Day 101: Carl Perkins - The Dance Album

Album cover courtesy of Sun Records

I saw the name Carl Perkins and thought I definitely know something about that man. Turns out that wasn’t strictly speaking true, I just vaguely remembered that George Harrison was a massive fan of him and counted him as a big influence on his music. That’s as good a reason as any to explore the music of Carl Perkins, so I decided to go for his 1958 debut release The Dance Album.

Nicknamed the King of Rockabilly, Carl Perkins was a rock and roll and rockabilly pioneer whose songs have been covered by artists like Elvis, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, T. Rex and his close friend and collaborator Johnny Cash. His impact is undeniable, but he does somehow fly under the radar a bit – at least I don’t hear about him very often, but he’s still impactful enough to be number 99 on Rolling Stone’s 2004 list of the best artists of all time

Carl Perkins was born in 1932 in Tiptonville, Tennessee. He was active as a musician from 1946 to 1997, but before that, he worked in cotton fields with his family as a child, starting from when he was six years old. He says he was exposed to Southern gospel music in the fields and at church, and another field worker taught him how to play guitar.

The Dance Album was Perkins’ debut studio album, and it includes songs that have lived on in rock and roll history: it opens with “Blue Suede Shoes” which is better known from the Elvis cover, and it has other iconic songs that helped shape the genre, such as “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” and “Honey Don’t”. Every single song on the album has been recorded either by the Beatles or individual members after the Beatles broke up, and to some extent, we wouldn’t even have the Beatles in the form that we did without him, as George Harrison taught himself how to play guitar to Carl Perkins’ records.

But disregarding the impact that the record had on others, it’s still a good record all by itself. It holds up, almost 70 years later, despite the sound being something that sounds quite well-worn due to the impact that he had on other artists. And yet it wasn’t much of a success at the time, only selling a little bit and becoming more of a regional than a national thing after its release. His high-profile pals, Elvis and Johnny Cash, helped propel him to being more well-established, which seems to have suited him well, as he doesn’t seem like a man who necessarily wanted to be a world-famous teen idol himself.

The lyrics are old-school country boy rockabilly lyrics that aren’t necessarily too intricate, but they’re charming, like saying that a woman has the right string but the wrong yo-yo, you don’t get patter like that anymore. And then there’s “Gone, Gone, Gone”, a fun song but not necessarily one with the most meaningful lyrics:

Well that must be my girl, yours don't look like that
I said it must be my girl, yours don't look like that
I know my baby, she's so big and fat
Baby-baby-baby, gone gone gone
Baby-baby-baby, gone gone gone
Aah, I'm gone gone gone, well I'm gone gone gone
Well I'm gone gone gone, come go with me

You know what, yeah, sure, whatever that means. The Dance Album is a fun record to listen to, I enjoyed it both for what it is and as a little music history lesson. You can hear how it impacted pop and rock that came after. 8/10.