Thursday, June 19, 2008

Footwear: Blue Suede Shoes



Carl Perkins: Blue Suede Shoes

[purchase]


Blue Suede Shoes is an important song in Rock's history. It's considered one of the first Rockabilly records and simultaneously rose to number one on the R&B, Country and Pop charts its day. Johnny Cash gave Perkins the idea for the tune - Wikipedia has an outstanding write up of the history of Blue Suede Shoes, be sure to check it out. From the History Of Rock website:

Blue Suede Shoes song put 23-year old Carl Perkins in the national spotlight. Appearances were arranged for the Ed Sullivan and Perry Como TV shows, but while traveling to New York for those engagements he was involved in a terrible automobile accident. The driver, Dave Stewart fell asleep at the wheel and the car ran into a pick-up truck near Dover, Delaware. Stewart was killed, Carl suffered a fractured skull and broken arm. His brother Jay's neck was broken from which he would never recover. Eventually Elvis Presley, covered Blue Suede Shoes, which became Elvis' third top forty hit. These events served to steal some of the his thunder and Perkins never quite recovered his momentum in the world of pop, although his place in music history was assured.

Things that you can do instead of stepping on Carl's blue suede shoes:

  • Knock him down, step on his face
  • Slander his name all over the place
  • Burn his house
  • Steal his car
  • Drink his liquor from an old fruit jar

  • 5 comments:

    Divinyl said...

    Finally! I was waiting for this one to come up! And this is what I was alluding to in my 'red' post :o) Nice.

    Anonymous said...

    Hmmm. Never having owned suede shoes of any color I'd probably let ya step on them before doing any of those other nasty things.

    LD said...

    HAHA. Great bullet points, Dean. Very Onionesque.

    boyhowdy said...

    Yeah, I was waitin' for this, too...so many covers, so little time. Sigh. LD's right: the format works great -- nice approach.

    Anonymous said...

    I'll have everyone know that I've had more than one pair of blue suede shoes.

    The Onion? AREA MAN BEATEN, SLANDERED, LOOSES HOUSE AND CAR OVER BLUE SUEDE SHOES.