Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  From there Sam made the rest of his rounds. He stopped by Stan’s Record Shop at 728 Texas Street, just around the corner from the auditorium, where they chatted with Stan Lewis, a prematurely white-haired twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the music business who had started out supplying five jukeboxes from the back of his parents’ Italian grocery store, then purchased the little record shop that had been his supplier as a full-time business for his wife and himself. Stan’s older brother, Ace, was the drummer in T. Tommy’s band, alternating with their first cousin, D. J. Fontana, who played with Hoot and Curley on the Hayride as well, and Stan had known Sam Phillips ever since Sam first went into the business. As the principal one-stop and independent distributor in the area, he was without question interested in this new artist—but not too interested, because not only was the artist unknown, the genre was untried. Still, Stan had been instrumental in placing Jimmy and Johnny with Chess, previously a blues label almost exclusively, and he was now reaping the benefits of their success. He was always open to new talent, he told Sam; what was good for one was good for all.

  Elvis meanwhile drifted over to the auditorium. It was bigger than the Opry, with spacious dressing rooms for the stars and a large common dressing room on the second floor. The folding chairs on the floor could be taken up for dances or basketball exhibitions, and the balcony curved around on either side of the stage, giving the room a natural echo. He walked out on the stage with his eyes fixed on the floor, looked up once briefly as if measuring the crowd, and then walked back to the hotel. The Negro shacks in the Bottoms, just a few blocks from the grand auditorium entrance, were not much different than the ramshackle structures of Shake Rag, in Tupelo, or the primitive shotguns of South Memphis; Shreveport’s bustling downtown just a couple of blocks away was busy and full of life, and when he ran into Scotty and Bill in the hotel coffee shop, Bill already had his eye on a pretty waitress….

  When he arrived back at the auditorium that night, it was completely different, transformed by the presence not just of an audience and musicians in colorful western outfits but by the almost palpable anticipation that something was going to happen. He was wearing a pink jacket, white pants, a black shirt, a brightly colored clip-on bow tie, and the kind of two-tone shoes that were known as corespondent shoes, because they were the kind that a snappy salesman or a corespondent in a divorce case might be expected to wear. Scotty and Bill were wearing matching western shirts with decorative bibs and dark ties. Bill’s battered bass looked as if it were held together with baling wire, Elvis cradled his child-size guitar, and only Scotty’s handsome Gibson ES 295 lent a touch of professional class to the trio. But everyone was taken with the boy. Tillman Franks, who had dispatched Jimmy and Johnny to Carlsbad but remained behind to play bass in the house band, was almost bouncing with anticipation. Pappy Covington greeted Sam and the boys warmly, as if he hadn’t seen them in months. Even Horace Logan, renowned not just for his impresario’s instincts but for his frosty air of self-congratulation, seemed to take to the boy—there was something about him that brought out almost a protective quality, even in seasoned professionals.

  Sam left to take his seat in the audience. Although he had put up a brave front all day, he really didn’t know how it was going to come out, and he felt like he should do his best to at least try to cue up a sympathetic response from the crowd. He had to admit that he was worried; the boy looked as if he was scared to death, and even though you could rationalize that they were all experienced veterans by now—all those nights at the Eagle’s Nest, the triumph at Overton Park, and of course their Opry appearance—in another way everyone knew that this could be the end of the line.

  Horace Logan was out onstage. “Is there anyone from Mississippi? Anyone from Arkansas? Let’s hear it from the folks from Oklahoma. Now who here’s from Louisiana? Now how many of y’all are from the great state of Texas?” A mighty roar went up as the Western Union clock on the wall registered 8:00 P.M. precisely and the band struck up the familiar Hayride theme, based on the old Negro “minstrel” song, “Raise a Ruckus Tonight.” “Come along, everybody come along,” the audience all joined in, “while the moon is shining bright / We’re going to have a wonderful time / At the Louisiana Hayride tonight.”

  A tall, skinny singer from Shreveport with a television show in Monroe sidled up to the new sensation—he was barely twenty himself and had been knocked out by Elvis Presley ever since hearing the first record at Jiffy Fowler’s Twin City Amusements, a jukebox operation in West Monroe. “I said, ‘Hello, Elvis, my name is Merle Kilgore.’ He turned around and said, ‘Oh, you worked with Hank Williams.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You wrote “More and More” [a number-one hit for Webb Pierce in the fall of 1954]!’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I want to meet Tibby Edwards.’ It was the first thing he said to me. Tibby recorded for Mercury, and he was a star. I said, ‘He’s my buddy, we room together here in Shreveport.’ And I went and got Tibby and introduced him to Elvis. That’s how we got to be friends.”

  JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO,” intoned announcer Frank Page’s impressively measured radio voice, “a young man from Memphis, Tennessee, recorded a song on the Sun label, and in just a matter of a few weeks that record has skyrocketed right up the charts. It’s really doing good all over the country. He’s only nineteen years old. He has a new, distinctive style. Elvis Presley. Let’s give him a nice hand… Elvis, how are you this evening?”

  “Just fine, how are you, sir?”

  “You all geared up with your band—”

  “I’m all geared up!”

  “To let us hear your songs?”

  “Well, I’d like to say how happy we are to be out here. It’s a real honor for us to hav—get a chance to appear on the Louisiana Hayride. And we’re going to do a song for you—You got anything else to say, sir?”

  “No, I’m ready.”

  “We’re gonna do a song for you we got on the Sun record, it goes something like this…” And with that he launched into the first side of his first Sun single.

  The cheers that went up from the audience were encouraged by Frank Page and Horace Logan as they stood to the side of the Lucky Strike backdrop. The microphones hanging out over the floor were turned up when Scotty took a somewhat uncertain solo, and the audience politely responded. Elvis was visibly nervous, his knees were practically knocking together, and the jackknife action of his legs was about all, Sam Phillips was convinced, that was preventing him from blowing his brains out. The reaction was not all that different from the one he had gotten on the Opry—he was so ill at ease it was hard for the audience to really like him, even though it was clear to Sam that they might want to do just that, that they were ready, like Memphis audiences, to respond to the boy’s charm.

  In between shows he went backstage to talk to Elvis. Merle Kilgore noticed them off in a corner huddled together as Sam exhorted Elvis to just relax: the people were there to see him, just let them see what you got, put on your kind of show, if it didn’t work, well, the hell with it, at least we can say we tried. Elvis, Merle noted, looked like he was scared stiff, but then Sam Phillips went to take his seat among the audience, after a little while the trio came out to do their two numbers, and this time it was entirely different. Much of the younger audience from the first show had stayed for the second, Tillman Franks observed, and now they were ready for what the new singer had to offer. For Sam it was a moment never to be forgotten.

  “There was a college up in Texarkana where Elvis’ records had gotten hot, and some of the young people from that college had turned up. Well, when he got through that first number, they were on their feet—and not just them either. Some big fat lady—I mean, it took an effort for her to get up, and she got up and didn’t stop talking, right in the middle of the next number, she didn’t know who I was, she just said, ‘Man, have you ever heard anything that good?’ And, honestly, the tonal impact couldn’t have competed with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, or the Carlisles, who had been on the
week before—I mean, they were pros. But Elvis had this factor of communication, I think the audience saw in him the desire to please, he had that little innocence about him, and yet he had something about him that was almost impudent in a way, that was his crutch. He certainly didn’t mean to be impudent, but he had enough of that along with what he could convey that was just beautiful and lovely—and I’m not talking about his physical beauty, because he didn’t look that pretty then or that good-looking, by conventional standards he should have been thrown off that stage. But I calculated that stuff in my mind: are they going to resent him with his long sideburns—that could be a plus or a minus. But when he came through like he did, it was neither. He stood on his own.”

  He did the same two numbers that he had for the first show—there were no encores, because Mr. Logan was very strict about encores, you didn’t take one unless there was a genuine eruption of the sort that overwhelmed Hank Williams when he sang “Lovesick Blues” seven times in a row and could have kept going all night. For Elvis and Scotty and Bill it wasn’t anything like that, but all three grew visibly more confident, and Elvis, for all the terror that had just engulfed him, responded warmly to the crowd’s enthusiasm for him. Some of the Hayride veterans, like twenty-seven-year-old Jimmy “C” Newman, who had just had his first big hit on Randy Wood’s Dot label with “Cry, Cry Darling,” regarded the proceedings with a certain amount of suspicion. “I’d never seen anything like it before. Here comes this guy, I guess you could almost call him an amateur, rings of dirt on his neck, but he had it all right from the start. He didn’t work into it, he just knew what he was going to do. We’d just stand in the wings and shake our heads. ‘It can’t be, it can’t last, it’s got to be a fad.’ ”

  “I think he scared them a little [in the first show],” said Merle Kilgore. “He was really on the toes of his feet singing. I think they thought he was going to jump off the stage. But when he came back out, he destroyed them—by now they knew he wasn’t going to jump off the stage and beat them, and they absolutely exploded.”

  “What he did,” said Jimmy “C” Newman, “was he changed it all around. After that we had to go to Texas to work, there wasn’t any work anywhere else, because all they wanted was someone to imitate Elvis, to jump up and down on the stage and make a fool of themselves. It was embarrassing to me to see it—Elvis could do it, but few others could.”

  IN THE OCTOBER 16 issue of Billboard, the same date as the first Hayride appearance, there was a small item in Bill Sachs’ “Folk Talent and Tunes” announcing that “Bob Neal of WMPS, Memphis, is planning fall tours with Elvis Presley, the Louvin Brothers, and J.E. and Maxine Brown.” Neal, who had not had a great deal of personal contact with Elvis since the Overton Park show, in July, had been out to see the trio several times at the Eagle’s Nest and was impressed with their potential. Though he had never been involved in management, he had been booking shows in and around Memphis for the last five years, doing local promotion for Opry and Hayride packages and promoting little shows of his own in Arkansas and Mississippi, anywhere, in fact, within the two-hundred-mile radius of the WMPS broadcast signal. He publicized the shows, of course, on his own popular early-morning program, which was on from 5:00 to 8:00, as well as the High Noon Round-Up, featuring the Blackwood Brothers, Eddie Hill, and other hillbilly entertainment, which Elvis had frequently attended. Neal called Sam Phillips and asked if the group had any representation. Sam said not really—Scotty was handling management for the time being, just taking care of things more or less on an interim basis—and the two men agreed that maybe it would be worth having Bob try some bookings, seeing how it worked out. Bob spoke to Elvis, and the boy seemed agreeable, though he certainly didn’t have much to say. And Scotty didn’t appear to have any objections; from all that Neal could see, he simply wanted to go back to being a musician. So Bob went ahead and set up some civic club and schoolhouse bookings for November and early December—in towns like Bruce and Iuka, Mississippi; Helena and Leechville, Arkansas—places to which he had brought his shows many times in the past, where folks knew him and enjoyed his ukelele playing and laughed in recognition of his comfortable, carefully honed cornpone humor.

  On October 20 the Press-Scimitar proudly announced under the headline “Elvis Presley Clicks”: “Elvis Presley, Memphis’ swift-rising young hillbilly singing star, is now a regular member of the Louisiana Hayride Show…. The Hayride specializes in picking promising young rural rhythm talent—and it took just one guest appearance last Saturday for the young Memphian to become a regular.” The announcement was somewhat premature (Sam was still working out an arrangement with Pappy Covington and Horace Logan), but Elvis promptly quit his job, and Scotty and Bill quit theirs, too. They did so with the bravest of intentions, but with not a little trepidation, either. “I hated to let him go,” said Mr. Tipler, who with his wife continued to go out to the Eagle’s Nest, “[but] I could see that he was going places. I just told him, ‘I understand that you can’t work and stay out all night, too.’ I’ve always been one that if somebody can benefit their self, make more of themselves, I don’t never ask them to stay.” Vernon, according to Elvis, took a somewhat less sanguine view. “My daddy had seen a lot of people who played guitars and stuff and didn’t work, so he said: ‘You should make up your mind either about being an electrician or playing a guitar. I never saw a guitar player that was worth a damn.’ ”

  He missed the Hayride for the next two weeks. There had been nothing finalized by the twenty-third, and they were booked at the Eagle’s Nest the following weekend, so they hung around Memphis, practiced at Scotty’s house, and basked in all the attention that was coming their way. They felt like great things were about to happen, if they could just get back to Shreveport. Tillman Franks had promised them work, Pappy Covington had assured them that he could get them gigs through the little booking agency that he operated out of the Hayride offices—they were just itching to get on with their new life. But in the meantime the kids would all be out at Clearpool the weekend of October 29–30—they were playing both Friday and Saturday nights—and it would serve as something of a Memphis send-off.

  That Friday night Bob Neal brought a visitor out to the club. Oscar Davis, known as the Baron of the Box Office, was a flamboyant fifty-year-old veteran of the vaudeville, carnival, and country circuits. With his jaunty boutonniere and elegant cigarette holder, his drawling Boston accent and his habit of fixing his listener in his gaze and focusing all of his considerable charm upon him or her, he could boast truthfully that he had spent more money than many millionaires had ever made, which was one reason that he was perennially broke. A true bon vivant, he lived up to the advertising slogan he used for every show that he promoted: DON’T YOU DARE MISS IT!

  That was how he happened to be in Memphis at this particular juncture. Oscar had worked promotions on his own for years, he had managed and been associated with stars from Hank Williams to Roy Acuff to Ernest Tubb and Minnie Pearl, and he had established a model for the modern country music promoter, but because of his impecunious ways, he occasionally found himself in the employ of one or another of his protégés. On this trip to Memphis he had been doing advance work for “Colonel” Tom Parker, whom Bob Neal had originally met some years before in connection with an Eddy Arnold show at Russwood Park that Neal had emceed. The Colonel had since split with Arnold, whom he had guided to unsurpassed heights in the country music field, over “personal differences” and a question of artistic direction. Parker had put Eddy Arnold in pictures; he had hooked him up with Abe Lastfogel, president of the William Morris Agency, and booked him into Las Vegas; he had carefully supervised every last detail of Arnold’s career. But Arnold wanted to go into television, and he wanted to spend his own, and the Colonel’s, money. The result was that in August 1953 Arnold fired his manager out of the blue, a bitter blow to Tom Parker’s pride but one that he was well on his way to overcoming with his recent signing of country’s new number-one star, Hank Snow, to a lim
ited partnership agreement. Part of the terms of his severance with Arnold were that he would continue to book Arnold on a regional basis, and to that end he had set up a ten-day tour of the mid South in the fall of 1954. Memphis was the fifth date on that tour.

  In the course of his Memphis travels, Oscar stopped by the WMPS studio to cut some spots for the show that afternoon and, as was his wont, asked Bob Neal what was going on around town. Neal, who had his finger in a number of pies, gave him a rapid rundown and then happened to mention this young singer, Elvis Presley, with whom he had an upcoming tour. Oscar had heard of Elvis, there was quite a stir about the boy, and he wondered if there might not be a chance to see the kid—maybe he or Tom could do something for him. As a matter of fact, said Neal, the boy happened to be playing out at the Eagle’s Nest that night: why didn’t they just drive out together and catch the show?