Many Americans have associated “Blue Suede Shoes” and its rebellious message with Elvis Presley. The truth is, the song was written by Presley’s Sun Records stablemate Carl Perkins, who had a hit record with the tune in 1956. Elvis’s version of Blue Suede Shoes was never a chart hit, and yet, in the public’s perception, Presley has somehow co-opted cultural ownership of the classic song.
At the time, blue suede shoes were a luxury item in the South, a stylish footwear for a night out. You had to be careful with them since suede isn't easy to clean.
While details of how and when Blue Suede Shoes was written vary, all parties agree that Johnny Cash gave Perkins the basic idea for the song. In a 1988 interview in England, Cash explained how the image came to him and how he passed it on to Carl.
“I was in the Air Force in Germany, and I had a black friend named C.V. White from Virginia. He’d get dressed up for a three-day pass, and in his mind, when he put on his clothes to go out, his black shoes were blue suede shoes. He would say, ‘Man! Don’t step on my blue suede shoes; I’m goin’ out tonight.’
Cash continued,” Carl Perkins and I were in Amory, Mississippi, with Elvis. Now Elvis, of course, was hotter than a pistol … and Carl hadn’t had a hit. He’d had two country records. He asked me to write a song with him. I said, ‘You take this idea and write it yourself.’ This ‘blue suede shoes’ line that my buddy used to say had been in my mind ever since I went to Sun. I told Carl about it, and he said, ‘That’s the one I’m looking for,’ and he wrote it that night. He started it backstage, but he went home and finished it.”
The story Perkins told is that later, he was playing at a high school sorority dance when he came across a guy who wasn't paying much attention to his date but kept telling everyone not to step on his "suedes," meaning his blues suede shoes. At 3 a.m. that night, Perkins woke up and wrote the lyrics based on what happened that night and the story he heard from Cash. He couldn't find any paper, so he wrote it on a potato sack.
On December 19, 1955, Carl Perkins recorded Blue Suede Shoes at Sam Phillips’ studio in Memphis and Sun Records released it on January 1, 1956.
Meanwhile, Elvis Presley had recorded his own version of Blue Suede Shoes at RCA’s New York studios on January 30, 1956. The main goal of that session was to produce some tracks to fill Presley’s first album. Sam Phillips claims that RCA’s Steve Sholes promised not to release Elvis’s cover as a single while Carl Perkins’s record was still hot on the charts. Presley gave Blue Suede Shoes the full rock ’n’ roll treatment, at a faster pace and with greater energy than Perkins’s rockabilly recording.
Various Sources