“Blue Suede Shoes” is a favorite of Elvis Presley fans around the world, and they oddly have something in common with legendary rock outfit Black Sabbath.
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It’s not exactly that surprising that the heavy metal pioneers were low-key fans of the tune. “Blue Suede Shoes” is considered one of the very first rockabilly songs to appear on a record, and it definitely kicked off an era to be remembered for the genre.
Black Sabbath isn’t the only band to cover the tune, though they are certainly among the oddest. John Lennon, Conway Twitty, Pat Boone, The Dave Clark Five, and Jimi Hendrix are just a few others who took on the song with their own renditions.
Why Black Sabbath Covered the Elvis Presley Classic, “Blue Suede Shoes”
In May of 1970, Black Sabbath was in the middle of recording sessions for the famed German television program Beat-Club. They decided to play a more uplifting song during the sessions. That upbeat number was none other than Carl Perkins’ (and later Elvis Presley’s) “Blue Suede Shoes”. Surprisingly enough, Beat-Club opted to run the performance during their 55th episode.
Toni Iommi would later say that the decision to play the rockabilly tune was just a joke, or rather a “run-through for the cameras.”
“That was a joke, basically,” said Iommi. “We just started playing that, and Ozzy hasn’t got a clue what the words were. And ‘course, you can imagine the bloody shock when we saw it out on TV. We thought, ‘My God, what’s this?’, ’cause it just weren’t supposed to be there. And we thought, ‘Ah, it’s German TV. Nobody’s ever gonna see this, anyway,’ you know? Little did we know.”
He was actually on the nose with that bit about Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne did not know the lyrics of the song outside of the opening lines. However, he trucked through it like a professional and delivered a few ad-libbed lines of his own: “I know a girl she lives next door / She sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall / But don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.”
Though Black Sabbath got the Elvis lyrics about as wrong as one possibly could, they had energy and drive. It was a cute moment for an otherwise not-so-cute band.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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