Biography
Born Thomas Wayne Perkins on 22 July 1940 in Battsville, Mississippi, the singer died on 15 August 1971 in Tennessee after a fatal car crash near Memphis. Remembered chiefly as a one-hit wonder, he was the younger brother of Luther Perkins, the guitarist who created and first performed Johnny Cash’s signature two-string style. Perkins attended Humes High School in Memphis, several years after Elvis Presley had passed through the same halls unnoticed. While there he assembled the vocal group the De-Lons, which Scotty Moore—Presley’s guitarist and co-owner of Fernwood Records—took into the studio. Their debut release failed to chart, yet the follow-up, the tear-stained ballad “Tragedy,” climbed to number 5 on the national pop listings. The same song resurfaced in 1961 when the Fleetwoods scored a hit with it. Subsequent singles on other labels never matched that success, although Presley cut one of Perkins’s own compositions, “The Girl Next Door Went A Walking,” in 1960. Later Perkins turned to production, but the promising career ended abruptly with his death in the 1971 automobile accident.
Singles
