Carl Perkins, whose song "Blue Suede Shoes" and lightning-quick guitar-playing influenced Elvis Presley, the Beatles and a slew of other performers, has died aged 65.

Mr Perkins died in Nashville, Tennessee, from complications related to three strokes he had suffered in November and December, family spokesman Albert Hall said.

The tall, broad-shouldered Perkins was famed as one of the proponents of "rockabilly," a cross of rhythm-and-blues and country music that came out of Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s.

He also wrote some of the top hit records in rock 'n' roll and country music. A near-fatal traffic accident in 1956, coupled with the rise of Presley, prevented him from becoming a bigger solo star.

Blue Suede Shoes hit

Perkins wrote and recorded the 1956 smash Blue Suede Shoes, which Presley later re-issued. Perkins' version sold 2m copies itself before Presley's rendition also became a hit.

Perkins also wrote the rockabilly standard Dixie Fried and the songs Honey Don't, Matchbox and Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby, which were later covered by the Beatles.

Perkins carried on entertaining audiences well into his 60's

His relationship with the Beatles lasted long after their breakup in 1970. Perkins dueted with Paul McCartney on the country ballad Get It, a song off McCartney's 1982 album, Tug of War. On the same record, he played rhythm guitar on the McCartney-Stevie Wonder hit duet, Ebony and Ivory.

He met the Beatles in 1964 during a British concert tour with another rock 'n' roll pioneer, Chuck Berry.

About his influence on the Beatles, he said in a 1985 interview, "They advanced it (guitar playing) so much. That rockabilly sound wasn't as simple as I thought it was."

Perkins grew up picking cotton in Lake County, Tennessee, where he listened closely to music sung by blacks as they worked in the fields together.

Learning young

As a youngster, he used to retreat behind the family chicken house to pretend he was singing on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry.

At the age of seven, he began playing a guitar that his father, a tenant farmer, had made from a cigar box, a broomstick and baling wire.

He wrote Blue Suede Shoes after hearing someone telling his date at a high school prom not to step on his blue suede shoes. Perkins went home to his dark housing project in Jackson, Tennessee, and wrote the song on a brown potato sack.

Presley 'good looking cat'

Shortly after recording the song, Perkins was seriously hurt in a traffic accident and spent a year recovering and unable to capitalise on his mounting fame. During this time, Presley also recorded the song and earned much of the popularity that Perkins had been building.

"I was bucking a good-looking cat called Elvis who had beautiful hair, wasn't married and had all kinds of great moves," Perkins said in 1986.

Unknown to many Carl Perkins did a great deal of work for charity, especially with the Exchange Club-Carl Perkins Centre for the Prevention of Child Abuse.

The world of music will miss his easy-going nature and his undoubted skill as one of the world's truly great guitar players.
 

Back to top | BBC News Home | BBC Homepage	©