Carl Perkins was born August 16, 1928, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and taught himself the piano as a boy. Childhood polio left his left arm weakened and short of reach, and rather than work around the limitation he rebuilt his technique around it, turning the arm sideways so that it lay parallel to the keys and striking the bass notes with his elbow. He described the adaptation in plain terms: "When I was small, my hand was too little to make bass chords so I turned my hand around and used my elbow to make them." Other musicians nicknamed him "the crab." His first professional work came in the rhythm-and-blues bands of Tiny Bradshaw and Big Jay McNeely between 1948 and 1949, and in 1949 he left Indiana for Los Angeles, which stayed his base for the rest of his life. That November he cut his first sessions for Savoy, a run of solo and trio sides that included "Summertime," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes," and "The Rosary," with Edwin Perkins on bass and Herb Williams on drums for the trio date.

The early 1950s were broken up by the draft. Perkins played dates around Los Angeles with Miles Davis in 1950 and recorded with the Illinois Jacquet Quintet on January 18, 1951, before entering the Army that same month; he served until November 1952. Back on the scene, he took a steady chair with guitarist Oscar Moore, working in Moore's trio and quartet from 1953 to 1955 and recording for Skylark, Tampa, and Norgran. On July 13, 1954, he filled the piano chair for the Clifford Brown and Max Roach quintet at a Gene Norman concert in Pasadena alongside Teddy Edwards and bassist George Bledsoe, a performance later issued on GNP.

Nineteen fifty-five put him in front of much stronger company. On March 31 he played in a Frank Morgan septet for Gene Norman that also carried Conte Candoli, Leroy Vinnegar (a fellow Indianapolis native, born there five weeks before Perkins in 1928), and Wardell Gray, whose last recorded performances the album preserves. On November 8 he was the pianist on a Dizzy Gillespie orchestra date for Norgran with Harry Edison, Melba Liston, and vocalist Toni Harper, and days later he made Dexter Blows Hot and Cool with Dexter Gordon for Dootone, with Vinnegar again on bass. Dootone's Dootsie Williams then gave him a trio session of his own. Introducing Carl Perkins (Dootone DL-211) holds eleven tracks including five Perkins originals, among them "Way Cross Town," "Marblehead," "Westside," and "Carl's Blues," with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Lawrence Marable on drums. It was the only full album he made as a leader.

October 1956 brought the association he is remembered for. Bassist Curtis Counce assembled a quintet with trumpeter Jack Sheldon, tenor saxophonist Harold Land, drummer Frank Butler, and Perkins, and recorded it for Lester Koenig's Contemporary label across sessions running from October 8, 1956, to January 6, 1958. Three albums came out of that book: The Curtis Counce Group (1957), You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce! (1957), and the posthumously titled Carl's Blues (1960). The group worked steadily enough to appear on KABC-TV's Stars of Jazz in November 1956 with Anita O'Day. Perkins was in demand elsewhere at the same time. He played the October 31, 1956, sextet date that produced Playboys for Chet Baker and Art Pepper; the January 1957 trio sessions for Jim Hall's first album as a leader, Jazz Guitar, with Red Mitchell on bass; the Richie Kamuca Quartet date for Mode in June 1957; Pepper Adams' recorded debut as a leader, the Pepper Adams Quintet album cut in Hollywood in July 1957 for Mode with Stu Williamson, Vinnegar, and Mel Lewis; Victor Feldman's Vic Feldman on Vibes that September; and Vinnegar's own Leroy Walks! for Contemporary across three 1957 dates.

His last documented studio work came in January 1958. The Counce group's closing session on January 6 supplied most of what became Carl's Blues, including the title blues Perkins wrote. A week later, on January 13 and 14, he joined Harold Land, Rolf Ericson, Leroy Vinnegar, and Frank Butler at Contemporary's studio for the album issued as Harold in the Land of Jazz and reissued as Grooveyard, after the Perkins blues that anchors it. Carl Perkins died in Los Angeles on March 17, 1958, at twenty-nine, of a drug overdose. Counce dissolved the quintet not long afterward. Lester Koenig, who had recorded nearly all of the group's output, put the reason bluntly: without Perkins, whose piano style was basic to the group's sound, the band could not be rebuilt.

Perkins was a blues-soaked bebop player whose whole conception grew out of a physical constraint. With his left arm turned flat against the keyboard he voiced two- and three-note chords with a hand that could not stretch, and dropped in bass notes with his elbow, which left him a spare, percussive left hand and threw the weight of the music onto his right-hand line and his time. Bassist Leroy Vinnegar, who worked with him more than anyone else did, called him the dream pianist for a bass player and singled out the infectiousness of his time feel; the relaxed, forward swing invites comparison with his Los Angeles contemporary Hampton Hawes. As a writer he stayed close to blues and rhythm heads, and the pieces that survive him are "Carl's Blues," "Mia" (also issued as "Westside"), "Way Cross Town," and above all "Grooveyard," a minor-key line over an E-flat-minor to A-flat vamp that outlived him as a standard: the Montgomery Brothers named a 1961 Riverside album after it. Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill's textbook Jazz names him among the strongest of the funky hard bop pianists while noting that his death at twenty-nine cut off the legacy he would otherwise have left. The bulk of his best playing is compressed into eighteen months, which is why he turns up on so many West Coast dates of 1956 and 1957 for leaders as different as Chet Baker, Dexter Gordon, and Curtis Counce.