Got a Match?

Song 294: The playlist track for this week is that Matchbox by Carl Perkins, who also wrote the song. Before the Beatles rocked my world in February of 1964, I knew nothing about rock and roll, so of course, the first version of this song that I learned was the Beatles recording of it. From the very beginning of my interest in records, though, I always took note of songwriter names, so at some point, when I had the chance to read the label of Something New, I noticed that someone named Carl Perkins had actually written this particular favorite. I slowly came to understand that an earlier generation of rock and rollers had preceded the Fab Four, and I began to learn more about their influences when I got my hands on their official biography during my senior year. Fast forward a couple of years, and with the ‘50s RnR revival of the early ‘70s, I started hearing a lot of vintage Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and others, giving me a clearer idea of how Carl Perkins also fit into that mix in a significant way. Very early in my own guitar experience, I figured out how to play this tune, and it became part of my standard cover repertoire, which would have come in quite handy if there’s any truth to the rumor of my membership in a country-bar pickup band slouching around the East Bay club scene in the 1980s, as this song would have been that band’s usual opener. In researching the original recording, I learned that Jerry Lee Lewis played piano on the track, accompanied by Carl’s older brother Jay (James Buck) Perkins on acoustic guitar and his younger brother Lloyd Carter Perkins on bass. I also found out that on the same day the group recorded this cut, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley dropped by the studio later and jammed along with Carl and the band. Matchbox originally arrived as the B-side of the Your True Love single, and at the time only the A-side charted, although the B-side would later become much more well-known. The lyrics to verse 1 of Carl’s track appeared earlier on discs from the 1920s by Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson, though no one knows now if either of them originated the lines or pulled the words from traditional sources, but even if everything else Carl ever did was wrong, this cut turned out quite all right, as, in fact, a bunch of his other ones did too, so possibly a few of them might appear on this list at different points in the future.