Records, liked it and asked you to lay it down on tape?
Yeah, he was in the control room.
The door was open.
And when we was doing it, he came, stuck his head out there and said, what are you guys doing?
And we said, just goofing around, you know.
He said, it sounded pretty good through the door.
He said, let's put it on tape and see what it sounds like.
Well, let's hear the version that was actually released of That's All Right.
Elvis Presley and my guest Scotty Moore on guitar.
Well, that's all right, mama.
That's all right with you.
That's all right, mama.
Just, any way you do it, That's all right.
That's all right.
That's all right, mama.
Well mama, she done, told me.
Papa done told me too.
Son, that gal you foolin' with, she ain't no good to you.
But that's all right.
That's all right.
That's all right, my mama.
Tell me the truth.
After you started recording with Elvis, did you think, this guy's a great singer?
Or were you thinking, this guy's okay?
Oh, well, we became more aware after just three records that he liked to challenge.
But he was very particular about songs.
He had to get into them, feel them good.
Now, true, most of the stuff on Sun, it wasn't original material.
There were some.
There were remakes of R&B and a couple of country things like Milk Cow Blues and things like that.
But when we went to RCA, things changed.
He was absolutely picking his own material in.
And we'd go into the session and have a stack two feet high of acetates.
In the first couple of hours he would spend going through those and he might listen to eight bars and zap across the room.
Then he'd listen about halfway, and he'd put that in another stack to come back and listen to again.
These were demos that had been made for him?
Demos, right.
And that's the way he did it.
And very few times did I ever see him that one he had kept in the maybe stack that we would actually try that he would then throw it away after he heard it back.
He had that good a year.
Do you remember one of the songs that was picked out of the demo pile like that?
I think Don't Be Cruel was picked like that.
Of course Hill and Range could try to keep their main writers and what they thought at the top of the stack too.
Let me play another record from the Sun Sessions.
I thought we'd play Mystery Train.
That's my signature song.
Tell me a little bit about what you're playing on this and what it was like to record this track.
Share some memories about it.
It was a slow R&B song.
That Junior Parker had.
That Junior Parker had, yeah.
And we ended up just getting the tempo up more, and I changed the rhythm thing around.
And I've always loved it.
It's just a fun thing to do.
Okay, well, this is Mystery Train.
Elvis Presley, my guest, Scotty Moore on guitar.
16, coach is low.
Well, it took my baby, But it never will again.
No, not again, For just joining us.
My guest is guitarist Scotty Moore, who we just heard on Mystery Train, and he's written a new autobiography called That's All Right, Elvis.
When did you start realizing that Elvis was really catching on in a very emotional way with his fans?
I would say that after we did the first couple of TV shows with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey after we went to RCA before that most of our shows and stuff had been all in the Southeast.
There had been some granted starting to see the hysteria and so forth, but It really didn't come home to us until we did those shows, that national exposure.
Then it just seemed like the floodgates opened up, you know?
What would you say is your most copied guitar solo from the Elvis records?
Hmm.
Or one of the most?
Probably Heartbreak Hotel, maybe.
I don't know.
I've never...
I've never been asked that before.
Can we do a survey?
Write in, folks, and tell me.
Well, why don't we go for Heartbreak Hotel?
Okay.
Tell me your memories of this session.
Well, of course, that was the first one on RCA.
They were trying to get basically the same sound that Sam was getting at Gatton Woods in Memphis.
They had this big long hallway out in the front that had the tile floor, so they put a big speaker at one end of it and mic at the other end and the sign do not enter, and they used that.
That's where it ended up with that deep, real room echo instead of the uh tape delay echo that salmon use now there is.
It's hard to hear.
There is a little tape delay on it, but either their tape machine didn't match his uh, so it's just very slight, and then he ended up with just with the acoustic echo.
I'll give them credit.
They didn't.
I don't think they knew.
Maybe they didn't think about it, but a room echo at that point was sound effects they used in the movies.
They weren't using them for recording.
And then here comes this and it's so drastic But it worked for the song.
When you say, you know, at the end of Lonely Street, it's so distant.
And I like to say this, if you don't mind, in speaking of these technical things, one thing that Sam did, that I don't believe he realized when he was doing it, and I didn't until years later that I got into engineering.
He pulled Elvis' voice back close to the music.
You know, all the Sinatra and all those things where the voice is so far out in front.
And he more or less used Elvis' voice as another instrument.
Into the mix.
Into the mix. but didn't bury him like a lot of the rock things later.
Right.
Now your solo on Heartbreak Hotel.
Is that something you had prepared before the session, or is it something you had worked out?
No, no.
Everything we ever did was just spur of the moment.
Did you learn the song at the session, or did you know it before that?
No, learned it at the session.
Well, all right.
Let's hear it.
1956, Heartbreak Hotel.
Well, since my baby left me Well, I found a new place to dwell.
Well, it's down at the end of Lonely Street, That heartbreak hotel where I'll be.
I'll be just so lonely, baby.
Well, I'm so lonely.
I'll be just so lonely I could die.
Though it's always crowded, you still can find some room for broken-hearted lovers to cry there in the gloom.
It'll be so lonely, baby.
It'll be so lonely.
It's so lonely.
They could die.
Now the bellhop's tears keep flowing.
The desk clerk's dressed in black.
They've been so lonely on this street.
They'll never, never look back.
¶¶ ¶¶
It's Heartbreak Hotel, my guest Scotty Moore on guitar, and he's written an autobiography which of course, includes his years playing guitar with Elvis Presley.
It's called That's All Right, Elvis.
When did you stop playing with Elvis, and what was behind stopping?
Well, actually, the 1968 special, which now they call the Comeback Special...
That great TV special where he's wearing the leather jacket and leather pants.
He was.
I mean, he would probably sound funny for a man to say, but he was an absolute Adonis on that show.
Mm-hmm.
He looked good.
He was in great shape.
And if that man had a pill in him at that point, well, I'd like for him to prove it to me.
I mean, he was just, and he was ready.
He was nervous because when he found out he was going to have to these two little groups they brought in when we did our in-the-round thing, that made him nervous.
But he was anxious.
He only had, I think, one more movie to finish before all the contracts were done and he wanted to get back performing.
That's where he was best at, what he loved to do.
When you stopped playing with Elvis, you virtually gave up the guitar for I don't know close to 25 years, I think.
24 years, right.
And I guess I can't understand that.
Well, after I sold my studio, then I started a tape duplicating company.
Mm-hmm.
And then also an industrial printing company.
And so I was pretty busy.
I mean, there really wasn't time for thinking about playing.
I sold what guitars I had.
You started playing again, what, in the early 90s, was it?
92.
And what was behind that?
Well, I'll have to back up a little bit there.
About 18, two years, 90, I went to a little gathering for Carl Perkins.
Carl and I, of course, had known each other from Sundays.
I had done one session with Carl in 75.
He wrote a song with all Elvis song titles called EP Express.
But other than that, we never had recorded anything together before.
And that's when this guy asked, he said, why don't you two guys record something?
And Carl and I looked at each other and said, well, why not?
When you picked up your guitar, about 24 years after you'd put it down to record with Carl Perkins, had you played it?
I mean, did you remember how to play?
Had you played at home in the interim?
No, I didn't even have any guitars.
Gosh.
Can you tell me you didn't miss it those years?
I really didn't.
I thought about that really hard.
Well, I was so busy doing other things, I guess.
But the thing that really got me when I realized it was in my blood.
The Elvis celebration August of that year 92, I went to Memphis and did the show with Carl.
And I'm standing over in the wings.
Carl's fixing to bring me out.
And I'm thinking to myself, you're supposed to be nervous.
And I walked out, and it just bothered me a bit.
And I was really surprised.
And that's when I told myself, it's in your blood.
You might as well admit it.
Well, Scotty Moore, I'm really glad you're playing again.
And a pleasure to have the chance to talk with you.
It's been a pleasure and enjoyable.
My interview with Scotty Moore was recorded in 1997.
He died in 2016 at age 84.
After we take a short break, we'll hear from Carl Perkins, the rockabilly guitarist and singer who wrote and first recorded Blue Suede Shoes and a song the Beatles later recorded, Honey Don't.
Let's listen to the song Moore and Perkins recorded together in 1975.
This is EP Express.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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This is Fresh Air.
I'm Terry Gross.
Let's continue our week of interviews from our archive with RB, rockabilly and early rock and roll musicians and songwriters.
Up next, we have Carl Perkins, one of the originators of rockabilly.
Perkins' singing, guitar playing, and songwriting brought together country and rock and roll.
He recorded at Sun Records, the label that also launched the careers of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.
Perkins was best known for writing the song Blue Suede Shoes.
In 1956, his version of Blue Suede Shoes was a pop, rhythm and blues and country hit.
Soon after, Elvis had a huge hit with the song.
Perkins also wrote Honey Don't, which was covered by the Beatles.
Later on, Perkins' songs were recorded by Dolly Parton, The Judds and George Strait.
I spoke with him in 1996 after he'd written a memoir.
He died two years later at the age of 65.
Here's Perkins' recording of his best-known song, Blue Suede Shoes.
Well, it's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go cat, go, but don't you.
Carl Perkins, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you, Terry.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I'd love to hear the story of how you wrote Blue Suede Shoes.
Well, I'd love to share it with you.
It was October the 21st, 1955.
I was playing what we called back in those days a honky-tonk.
They call them clubs now, but it was a honky-tonk where people get together and scream and holler and dance and have a good time.
And I had not owned a pair of blue suede shoes at this point.
I'd seen a few of them around my hometown in Jackson, Tennessee.
But at the end of a song This couple had been dancing a very attractive young lady and a cat that had on a pair of blue suede.
And at the end of the song, he said, uh-uh, don't step on my suede.
And it bothered me, you know, not having owned a pair.
I didn't realize that.
You know if you step on them.
You kind of got to brush them off a little bit.
It discolors the toe of them.
But the thing that bothered me was he thought that much of a pair of stupid shoes to actually hurt her feelings.
So I went home that night, and I could not go to sleep.
I mean, I just kept seeing her face, and she said, oh, I'm sorry.
And she really was.
And I laid there and I thought of the old nursery rhyme one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.
I got up, went down the concrete steps.
I was living in a government project house.
And I got my guitar down, and I said, well, there's a one for the money, two for the show.
And I never will forget.
I couldn't find any paper to write on because we had two small children, my wife Valda, who thank God, is still with me after 44 years.
All of our folks lived close by, so I guess we had no need to have writing paper.
So I took three hours' potatoes out of a brown paper sack.
Oh, no.
I did.
And bless her heart, she saved that sack.
The original words, the blue suede shoes, is hanging in my den in Jackson, Tennessee.
And I never will forget.
I called Sam Phillips at Sun Studios down here in Memphis who had a boy by the name of Elvis, who had a couple of records already out at that time.
I said, Mr. Phillips, I wrote me a good song last night.
He said, what is it?
I said, I guess we'll call it maybe Blue Suede Shoes.
He said, is it anything like old them golden slippers?
I said, no, man, this is about a cat that don't want nobody stepping on it.
He said, it sounds interesting.
Now, as you pointed out, the nursery rhyme is three to get ready and four to go.
So how did it become Go Cat Go?
Well, the original line there that I came up with, I said three to get ready.
Now, go man, go.
I wrote the song Go Man Go.
And the first attempt I made at recording it, I said go man.
And then I got excited because I could tell through the glass control window that Mr Phillips was liking this song.
And I got excited and forgot the word man.
On my original record, there was a slight pause.
I said, three to get ready, now go, cat, go, but don't you.
The word cat flew in there instead of man.
And after I got through with it, he said, that's it.
I said, Mr. Phillips, I made a terrible mistake.
I called that man a cat.
He said, I heard you, and he's going to stay a cat.
This was the first rock and roll record to top the pop charts, rhythm and blues charts and country charts at the same time.
Yeah, it was.
And a lot of people made their own recordings of Blue Suede Shoes.
Lawrence Welk among them.
Yeah, he sure did.
Pee Wee King and the Golden West Cowboys.
There was every kind of version.
And, you know, to this day, Cherry, this song still... gets put on albums all around the world.
It's amazing.
You ought to hear it in the Japanese language.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, of course, Elvis Presley did a version of your song.
How did he end up doing it?
When my record came out January 2, 1956, of Blue Suede Shoes, RCA Victor contacted Elvis.
They had bought him from Sun Records at that point.
And they said, Elvis, there's a hit song out there.
We want you to get in the studio and record it.
He said, there's a lot of hits out there.
What are you talking about?
And Steve Schultz allegedly was a man who recorded Elvis back in the early part of his career.
At Victor said the song's Blue Suede Shoes.
He said, yes, sir, you're right.
I think it's a hit song myself.
But that's my friend, Carl Perkins, and that's a Sun record.
And he didn't want to do that song at the time they wanted him to, which was in January of 1956.
He waited until April of that year, letting my record do what it was going to, and then he recorded it.
And that was the kind of guy he was.
You know, he could have jumped on it first, and nobody would have ever known Carl Perkins existed.
But because of the nature of this film, fine individual human being named Elvis.
He wanted me to have success with it and he thought I would have if he stayed off of it.
And that's what he did.
What do you think of his version?
I loved it.
You know, I fell into the trap.
Elvis did it faster than I did, and I love in the music industry, we call it the groove.
The beat that he put to.
It was up-tempo for mine quite a bit and I loved his so much till I drifted into doing it like he did, you know, faster.
And when I met the Beatles in 1964 in England and we was at a party and they wanted me to do, you know, Blue Suede Shoes and I did.
And Harrison said, why don't you do it like you did it?
I said, well, I think I am.
He said, no, you're not.
My record was well, it's a one for the money, a definite two stops.
And Elvis, well, it's a one for the money, two for the show.
It was a one lick.
And Harrison was really disturbed with that.
He said man, you do it different than anybody ever did, and now you're doing it like everybody else.
But I really liked Elvis' record of it.
I still to this day do, and I catch myself unconsciously speeding it up to the very groove he had it.
Did you think of yourself as trying something new, bringing together rock and roll and country?
Well, we didn't know exactly what we were doing, Terry, but we did know that it was different.
We did know that, instead of leaning back and sitting comfortably in their theater seats or wherever we were playing, these people were scooting around moving.
Some were getting up shaking.
Young people were dancing in the aisles and we knew that we were doing.
We were causing a stir with this and it wasn't as far as I was concerned or any of the guys in the early days, we didn't feel like it was anything wrong with what we were doing.
Did you develop that style playing in honky-tonks?
Oh, yeah.
You move there because of a flying bottle or an ashtray flying at some cat's head close to the stage.
Yeah, you're on your toes playing in those places.
And even you know, back in those years I was playing the same kind of music that was later recorded in Memphis in 54.
I started playing the Tonks when I was, gosh, 16, 17 years old. and I played.
I did Roy Acuff's Great Speckled Bird or Wabash Cannonball, but I said What a beautiful thought Lord, I'm thinking.
That old upright bass.
My daddy used to tell me, he'd say, Son, put that guitar back on the nail.
You are messing up Mr. Acuff's song.
He don't do it that fast, and there ain't no needin' you doin' it.
And rest my mama's soul, it was her who would say, Buck, leave the little fellow alone.
He's not hurting Mr. Acuff's song.
And because of what she would say to him, he backed off of me.
And I just always felt good playing my songs up-tempo because that's the music I heard in the cotton fields.
I picked cotton with... many, many black people, and we'd start singing.
They would.
And I'd start singing with them, 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon with the sun beating down on you.
You know, I could hear Uncle John Westbrook say, mm-hmm, about 10 rolls over, sister wanted it, whoa, whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And now my little blood would start boiling.
I'd say, wow, they're fixing to sing.
Gonna lay down my burdens, boom, boom.
The ones who didn't know the words used their voices.
And to this day, Terry, I can vividly hear that up-tempo gospel music.
Then I'd go home at night and get my old beat-up guitar off of the wall from the nail and I tried to make the strings, you know, sound like the voices I was hearing.
When I do Some Glad Morning, my bass string is going.
That was filling in for the sounds of the voices I heard in the cotton fields.
We're listening back to my 1996 interview with Carl Perkins.
We'll continue the interview after a break.
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This is Fresh Air.
Let's get back to my interview with Carl Perkins, one of the originators of rockabilly.
He wrote and recorded Blue Suede Shoes, which was also recorded by Elvis and Honey Don't, which the Beatles later recorded.
There's a great story about how you ended up going to Memphis to record at Sun Studios.
Your wife heard Elvis Presley on the radio singing Blue Moon of Kentucky and she called you and she said look, there's someone on the radio who sounds like you.
Because you and Elvis were both putting together country music, rhythm and blues and and rock and roll.
And when you heard that, you went right to memphis, to the sun studios, to see if sam phillips would record you too you're right about that.
So was he was too willing to give you a shot right away.
Did you have to work hard to convince him?
If i hadn't have felt that was my only opportunity, i would have.
I wouldn't even turned around, i'd have put it in reverse and backed back to jackson Because he wasn't there when I walked in.
She told Sam about this good-looking boy and how unique he sang.
He came in to make a record for his mama.
Paid $3 for it.
It was called Memphis Recording Service then.
But I walked in, and I guess she could tell by looking at me that I was a hungry guitar picker.
She said if you come to audition you're out of luck because we got this boy Elvis, and he's more than we can handle.
Mr. Phillips is not listening to anybody.
I said, well, I...
I appreciate it.
It was all right.
We sat out front for a while till he gets here.
And just a few seconds after, or a few minutes really after that, he pulled in and he got a little close to my old Plymouth because I was in his parking place and right in front door.
And he whipped in there in that two-tone 54 Cadillac Coupe de Ville.
I never will forget it.
It was dark blue and light blue and he got out.
He had on a dark blue pair of pleated pants with a light blue coat.
I said, wow, that's either Elvis Presley or the cat that owns this place.
I beat him to the front door.
I had my foot in the door.
I said, Mr. Phillips, I'm Carl Perkins.
That's my brother sitting there in the car, and I was talking 90 miles an hour.
We come down.
We want to make a record for you.
He said, I just, I'm too busy, man.
I just...
And he told me after that, he said, Carl, I don't know why I listened to you.
I had no intentions.
I was wrapped up with what I was going to do to get records pressed of this boy Elvis.
But you look like your world would have ended.
And I said, Mr. Phillips, it might have.
Because my heart was, I was just aching to get in that studio.
I just felt.
You know, with encouragement from my wife, I thought, I can't let Val down.
I got to get in there, and we did.
So Sam Phillips gave you a shot.
What did he do, ask you to play a lot of your songs?
My brother Jay had a couple of songs that he'd written.
So Jay started doing one that he'd written, and he stopped him after about one verse.
He said, I've got anything else.
He did another one and got about that far, and he stopped him again.
Jay liked a country singer by the name of Ernest Tubb and had developed a style like him because he loved him so much and he sounded a little bit like him.
And I never will forget, Mr. Phillips said, Boy, there's already an Ernest Tubb.
You need to forget about him.
Your song's pretty good, but I can't use you guys anymore.
And I didn't realize, we didn't know, the microphone was still on.
And he was back in the control room.
I said, boys, don't put them, they started to put their instruments, you know, back in the cases.
And I said, don't put them up.
I'm going to do them one of mine.
We can't leave here.
But he was hearing this.
And he heard a convicted little old skinny, armed boy by the name of Carl Perkins that When I got the shot he walked back through there.
I said, Mr. Phillips, will you listen to one of my songs?
He said, yeah, take off.
So he stood there.
But I got real nervous because after I got past the first verse, he hadn't stopped me.
And I thought, oh, Lord, he's going to listen to the whole song.
And I got to jumping around.
And the first thing he said to me after I did that, he said, that's a cute song and I like it.
He said, can you sing Standing Still?
He said you're going to have to because if you ever make a record you're going to have to stand still.
I said, yes, sir, I can do whatever you tell me to.
And he said, well, I like that song.
Go home and write you another one in that vein, and we'll talk about putting a record out.
So on the way back to Jackson, in a 40-model Plymouth I must have written 10 or 15 songs on the dashboard.
And I called him back in a couple of weeks saying, I had a thing he liked.
It was a country song called Turnarounds.
And that was my first record.
Why don't we hear Turnaround, your first recording.
And this is different from what we've heard.
This is more of a country ballad than an up-tempo rockabilly song.
Yeah.
Now, the song on the other side was a rockabilly country thing called Movie Mag.
But he liked... I'll tell you what.
He told me, he said, this boy Elvis is doing... I know where your heart is.
But he's got that ball and going with it and I can't have two of you cats sounding a lot alike and singing this up-tempo.
We call it feel-good music.
There was no word, no name for it at that point.
Some of the hillbillies in Nashville, I think Rockabilly sprang out of there.
They said, you know, these boys in Memphis are rocking our music.
So it got called Rockabilly, and it kind of stuck there.
But He didn't feel like that he had room for Elvis and I doing the same kind of music.
So he told me, he said, I'm going to put out this song, Turn Around.
And then he sold Elvis to RCA Victor, and he said, now you can rock.
So that's when I came up with Blue Suede Shoes and Honey Don't.
Oh, that's interesting.
Well, why don't we hear the country ballad that you wrote, Turn Around.
Okay.
When you're all alone and blue And the world looks down on you, Turn around.
I'll be following you.
When you feel that love is gone And you realize you're wrong, Turn around.
I'll be following you.
Turn around, I'll be waiting behind you With a love that's real and never, ever dies.
If you feel your love will last and you'd like to live your past turnaround, I'll be following you.
We're listening back to my 1996 interview with Carl Perkins.
We'll hear more of it after a break.
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This is fresh air.
Let's get back to my interview with Carl Perkins, one of the early rockabilly performers.
He wrote and recorded Blue Suede Shoes, which was later recorded by Elvis, and he wrote and recorded Honey Don't, which was later recorded by the Beatles.
After the rockabilly era sometime in the early 60s, your music wasn't doing that well commercially anymore and you decided to give up music back then.
Why did you want to give it up?
Well, I was drinking a lot.
I was drinking because I thought, I really can't pinpoint why I got so deep into alcohol.
I thought it was erasing memories.
It was causing me, maybe to dodge the real problems that were out there for me, and that was the crowds were falling off, my music was suffering, but alcohol was causing most of this.
Thank God I had a good church-going wife who kept raising my children in the right direction and praying that I'd see the light.
And one day I did, and life's been wonderful ever since.
But it got bad for a while.
It sure did.
Now, after you started feeling forgotten and neglected in America, you became a real hero in England.
The Beatles did some of your songs, including Honey Don't.
Yeah.
How did you end up getting so popular there?
Did you tour England?
Yeah, I did.
I went over in 1964 with Chuck Berry, who had not been to England at that time.
And the tour was very, very successful.
And this was before the Beatles came to america.
A month or two before they came and i i met them over there and come find out, you know they.
They told me that they'd been listening to a lot of my old son records and and liked what i did and and kind of inspired them.
I think the inspiration i gave the beatles was the fact that i wrote my own songs, i played my own lead guitar and sang my own songs and this is what they were doing.
And if, if i inspired him it was in that way, i don't think and never will think that it was my quality of music uh, although there george harrison does hit a little lick or two that i used on some of my earlier records, but he does it so much better than i ever did.
But uh i, you're right, i have been uh pretty successful in england and i still go over.
Uh, every year and most of the years i'll do a couple of tours over there.
Rockabilly music's held up real well and for some reason another, uh old carl perkins just feels good over there with those kids.
They won't sit down and i just uh, i just, you know i come alive and rock with them.
Well, i'm glad you're still recording.
I really enjoy this.
Thank you so much for talking with us.
Oh, it's been a treat, girl.
Anytime.
Just holler.
Carl Perkins will be on this end of the line.
Thank you so very much.
My interview with Carl Perkins was recorded in 1996.
He died two years later at the age of 65.
Well, how come you say you will when you won't?
You tell me you do, baby, when you don't.
Let me know, honey, how you feel.
Tell the truth now, is love real or not?
Tomorrow, on Fresh Air, we'll continue our RB rockabilly and early rock and roll series with Sam Phillips, whose son record label was the first to record Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.
And we'll feature my interview with Johnny Cash.
I hope you'll join us.
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Reboldinato, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Leah Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman and John Sheehan.
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V.
Nesper.
Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson.
Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
Our co-host is Tanya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
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