"[3] Perkins's songs were recorded by artists (and friends) as influential as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash, Ricky Nelson, and Eric Clapton which further cemented his prominent place in the history of popular music.

[9] Perkins also learned from John Westbrook, an African-American field worker in his sixties who played blues and gospel music on an old acoustic guitar.

[11] Perkins and his brother Jay had their first paying job (in tips) as entertainers during late 1946 at the Cotton Boll tavern on Highway 45, twelve miles south of Jackson, Tennessee, starting on Wednesday nights.

Within a month, Carl and Jay began playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Sand Ditch tavern near Jackson's western border.

[12] During the next couple of years, as they became better known, the Perkins brothers began playing other taverns around Bemis and Jackson, including El Rancho, the Roadside Inn, and the Hilltop.

[14] Perkins had day jobs during most of these early years including picking cotton, working at various factories and plants and as a pan greaser for the Colonial Baking Company.

[17] Malcolm Yelvington, who remembered the Perkins Brothers when they played in Covington, Tennessee in 1953, noted that Carl had an unusual blues-like style all his own.

"[19] In July 1954, Perkins and his wife heard a new release of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black on the radio.

[19] Years later, the rockabilly singer Gene Vincent told an interviewer that, rather than Elvis's version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" being a "new sound", "a lot of people were doing it before that, especially Carl Perkins.

Shortly before sunrise on March 22, on Route 13 between Dover and Woodside, Delaware, their vehicle hit the back of a pickup truck and went into a ditch containing about 12 inches of water.

[42] "Blue Suede Shoes" had sold more than 500,000 copies by March 22, and Sam Philips had planned to celebrate by presenting Perkins with a gold record on The Perry Como Show.

[44] On April 3, while still recuperating in Jackson, Perkins watched Presley perform "Blue Suede Shoes" in his first appearance on The Milton Berle Show.

[50] Appearing with Gene Vincent and Lillian Briggs in a rock 'n' roll show, he helped attract 39,872 people to the Reading Fair in Pennsylvania on a Tuesday night in late September.

Later that day, there was an impromptu session with Perkins, Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis informally referred to as the Million Dollar Quartet.

That same year, Perkins was cast in a Filipino movie produced by People's Pictures, Hawaiian Boy in which he sang Blue Suede Shoes.

[citation needed] In 1962, Patsy Cline recorded So Wrong, which Carl wrote with Mel Tillis and Danny Dill, and had a #14 hit on the Country charts.

On the last night of the tour, Perkins attended a party where he sat on the floor sharing stories, playing guitar, and singing songs while surrounded by the Beatles.

Perkins also played lead guitar on Cash's single A Boy Named Sue, recorded live at San Quentin prison.

[65][66] Also in 1969, Columbia's Murray Krugman placed Perkins with the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet, the NRBQ, a rockabilly group based in New York's Hudson Valley.

Arlene Harden had a Top 40 country hit in 1971 with the Perkins composition True Love Is Greater Than Friendship, from the film Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1971).

After a long legal struggle with Sam Phillips over royalties, Perkins gained ownership of his songs in the 1970s and, in 2003, his widow, who by then owned the catalog, entered into an administration contract with Paul McCartney's MPL Communications.

[70] During 1985, Perkins re-recorded "Blue Suede Shoes" with Lee Rocker and Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats as part of the soundtrack for the film Porky's Revenge.

In October 1985, Perkins performed on stage in London for a television special, Blue Suede Shoes: A Rockabilly Session, with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Dave Edmunds, Lee Rocker, Rosanne Cash and Ringo Starr.

He and his friends ended the session by singing "Blue Suede Shoes", his most famous song, 30 years after its writing, which brought Perkins to tears.

[72] Perkins returned to the Sun Studio in Memphis in 1986, joining Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison on the album Class of '55.

The record was a tribute to their early years at Sun and, specifically, the Million Dollar Quartet jam session involving Perkins, Presley, Cash, and Lewis in 1956.

[76] In 1983, a jury in Jackson, Tennessee found Greg Perkins "innocent on two felony counts of vehicular homicide, and guilty on a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence of alcohol.

[78] Perkins died on January 19, 1998, at the age of 65 at Jackson-Madison County Hospital in Jackson, Tennessee, from complications from several minor strokes the previous month.

[76] As a guitarist, Perkins used finger picking, imitations of the pedal steel guitar, palm muting, arpeggios, open strings, single and double string bending, chromaticism, country and blues licks, and tritone and other tonality clashing licks (short phrases that include notes from other keys and move in logical, often symmetric patterns).

The Kentucky Headhunters also covered the song, as did Keith de Groot on his 1968 album No Introduction Necessary with Jimmy Page on lead guitar and John Paul Jones on bass.