Sittin here, thinkin.....(Nuther white boy singin da blues)
Like Johnny Cash, who he would later tour with for about 8 years in the late '60's and early '70s, Carl Perkins was born in 1932 (in west Tennessee) and, like Johnny, he was pickin cotton at age 6. His folks was the onliest white family on a share-croppin plantation, and he worked with the black boys in the field, singin as they went, as Carl put it "from can to can't" (14 hours a day for fifty cents). Carl had a 60 year old blues-playin black man, named John Westbrook, who help learn him how to play guitar as a chile (he hadda home-made contraption--a cigar box on a broomstick, with some strings to start).
Carl wrote most of his own songs and had his own style, which he said was just blues, speeded up a little, influencing a lot of other artists as he went. After Elvis heard his (own) studio version of Blue Moon of Kentucky, he excitedly said: "That sounds like Carl Perkins!" Presley later had a big hit coverin the Perkins' tune "Blue Suede Shoes," which was basically a 12 bar blues tune with "rockabilly" overtones. He had to wait until after Perkins' own version (which was the first Sun record to sell over one million copies) had cooled down, though. Paul McCartney, said "If there were no Carl Perkins, there would be no Beatles," and the Beatles covered several of his early tunes, such as Honey Don't, Everybody's Trying To Be My Baby, and Matchbox, all rockabilly classics. He also wrote such classics as Boppin the Blues, True Love, All Mama's Children (wanna rock), and a lotta others.
This here tune, Matchbox, recorded at Sun studios with Jerry Lee, da Killa, playin the piano (where he gits outta key for a short spell) in 1956, was first recorded by the great early bluesman, Blind Lemon Jefferson, in 1927. Carl's version is a little different, of course, but throws in some recurrent blues lines which appear in various older blues toons (the big-dog, little-dog, stanza, for example). Goes without no kinda sayin, of course, but it ROCKS, eh!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPQwtalHNNk