Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Occasionally Buzzy and the other boys would arrange with Miss Richmond, the Lauderdale Courts supervisor, to use the basement under the main office on Lauderdale. She would give them the key, and they would set up tables and issue invitations, charging twenty-five cents per couple. They’d have Cokes and popcorn and a record player, and in the course of the evening Elvis would never fail to sing. One time he accompanied Buzzy and Paul, who had joined the Junior Order of the Oddfellows and made monthly trips to area hospitals as a kind of civic project, when they went to the Home for Incurables out on McLemore in South Memphis. Ordinarily they just passed out ice cream and cookies and spoke to the patients, but this time, to Buzzy’s surprise, Elvis had brought his guitar with him and got up and sang, making it in Buzzy’s view the first time he ever entertained in Memphis outside of the Courts.

  Senior year he went to work for MARL Metal Products, a furniture-assembling plant on Georgia near the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge, where he worked from 3:00 to 11:30 P.M. each day, but the work took its toll. According to a teacher, Mildred Scrivener: “Elvis was working too hard. He was in my homeroom, and he also was in one of my history classes. One thing I have always been very strict about is the matter of sleeping in class. Nothing can spread yawns and boredom so fast from row to row. But the day came when Elvis fell asleep in class…. That day when the class bell shrilled, Elvis, like a little boy, raised his head, got to his feet, and wandered out like a sleepwalker.” “It got so hard on him,” said Gladys, “he was so beat all the time, we made him quit, and I went [back] to work at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

  That evidently got them thrown out of the Courts. Despite Vernon’s back troubles, in November 1952 it was determined that the Presleys’ projected annual income had risen to $4,133, well over Housing Authority limits, and on November 17 the Presley family got an eviction notice, requiring them to move out by February 28. In a sense their eviction could be seen as evidence of upward mobility, though it seems unlikely Vernon would have taken it that way at the time.

  Elvis meanwhile was making a greater claim on his schoolmates’ attention. It seemed as if he was determined to make a statement, he was intent upon setting himself apart, without ever raising his voice or changing from the polite, well-mannered boy that he knew he would always be. By his dress, his hair, his demeanor, though, he was making a ringing declaration of independence. More and more to his fellow schoolmates he was a “squirrel,” a misfit, a freak, as he would later describe himself, but not a freak to himself. Photographs show an increasing self-confidence, an increasingly studied self-image, even as he was being increasingly rejected by others. He entered a citywide automobile-safety contest sponsored by the Junior Chamber of Commerce and was pictured in the paper changing a tire, expression pensive, dress immaculate: where others wore short-sleeved shirts and work pants and boots, Elvis is spectacularly attired in what could be a pink and black drape jacket, dress pants and loafers, and black shirt.

  Red West, the All-Memphis football player who was reputed to have rescued Elvis in the football-team incident and thus laid the groundwork for a lifelong friendship, admired that he had the guts to be different, but “I really felt sorry for him. He seemed very lonely and had no real friends. He just didn’t seem to be able to fit in.” To Ronny Trout, who shared a workbench with him in wood shop though they were a couple of years apart in school, it was as if he were newly creating himself. “He would wear dress pants to school every day—everybody else wore jeans, but he wore dress pants. And he would wear a coat and fashion a scarf like an ascot tie, as if he were a movie star. Of course he got a lot of flak for this, because he stood out like a sore thumb. People thought, ‘That’s really weird.’ It was like he was already portraying something that he wanted to be. One thing I noticed, and I never really knew what to make of this: when he walked, the way he carried himself, it almost looked as if he was getting ready to draw a gun, he would kind of spin around like a gunfighter. It was weird.

  “The way I found out he could play the guitar—I never remember seeing him have it in school, but one of the projects we had in wood shop was to bring an article from home that needed to be repaired, and our wood shop instructor, Mr. Widdop, would look at it and evaluate what had to be done, and that would be our project for a six-week time period. Anyway, I brought something from home, and Elvis brought a guitar. And he fooled around with it, sanded it, used some rosin glue and fixed a crack in it, stained it, varnished it, then he took this real fine steel wool to get all the bubbles out of the lacquer and bring it down to a satin finish so it looked really good. Then he put the strings back on it and was tuning it just before the period ended. So, naturally, somebody came up and said, ‘Hey, man, can you play that thing?’ And he said, ‘No, not really. I just know a few chords. My uncle’s taught me a few chords.’ So they said, ‘Why don’t you play something for us?’ He said, ‘Naw, I can’t do that,’ and he kept tuning it. Well, somebody grabbed him from behind and locked his arms behind him, and another guy got his car keys out of his pocket, and they said, ‘If you play something, you’ll get your car keys back.’ He said, ‘Well, okay, I’ll try, but I really don’t know that much.’ And he started picking out the melody to a song that most people today probably wouldn’t even know called ‘Under the Double Eagle,’ and he did it very expertly. And it just blew me away. I didn’t even know he could play that guitar—I just thought he was fixing it for somebody else.”

  More and more, it seemed, his determination to be himself—his determination to be a different self—grew. He started wearing a black bolero jacket that he had bought at Lansky’s and a pair of dress pants with a stripe down the side that made him look, some said, like a carhop. He was constantly fooling with his hair—combing it, mussing it up, training it, brushing the sides back, seemingly oblivious to the attention he was getting from teachers and fellow students alike (“We had grown accustomed to those sideburns,” wrote Miss Scrivener in the nostalgic afterglow of success). One time he got a home permanent and came into school the next day asking if he didn’t look like Tony Curtis.

  He put a couple of gallons of gas in the Lincoln and cruised around town by himself or with his cousin Gene or Bobbie—to Leonard’s Barbecue, to the drugstore where Gene worked as a soda jerk; every afternoon he stopped by St. Joseph’s to visit his mother at work, and once or twice he and Gene drove down to Tupelo to visit old friends. Perhaps he attended the Midnight Rambles at the Handy Theater, on Park and Airways. Everyone else did. A whole gang would get together on Sunday night and go out to the colored district in Orange Mound for the late show, which was whites-only. There you could catch Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, Ivory Joe Hunter, Wynonie Harris, even Dizzy Gillespie, and local acts like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Junior Parker, and the comedy team of Rufus (Thomas) and Bones. Was Elvis there—or was he just at home, lying on his bed and listening to Dewey Phillips and dreaming of a world that the music alone could transport him to? By himself he would venture out east to Overton Park, the 330-acre expanse that housed the zoo he had first visited as a child (his uncle Noah had driven the East Tupelo schoolchildren in his school bus), “the same place,” he later recalled, “that I did my first concert. I used to go there and listen to the concerts they had with big orchestras. I watched the conductor, listened to the music for hours by myself—I was fascinated by the fact that these guys could play for hours, you know, and most of the time the conductor wouldn’t even look at his sheet…. I had records by Mario Lanza when I was seventeen, eighteen years old, I would listen to the Metropolitan Opera. I just loved music. Music period.”

  THE PRESLEYS moved out of the Courts on January 7, 1953. At first they moved to a rooming house at 698 Saffarans, just a couple of blocks from Humes, but then at the beginning of April they moved back to their old neighborhood at 462 Alabama, opposite the Blacks’ house on the northeast end of the Courts. Johnny, like his older brother Bill, had by now taken up the bass, married, and moved out of his mother’s hom
e, but like all of his grown brothers and sisters he visited frequently and came back to play music with his friends from the Courts from time to time. “We just thought he was pretty,” Bill’s wife, Evelyn, said of the women’s reaction to Elvis. “We’d sit out there under the tree in front of Mrs. Black’s with him playing guitar: Bill’s mama said he was her boyfriend! We knew he could play, but we didn’t think it was any big deal.”

  The house on Alabama was a big Victorian set on a rise and divided up into two good-size apartments. The rent was fifty dollars a month, payable to a Mrs. Dubrovner, whose husband had been a kosher butcher and who lived down the street herself, and both Mrs. Dubrovner and the Presleys’ upstairs neighbors, Rabbi Alfred Fruchter and his wife, Jeanette, showed a considerable amount of kindness, and financial consideration, toward the new tenants. Mrs. Presley visited with Mrs. Fruchter almost every afternoon after work, and the Fruchters were particularly fond of the boy, who would turn on the electricity or light the gas for them on the Sabbath when it was forbidden for Orthodox Jews to do so for themselves. “They never had much,” said Mrs. Fruchter, but every Saturday morning Vernon and Elvis “would stand outside and polish that old Lincoln like it was a Cadillac.”

  On April 9, 1953, the Humes High Band presented its “Annual Minstrel” show in the Humes Auditorium at 8:00 P.M. It was a Thursday night, and much of the school had turned out to see the dancers, twirlers, xylophone trio, male quartets, band performances, and comic turns. On a printed program that listed twenty-two acts, the sixteenth entry captured a number of people’s attention. “Guitarist…. Elvis Prestly,” it read. He had told only one or two of his friends beforehand, and even they were not fully convinced he would go through with it. For the minstrel show he wore a red flannel shirt that he had borrowed from Buzzy, and he appeared neither visibly nervous nor particularly at ease either. Unlike some of the kids, who were practiced showmen (Gloria Trout, Ronny’s sister, starred in virtually every show that was ever put on at Humes and was renowned for her dance technique), he didn’t appear to know what to do when he stumbled out onstage, stood there for what seemed like a full minute, looked at the audience sidelong from under hooded eyes, and finally, as if an internal switch had somehow clicked on, began to sing.

  “I wasn’t popular in school, I wasn’t dating anybody [there]. I failed music—only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show, and I came out and did my [first number,] ‘Till I Waltz Again with You’ by Teresa Brewer, and when I came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and whispering and so forth, ’cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that. Then I went on through high school and I graduated.”

  He sang at the homeroom picnic at Overton Park. “While other students were dashing around… playing games,” wrote Miss Scrivener, “Elvis sat by himself plunking softly at that guitar. The other students began gathering around. There was something about his quiet, plaintive singing which drew them like a magnet. It wasn’t the rock ’n’ roll for which he later became famous… more like [the ballad] ‘Love Me Tender.’… He went on and on singing his young heart out.”

  Toward the end of the school year he took Regis Vaughan, a fourteen-year-old freshman at Holy Name School, to the senior prom, which was held at the Continental Ballroom in the Hotel Peabody. He had started going with Regis, whom he had met while she was living with her mother in the Courts the previous year, in February, and they went together all spring. Generally they would double-date with Elvis’ cousin Gene and go to a movie or out to the “Teen Canteen” overlooking McKellar Lake at Riverside Park, a recreation spot in South Memphis that was very popular. He sang one song to her, “My Happiness,” over and over, and when they went to the gospel All-Night Singings at Ellis, he embarrassed her by singing along with each of the groups, trying to hit the low notes with the bass singer, the high ones with the lead tenor. For the prom he borrowed a car and wore a shiny new blue suit, but they never danced once the whole evening because Elvis said he didn’t know how. Afterward they were supposed to meet some friends of Elvis’ at Leonard’s Barbecue and go to a party, but the friends didn’t show up. He never told Regis about the talent show at school, he never talked about becoming a singer, “he talked about finding a job so that he could afford to buy a house for his mama.”

  He graduated on June 3, 1953, in a program that took place at 8:00 P.M. in Ellis Auditorium’s South Hall. The Senior Glee Club sang a selection by Rachmaninoff and “Nocturne” by the Czech composer Zdenko Fibich. Elvis was visibly proud that he had made it through, and Vernon and Gladys were no less elated. They had the diploma framed, and it was placed in an honored spot in their home. The 1953 yearbook, the Herald, announced in its “Class Prophecy” that “we are reminded at this time to not forget to invite you all out to the ‘Silver Horse’ on Onion [Union] Avenue to hear the singing hillbillies of the road. Elvis Presley, Albert Teague, Doris Wilburn, and Mary Ann Propst are doing a bit of picking and singing out that-away.” Meanwhile, Elvis had been visiting the Tennessee Employment Security Office regularly since March, looking for a job, preferably as a machinist, to “help work off [his family’s] financial obligation.” Finally, on July 1 he was sent to M. B. Parker Machinists, which had a temporary position open that paid thirty-six dollars a week. He was out in the world.

  “MY HAPPINESS”

  July 1953–January 1954

  SAM PHILLIPS AT 706 UNION AVENUE.

  (COURTESY OF GARY HARDY, SUN STUDIO)

  ON JULY 15, 1953, an article appeared in the Memphis Press-Scimitar about a new group, which was making records for a label that had just started up locally. The Prisonaires were the group. They had begun their career inside the walls of the Tennessee State Penitentiary, in Nashville, where they had come to the attention of Red Wortham, a small-time Nashville song publisher. Wortham contacted Jim Bulleit, only recently the proprietor of his own self-named record company in Nashville (the Bullet label had had a number-one pop hit with Francis Craig’s “Near You” in 1947 and had released B. B. King’s first sides, in 1949) and a recent investor in the new Memphis label. Bulleit called his partner, Sam Phillips, reported the Press-Scimitar story, “and said he had something sensational…. Phillips, who has been operating [his studio, the Memphis Recording Service] since [January] 1950, and has established a reputation as an expert in recording negro talent, was skeptical—until he heard the tape. Then came the problem of how to get the prisoners for a record-cutting session.” The newly appointed warden, James Edwards, however, was fully committed to the principle of prisoner rehabilitation, as was Governor Frank Clement, a close friend and fellow townsman of Edwards’. And so on June 1, “Bulleit drove the five singing prisoners to Memphis, the composer having to stay in prison. An armed guard and a trusty came along, the record company paying the expenses.”

  The Prisonaires arrived at 706 Union Avenue to make their first record for the fledgling Sun label, which, despite Sam Phillips’ considerable experience in the record business (he had been leasing sides to the r&b labels Chess and RPM for three years now and had made an abortive start at his own label a year before), had put out fewer than a dozen releases to date. “They worked from 10:30 A.M. to 8:30 P.M.,” the article noted, “until the records were cut just right to suit painstaking Mr. Phillips.”

  “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” came out about the same time that the local story did. It went on to become a hit, as the reporter, Clark Porteous, had predicted it would, if nowhere near as big a hit as it would become when Johnnie Ray recorded it three years later, in 1956. It was the song that put Sun Records on the map, though, and, very likely, the item that captured the attention of Elvis Presley as he read about the studio, the label, and “painstaking” Sam Phillips, who had staked his reputation on a recording by an unknown singing group and a song whose plaintive notes Elvis heard reverberating over and over again in his mind and in his memory and on the air.

  Why didn’t everyone else come running to 706
Union Avenue at this point? Why didn’t Lee Denson and Johnny Black and Johnny and Dorsey Burnette and the dozens of other aspiring young singers and players in and around the city flock to the doors of the Memphis Recording Service, just up the street from the newspaper and less than a mile away from the teeming downtown area? I don’t know. It may have had something to do with the fact that Sun started out as a blues and “race” label, it may simply have been that none of the others was as innocent, or as open, as a young Elvis Presley, who could dream of success beyond the scope of his knowledge or experience. It’s a question that I put to nearly every Memphis musician that I interviewed in the course of doing this book, but the closest that I got to an answer was that they simply didn’t think of it—they were too caught up in other things, boxing or girls, playing the honky-tonks, some of them made recordings of their own voice in a booth at the five-and-dime for twenty-five cents, they may even have harbored the ambition to get on the radio and become a star, like Slim Rhodes or Eddie Hill—but it never seems to have occurred to any of them that there was even a possibility of making records, at least not here in Memphis. Did it occur to Elvis Presley? Perhaps. Perhaps, like so many things in his life, it was no more than inchoate desire, a vision he could scarcely make out, words that remained unformed. But it was a vision that he pursued.