Carl Perkins Country Boy's Dream - The Dollie Masters (CD)

1-CD Album with 20-page booklet, 30 tracks. Playing time approx. 76 mns.

By 1966, Carl had been dropped by Columbia and Decca and was picked up by Dollie Records, a Nashville-based label owned by his music publisher. Reverting to country music, Carl proceeded to make some of the best music of his career, and even scored the hit he had been after for so long, ‘Country Boy's Dream’. The 30 tracks here also include Poor Boy Blues, Detroit City, Dream On Little Dreamer, Sweet Misery,
Shine Shine Shine, Back To Tennessee, Lake County Cotton Country, and Baby I'm Hung Up On You.


It was a strange, contradictory period in Carl Perkins' career. At home, the Americans had just about ensured that a rock 'n' roll singer of Perkins' vintage couldn't even buy airplay, and with that inability to command airplay went a shot at a major label deal. But then, in a swift kick of irony, Perkins was an all-conquering hero in Britain and Europe to those who still put grease in their hair. He toured overseas to an uproarious reception, but was largely confined to playing the pisspots of the mid-South back home. To compound the irony, the Beatles, who had spearheaded the invasion that kept Perkins invisible back home, had recorded three of his songs, the royalties from which gave him more financial security than he had known in years.
Despite his reputation as a rock 'n' roller overseas, Perkins' thoughts were turning increasingly towards the country market. In the early '60s, as the end of his first tenure at Columbia Records came in view, he had started seriously cultivating country airplay, and his domestic releases on Decca continued in much the same vein. The overseas tours gave Perkins the impetus to cut some rock 'n' roll sessions in both England and Nashville, but the lack of success in either the country or pop markets led to him being dropped by Decca in 1965.
Since 1958 Perkins had been signed to Cedarwood Music as a songwriter. The company had been formed in 1953 as a partnership between Jim Denny, the irascible departing manager of the Opry's Artist Service Bureau, and singer Webb Pierce. On May 28, 1958 Denny married his office manager, Dollie Dearman, and when he got the idea to start a record company the fol-lowing year he found inspiration for the company name sitting at the front desk during the day and at the kitchen table at night.

The Dollie label was launched in March 1959 with a release by Horace Heller, a performer soon beckoned by anonymity. It's unclear what - if any -activity took place under the Dollie logo between 1959 and 1966 when Perkins signed with the label. The first records were numbered 101 thru 103, by the time Perkins joined the label they had started again at 500, suggesting that there was an hiatus of some years. Undoubtedly one hiccup was the death of Jim Denny in 1963. The business was taken over by his sons, John and Bill Denny, who bought out Webb Pierce soon after they assumed control. When they revived Dollie, they negotiated a distribution pact with Laurie Records, a label not best-known for its penetration in the country market.

One consideration in relaunching Dollie may have been the success that Cedarwood's principal competitor, Acuff-Rose, was finding with their Hick-ory label. Hickory was often no more than a retirement home for artists af-filiated with the Acuff-Rose who couldn't land a deal elsewhere, such as Roy Acuff and later Don Gibson, but in 1965 they were as hot as they were going to get with the New Beats, Donovan, Bob Luman and Ernest Ashworth. Even Roy Acuff turned in a hit for them that year. John Denny strenuously denies that what Acuff-Rose were doing had any bearing on what he and his brother did, but that declaration sounds a little hollow.
For Perkins, the end of the Decca contract in 1965 heralded one of the bleakest periods in his life.

After a European tour at the end of 1965, Perkins returned home for Christmas with the conviction that he should give up the music business. He used the royalties from the Beatles recordings to buy a 108 acre fai in near Jackson. He moved his parents there, and worked the farm himself. There is no record of Perkins performing any live gigs for the greater part of 1966. With the memory of Blue Suede Shoes now ten years distant, Dollie repre-sented the best Perkins could get when he went label-shopping. It was ob-vious from the first cut that the Dennys were aiming Perkins fair and square at the market sector they understood best: the country market. The move towards country music was doubly necessary because rock music was now a fair distance from anything that Carl Perkins understood as rock 'n' roll.

Carl Perkins