by Molly Gloss
Sun was mostly recording black musicians in those days and Mr. Phillips will tell you, he was particularly looking for a white man who had a black sound and what used to be called a “Negro feel.” A white singer who could bring in a broader audience for that type of music. Mr. Phillips wasn’t looking for close harmony when we walked in, but after he heard us, he was interested enough to bring us back to the studio a couple of times and finally we had a session with Scotty Moore on bass and Bill Black on steel string guitar [scattered applause] to see if we could come up with something. It went all day into the night with nothing much taking hold. We were tired, just about to quit, when Jesse, messing around, started belting out Arthur Crudup’s old blues number “That’s All Right.” And I jumped in, but it wasn’t any stacked harmony, I was just coming in rough, and then the others picked up their instruments and it was gritty as all get-out. But Mr. Phillips happened to have the door to the studio standing open, and he stepped in and said, “Go back and do that again,” and he recorded it. [applause]
Maybe you know the rest of that story, Dewey playing the song on his radio show a bunch of times and everybody thinking we were black at first, and then playing a show at Overton Park and all the girls screaming when we shook our legs. [shouts and prolonged applause] A lot of the black groups on Beale Street shimmied around some, and it was always a natural thing for both of us, just like it was for them. Feeling the rhythm, and feeling like we just couldn’t stand still, and I was nervous, besides, so in the instrumental parts I would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking and the crowd would just go wild. It wasn’t a calculated thing, but as time went on we both started being conscious of what would get a reaction. One of us would do something and if it provoked the audience then we’d both take it up, and maybe take it a little farther.
Then Bob Neal signed on as our manager and we played the regional circuit for a couple of years, calling ourselves the Hillbilly Cats. [a few whoops] Some of those teenage boys in the audience got to hating us [laughter], which I guess was on account of the girls screaming. They were worried we were out to steal their girls, I guess. There were occasions in some towns in Texas when we’d have to be sure to have a police guard because somebody was always trying to take a crack at us, or get up a gang and try to waylay us. I never heard of that happening to the Everly Brothers [laughter], but I happen to know it was those squeaky-clean Everlys [gestures toward the Everlys] that the kids should have been worried about. It was always Phil and Don who were out to steal the girls. [applause, laughter]
We were making records for Sun, ten sides or so by then, but not getting much radio airplay, which Bob always said was because our music was hard to pin down, put a name to. The country music disc jockeys said we sounded too much like black singers, and the R & B guys said our blues had too much hillbilly sound. Rockabilly was what everybody called it later, but there just wasn’t a name for it right then.
We were a bit too wild for the Grand Ole Opry, but Bob got us a regular Saturday night gig on the Louisiana Hayride, and then Colonel Parker come along [scattered boos, Mr. Presley’s hand rising to quiet them], and he got us signed with RCA. Well, we were still minors, just twenty years old, so it was our daddy who signed for us.
The first song we did with RCA was “Heartbreak Hotel” [applause], and they put some money behind it, promoted it pretty heavy, got us some radio airplay, which is what we’d been needing, and I guess you could say that song did fairly well for us. [applause] Everything went pretty crazy after that. I don’t know if y’all remember, but we had ten number one hits, I think it was, and did all those TV shows—Milton Berle, Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan—and that silly movie, Double Trouble, all of it in those first couple of years. Not even two years, it was twenty-one months from when “Heartbreak” hit the charts to when I went off to the Army, just twenty-one months, and we were touring all that time when we weren’t recording or making a movie or flying off to do some TV show. Amazing to think about, even now, how much happened in such a short time.
Well now I think I’d better wrap this up. I wanted to talk about those early times, the way we started, because the rest of it, the last twenty-five years and what all, has been talked just about to death.
We were a couple of poor dumb Southern country boys who got lucky, that’s what folks used to say. [boos] But luck is just life coming together, working itself out the way it will do, this is what Momma always said.
So I will finish up by telling you this one time life worked itself out. It was after we did the first Milton Berle show and we were flying back to Nashville, flying over Arkansas, when one of the engines died and the plane heeled over pretty hard and started to drop. Now this was 1956, and we were just getting started—there was just the one album and it had just come out. So I think of that sometimes, that if that plane had gone on and crashed y’all would have “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Heartbreak Hotel,” but that’d be all of it. We’d have been nothing but a footnote to the history of rock and roll, not anybody you’d think of voting into the Hall of Fame.
All our lives Jesse and I wondered about the way he was born, which was a kind of miracle and a mystery. We both of us had these dreams where we were separated but we went on believing in each other even though each of us was sure that the other must be lost. We dreamed we were in a place all dark and without shape, and we were waiting there for the other one to show up. And this felt like it was only part dream and the rest was part memory.
We were both always interested in the spiritual side of things, the meaning of life, those soulful questions, which was on account of our dreams and the way Jesse was born. And we were readers, both of us, we carried around a trunk full of books when we were on the road, and we’d read certain parts to each other out loud. While we had been waiting to go on the Milton Berle show, he had read to me something about the Buddhist way of thinking—how people have all these lifetimes, and how the dead meet up in this place called the Bardo, which is some kind of state of existence between two lives on earth. You meet up there with the ones you love, and you talk things over before being born again. Or anyway that’s how he understood it, and he thought our dreams might be some memory of being in the Bardo, each of us waiting for the other one to get there.
So that time over Arkansas, when the plane looked to be going down, there was a minute when we thought this might be it, this might be all of this lifetime we were going to get. I looked over at Jesse and he just smiled and said, “Look for me, Elvis. I’ll be waiting.”
And I said to him, “I will, Jesse. I’ll look for you.”
And now he’s gone I think often about how he used to say he would be the one to go first—that he had been the one to go first in all our lifetimes. So I think of him waiting for me. And I know when I get there I will go looking for him and when we find each other, the string that joins me to him will play such a note, y’all will hear it all the way up here in the world.
[silence]
[sustained applause]
Excerpted from citations for the Presley Brothers on the occasion of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
The Presleys reshaped [those] old R & B songs—infused them with their own vocal character—but they never softened the wailing, reckless edges, as so many white artists were doing in the 1950s. And it was the cover image of their first album, Elvis and Jesse!—the brothers’ faces transformed by the music, their guitars lifted high—that crucially placed the guitar, not the piano, at the center of this new music known as rock and roll.
—Music critic Robert Rodman
The Presleys, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation—the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture.
—Historian Marty Jezer
Their early recordings, more than any others, contain the seeds of what rock and roll was, has been, and most likely what it may foreseeably become.
—Criti
c Dave Marsh
Hall of Fame Series Interview. Recorded in the Foster Theater, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, Ohio, February 22, 1997
John Halliman: Welcome, Mr. Presley. Thank you for being here.
Elvis Presley: It’s my pleasure.
JH: You yourself—that is, Elvis, the singer-songwriter—were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year, twenty-nine years after your first solo album [applause] but I want to start by talking just a bit about you and your brother, about the Presley Brothers. As a duo, you were in that very first group of musicians inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1986. Bob Dylan, speaking at your induction, said when he first heard the Presley Brothers, “it felt like busting out of jail.” Fats Domino, also in that first group, called you and your brother “the Kings.”
EP: I’ll tell you who the kings of rock and roll are, it’s those guys we heard growing up, those black singers we took after. It’s Arthur Crudup, and all the rest.
JH: Arthur Crudup was a well-known black musician in Memphis, is that right? You heard him sing in the blues clubs there?
EP: Yes sir, we did. If I ever got to the place where I could feel all that old Arthur felt, I’d be a rocker like nobody ever saw.
JH: Little Richard, who was inducted in that same group with you and your brother, has said that the Presley Brothers opened the door for black music, allowed black musicians to make it into the mainstream. But there have been a few critics over the years who’ve accused you and your brother of “stealing” black music.
EP: Well, we did steal it, I guess. It was the music we liked to listen to, and we liked to sing it, if that’s stealing. Rock and roll is just rhythm and blues, or it sprung from that, mixed up with old-timey country music, hillbilly music, and we always tried to show respect for all those artists we listened to when we were kids.
JH: The Everly Brothers were also inducted into the Hall of Fame that year. You and your brother are most often compared to the Everlys, and I wonder what you think of that comparison, what differences or similarities you see.
EP: Well, it’s what they always used to say, we were the rowdy boys and they were the good boys. [laughter] No, all of us come out of the country tradition some way or other, but I would say Don and Phil stayed closer to it than we did. They could get to rocking pretty hard, but it was always with a steel-string guitar, strumming or fingerpicking, kind of a bluegrass instrumentation, and that tight, melodic vocal harmony. I guess we took it more toward a backbeat-heavy R and B. We got away from stacked harmonies into kind of a raw, slurred vocal style. And we always jiggled around a bit more than they did. [laughter, applause] But you know, rock and roll is a big old tent and there’s plenty of room in it for all of us. We were big fans of the Everlys.
JH: After you were discharged from the Army, you and your brother only briefly performed as a duo and then split up. Would you talk about that?
EP: Well, that’s been talked about till the cows come home.
JH: But if I may say so, not very often by you. You spent two years in the Army, which some of your biographers have said was the beginning of your split. I wonder if you could start by just saying a little about that, about being out of the music business for so long, separated from your brother both musically and physically for the first time in your lives.
EP: Well, you know, I got a draft notice and Jesse didn’t. The Memphis Draft Board had a lot of leeway in those days, and people say they were trying to split us up, that they thought we were a bad influence on their children. We never did see how any type of music could have a bad influence on people when it’s only music, but we did think maybe my going into the Army would be the end of our career. RCA had us into the studio to record some songs to put onto the radio while I was gone, and then Jesse kept on touring, paired up with different fellows, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis, which the Colonel billed as Jesse Presley and Friends. So it worked out all right.
JH: Ten of the songs you recorded together before you went into the Army hit the top of the charts while you were away.
EP: Well, you know Jesse had some hits too, singing solo. “Hard-Headed Woman,” that was his. And he had made that one picture while I was over there in Germany—
JH: King Creole.
EP: Yes sir. And a couple of hits came from that.
JH: And when you came out of the Army you and Jesse made only the one album together before you each went off to separate careers.
EP: Well, he enjoyed making that picture, and he wanted to get into making more movies. There’s not much call for identical twins in the movies [laughter], and I guess we had used up about all the ideas they had for it when we made that first one.
JH: Double Trouble.
EP: Yes sir, that’s the one. So Jesse started making movies, and sometimes, you know, it would interfere with our recording schedule and our touring schedule. So after a while we just each of us went our own way.
JH: It was amicable?
EP: Yes sir, it was.
JH: Is there anything more you’re willing to say about the breakup?
EP: No sir, that’s pretty much all I want to say about it.
JH: Nothing about Priscilla or—
EP: No sir, that’s all I will say.
JH: You broke up in 1961. Your brother made twenty-seven movies in the 1960s, almost three a year, which most critics have said were no more than vehicles for soundtrack albums. There were some good songs in the first few movies but it seemed like they were more and more a watering down of the music that had made the Presley Brothers so famous. And in those same years, you were out there playing small town clubs and fairs, very small venues. Colonel Parker had to stop managing your career to focus on your brother, and you weren’t recording at all. So each of you in your different ways had fallen from the heights, so to speak. Were you in touch with Jesse during that time?
EP: We were in touch, yes sir. But I want to say something else about Jesse’s movies, and about his not being at the heights. You know they offered him Jon Voight’s part in Midnight Cowboy, but Fox was making quite a bit of money off those other pictures, and they had him locked into them.
JH: I didn’t know that.
EP: West Side Story is another one that was offered to him, back when we first split up. But he had that contract with Hal Wallis and he couldn’t get out of it.
JH: Did you and Jesse talk about the track your careers were on? Did you talk about getting back together? Jesse’s movies were making money, but was he concerned about what had happened to his music? And were you concerned that you might never have a solo song make it onto the charts?
EP: Jesse always said, “I’m making these silly movies so you can go off and be a poet.”
JH: A poet?
EP: I had started to write songs, that’s what he meant by being a poet.
JH: He said he was making movies so you could write songs?
EP: It was something like that, yes sir. It seemed like everybody was focused on him, and they were pretty much leaving me alone, and he’d say, well, you need the quiet so you can work on your writing.
JH: Of course eventually he did get away from, as you say, those silly movies. He started touring, he had a whole other career in the seventies, filling those big arenas, and by then you were beginning to record again, singing your own songs, you went down a very different path from your brother’s. And you are now, along with Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, maybe Leonard Cohen, often mentioned as one of rock and roll’s first generation of singer-songwriters.
[silence]
EP: I don’t know if you’re asking me a question. [laughter]
JH: [laughing] I guess I’m not. Well, I will just say that “poetry” is not a bad way to describe the songs you write. Even when the melodies are simple the lyrics are complex; sometimes, to my ear, opaque. You’ve written quite a lot about loneliness and separation, death and loss, about drug use, about faith and religion, you’ve written about the toll taken by celebrity. I
don’t want to say all your songs are dark, but even your love songs are shaded with something I would call worry, or maybe yearning, or regret.
EP: That’s the blues, I guess. There’s joy in the blues, but it’s always a little bit sad, a little bit shaded—that’s a good word—with worry, with regret. That’s where my music comes from, the blues. That’s where we started, Jesse and me.
JH: The “white nights” in blues clubs, as I’ve heard you say in interviews. But I want to get back to how things changed for you when you became Elvis, just Elvis. You made a comeback as a solo act and then you won several Grammys—
EP: We both did. Jesse had three.
JH: He did, yes. Not for rock and roll, but he did win in the spiritual category.
EP: It was gospel that we loved before anything, growing up. He was always proud of those albums.
JH: I think you know Dave Hilbrun? I heard him saying the other day that Jesse Presley was the greatest white gospel singer of his time. That he was the last rock and roll artist to make gospel a vital part of his music. But let’s shift gears now, and before we run out of time I want to ask you about who is on your list of favorite singers. You have often talked about the old blues singers, but who is it you admire among your peers, your contemporaries?
EP: Oh, that’s a long list. A real long list. [pause] Well, I’ll just tell you to listen to Roy Orbison. He gets up there on those high notes and he doesn’t back off, he doesn’t go soft like most of us do, he takes it high and sings it stronger than he does in his natural voice. Nobody else does that. And he writes some great songs, great storytelling, so much nuance of emotion.
