Episode fifty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Matchbox" by Carl Perkins, and at the session that turned into the historic Million Dollar Quartet jam session. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.

Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Blue Yodel #9" by Jimmie Rodgers.



Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.

I've used multiple books for this episode, as it deals with multiple artists.

I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. And another book by Guralnick. Last Train to Memphis , is undoubtedly the best book on Elvis ever written.

Information on Carl Perkins comes from comes from Go Cat Go! The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, by Carl Perkins and David McGee.

Information on Johnny Cash came from Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn.

Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most.

This double-CD collection of Carl Perkins' Sun recordings seems as good as any.

The early Sun singles are all on this ten-disc set, which charts the history of Sun Records, with the A- and B-sides of ninety of the first Sun singles in chronological order for an absurdly low price. This will help give you the full context for "Matchbox", in a way hearing it in isolation wouldn't, including the first recordings by all the participants in the Million Dollar Quartet.

And the complete Million Dollar Quartet recordings themselves can be found on this CD.

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Transcript

We're coming to the end of 1956, and with it the end of the first wave of rockabilly. As we've discussed before, by December 1956, only Elvis was left standing as a white rock and roll star from the first wave -- Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, and Bill Haley had stopped having hits, and Johnny Cash had started to be promoted as a country singer rather than a rock and roller.

But just because someone has stopped having hits doesn't mean they've stopped making good music, and that was certainly the case for Carl Perkins, who spent the rest of 1956 making records that were every bit as good as his one hit, "Blue Suede Shoes". After "Boppin' the Blues", the song's unsuccessful follow-up, he released "Dixie Fried":

[Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Dixie Fried"]

But that was no more successful. Perkins was increasingly dissatisfied with the way Sam Phillips was promoting his work, and like Johnny Cash was strongly considering moving to another label.

But on December the fourth, 1956, Perkins was still working for Sun, and so he was in the studio with his brothers, recording another single that was destined to do very little.

The A-side, "Your True Love", charted, but not very high -- it went to number thirteen on the country charts and only number sixty-seven on the pop charts. It was a decent country record, but not much more than that. The B-side, though, was more interesting:

[Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Matchbox"]

"Matchbox" was a song that came from an idea Carl had been given by his father. His father had been sitting around in the session, watching his sons play, and remembered an old song he used to like with the line "sitting here wondering will a matchbox hold my clothes/Ain't got no matches, but I've got a long way to go". Carl had never heard the song before, and he wasn't particularly impressed by the line his dad sang -- he thought the line made no sense. His dad also couldn't remember any of the rest of the song, but Carl took that line and built a new song around it.

Given Carl's father's musical tastes, it's likely that the record he was remembering