A song from the Drive-By Truckers' 2004 album The Dirty South, Carl Perkins' Cadillac sympathetically tells the story of one of the giants of rock and roll, Sam Phillips of Sun Records, and the respect shown to him by his stable of artists in the mid-1950s. One of the lines in the song states, "Mr. Phillips was the only man that Jerry Lee still would call 'sir.'"
The narrative of the song tells the story that Sam Phillips promised a Cadillac to the first Sun artist who created a gold record. While it was expected that Elvis Presley would be the first to accomplish this, it was actually Carl Perkins. Other Sun Records artists mentioned in the song include Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis.