Go, cat, go!

One of the last living pioneers of rock, Carl Perkins is best known as the man who wrote "Blue Suede Shoes," the song that galvanized a generation of teenagers and redefined the honky-tonk music of his native South for the pop mainstream. Carl Perkins was born in a three-room shack in Lake County, Tennessee, the son of a sharecropper whose family worked the cotton fields. The stirring music of his black co-workers struck a responsive chord in the young Perkins, who learned to play guitar from a picker called Uncle John. Practicing to the music of the Grand Ole Opry on his father's radio, Carl…