Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were thrilled to meet this larger-than-life character with his stories of the big time, the glamorous world that they could only read about in fan magazines like Country Song Roundup and Country & Western Jamboree. Davis cut quite a figure in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the club, and when he invited Elvis to stop by the show at Ellis Auditorium on Sunday—he would be back in town by then after traveling to Nashville the next day and advancing the upcoming Monday and Tuesday shows there—Elvis jumped at the chance. Maybe, Mr. Davis suggested, he would even be able to introduce Elvis to Eddy Arnold, who was always interested in new talent.

  That Sunday at 6:00 P.M. Elvis walked up the familiar steps of the entrance to Ellis Auditorium. The show included Minnie Pearl, guitar virtuoso Hank Garland, local hillbilly star Eddie Hill, and the singing group the Jordanaires, not to mention Robert Powers, the World’s Smallest Hillbilly Singer. The man at the box office recognized him immediately and gave him the tickets that had been left in his name, and he attracted a good deal of attention himself sitting up front in his pink shirt and black pants and sharp white shoes. Eddy sang “Don’t Rob Another Man’s Castle,” “I’ll Hold You in My Heart,” “Any Time,” and “I Really Don’t Want to Know” (his latest number-one hit), all in that effortlessly flowing voice, with the smooth quartet backing of the Jordanaires.

  After the show was over, Bob Neal found Elvis and took him backstage, where he wandered around the unfamiliar setting in a kind of daze. Oscar Davis came over and seemed genuinely pleased to see him; he introduced him to Eddy and to Hoyt Hawkins of the Jordanaires. He had really enjoyed the group’s singing, Elvis mumbled with his eyes on the floor. Well, they had enjoyed his singing, too, Hoyt said. They had heard his record on the radio when they were out in California with Eddy. He sounded like a quartet singer to them. Elvis blushed and fidgeted with his hands. If he ever got to the point where he had the kind of success that Eddy Arnold had, he said, he would like to get a group like the Jordanaires to sing with him; if he ever achieved that kind of success he would like them to sing behind him on record—did Hoyt think that was possible? Hoyt said he was sure that it was; they did lots of background work in Nashville, it was more and more popular nowadays—they’d love to work with him someday. Oscar seemed anxious for them to go. There was a little coffee shop across the street, maybe he and Elvis and Bob Neal could go over there and have a Coke or a cup of coffee. A heavyset man in a rumpled, ready-made suit with a cigar stuck in his mouth eyed them briefly from across the room, then turned his attention elsewhere. Who was that? Elvis asked Oscar as they exited the backstage area. That, said Oscar, with a respectful but somewhat impatient gesture, was Colonel Parker.

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY NIGHT he signed a standard union contract with the Hayride for a period of one year. He would receive $18 per appearance as leader; Scotty and Bill would get $12 apiece. And they were permitted to miss five dates a year for outside bookings, though Mr. Logan assured him that informal arrangements could be made if other circumstances arose. Vernon and Gladys accompanied him to Shreveport to sign the contract, and they all stayed at the Captain Shreve Hotel.

  That same week, with “Good Rockin’ Tonight” number three on the Memphis charts and the first single still showing up on territorial charts throughout the South, Billboard ran a review of the new single, once again in the “Spotlight” section. “Elvis Presley,” it said, “proves again that he is a sock new singer with his performances on these two oldies. His style is both country and r.&b. and he can appeal to pop.” Sam Phillips was delighted. It wasn’t simply that this gave him further ammunition in his crusade—it was becoming increasingly clear that there was a groundswell building which distributors and jukebox operators and one-stops could ignore only at their peril. Bill Haley had a couple of records out there that proved the same damn point, and every day Sam was seeing new evidence of it in the country boys who were showing up on his doorstep because they were hearing something in the music that, without being able to put a tag on it, they had recognized all along. And Sam knew that a day was coming, he knew as sure as he was born that a day was coming when this music would prevail, he didn’t need any damn industry backslapping to convince him of it—but this was Billboard, after all, this was Paul Ackerman, a man whom he had yet to meet but for whom he had the deepest respect, and he was hearing the same thing in the music that Sam Phillips was.

  Gladys dutifully pasted the review in the scrapbook she was keeping—she couldn’t believe how rapidly it was filling up. She and Dixie talked excitedly about his new “career.” They chewed over every scrap of information that either of them could come up with, it didn’t seem possible somehow that all of this could be happening, and happening so fast—you should have seen the young people in Shreveport, she told Dixie excitedly, they practically went crazy over him, he had to come back and do an encore both shows. And the hotel was so nice, too….

  DIXIE WAS WORRIED about Elvis. When he was gone, she worried about him, she prayed for his success and she prayed that the success wouldn’t change him. When he was at home, she worried that things were in fact changing, that where just three months ago the main thing on both their minds was marriage and whether they would have the strength to wait, now it seemed his mind was always somewhere else. She wondered if it was on someone else, but she didn’t think so, she was sure not, it was just that he was always so distracted, and everywhere he went he was recognized, some of the girls were almost shameless the way they called attention to themselves, and he really didn’t seem to mind. They stopped by the Chisca to visit with Dewey while he did his radio show, and Elvis went down there sometimes by himself. She didn’t know what exactly they did afterward: sometimes they played pool, sometimes they just watched movies in Dewey’s garage, and she knew that they went down on Beale, because he told her about meeting B. B. King and about some of the colorful clubs and club owners that he had run into. He seemed really excited about it—he had seen a nattily dressed Lowell Fulson at the Club Handy, and he sang her some of Fulson’s brand-new number, “Reconsider Baby,” which she might have heard if there was still time to listen to records at Charlie’s; he described how Calvin Newborn did the splits while he was playing the guitar at the Flamingo Lounge. The pure enthusiasm, the wide-eyed fascination, the hunger for new experience, were all very much part of the boy she knew, but there was something different about him, too, she knew it and Mrs. Presley did also, but neither one of them wanted to confess it to the other, so they skirted the issue and merely expressed their concern that the boys would drive carefully.

  Toward the end of football season Elvis drove by Humes just as the football team was heading out to Bartlett to play a game. One of the star players, Red West, who had been on the team as a freshman when Elvis had tried out junior year, spotted him just as the team was getting on the bus and called out to him. “Congratulations,” he said when Elvis got out of his old Lincoln coupe and ambled over. He invited Elvis to come watch the game, so Elvis followed the bus out to Bartlett and, when the game was over, asked Red if he wouldn’t like to come out to a show he was doing that weekend, and for the rest of the school year Red accompanied him off and on to shows that were booked on the weekends.

  He liked having Red around, it made him feel more comfortable, and Red got along okay with Scotty and Bill, but still he felt strange in Memphis, he felt almost as if people were making more of him than he deserved, as if he were onstage all the time and never quite at ease, never able to be entirely himself. He was becoming a hometown celebrity of sorts and didn’t know how to act. On November 8 they played out at Memphis State for a blood drive, and he had his picture taken with Mayor Tobey. “He would look in the papers,” said Guy Lansky, “he was worried about what they said about him.” Ronnie Smith recalled running into Elvis at WHHM one day, “and he said, ‘Come on, Ron, I’ll show you my new Cadillac.’ We got in the elevator and came back down and went around the parking lot and kept walking until we was i
n front of the telephone company. That was where his old Lincoln was parked!” Sometimes old friends passed him on the street—he didn’t know if they were laughing at him, or if it was because they disapproved, or if they thought he felt somehow that he was above them now.

  In Shreveport it was different. It was as if he were a different person; he could create a whole new image for himself and never have anyone bring up the old one. In Shreveport the girls were falling all over themselves to get to him. When he and Scotty and Bill returned to Shreveport the week after Gladys and Vernon came down, they holed up at the Al-Ida Motel in Bossier City, across the river, and the girls started showing up almost as soon as they arrived, as if they sensed his presence. For a kid who had spent scarcely a night away from home in his nineteen years, it was like being away at summer camp: he had always loved flirting with the girls, he loved playing with them and teasing them, but now there was no one around to see that it didn’t go too far. And they didn’t seem too concerned about it either. In between shows at the auditorium he would peek out from behind the curtain, then, when he spotted someone that he liked, swagger over to the concession stand, place his arm over her shoulder, and drape his other arm around someone else, acting almost like he was drunk, even though everyone knew he didn’t drink.

  “He was a typical teenager,” said Scotty. “Kind of wild, but more like in a mischievous kind of way. He loved pranks and practical jokes. We had to practically beat him with a stick to get him out of bed. His parents were very protective. His mama would corner me and say, ‘Take care of my boy. Make sure he eats. Make sure he—’ You know, whatever. Typical mother stuff. But it always came down to me. He didn’t seem to mind; there was nothing phony about it, he truly loved his mother. He was just a typical coddled son, that’s about all you can say, very shy—he was more comfortable just sitting there with a guitar than trying to talk to you. Bill and I would usually be the ones to do most of the talking, and yet he could be very extroverted, too. You know, I’d been all over and he’d never been outside the city limits. He watched and he learned, I never said anything to him because we communicated pretty much without talking anyway—but most of what he didn’t know, it was just that nobody had ever told him. When he got to Shreveport, he was just running around, I think, sowing his wild oats.”

  With Merle Kilgore he would hang out at Murrell’s Cafe, on Market Street, opposite the Hayride offices. They would sit for hours sometimes, eating hamburgers and talking about music and eyeing the girls. “He reminded me of Hank Williams,” said Merle, who as a fourteen-year-old had met Williams and whose admiration for his idol continued to know no bounds. “Something in his eyes. He’d ask you a question, and his eyes would be asking you another question. It was that look. He’d wait for the answer, but his eyes would be asking the question. I’d only seen that in Hank and Elvis.” Sometimes they would go down to the bus station to play pinball with Tibby Edwards or stop by Stan’s Record Shop to thumb through the rhythm and blues racks. You ate when you wanted, you slept when you wanted, the girls came running after you—it was a teenager’s dream. Every night he called home and spoke to his mother; frequently he called Dixie to express his undying love. But then he was free to do whatever he wanted.

  They worked one night at the Lake Cliff Club, where Hoot and Curley played ordinarily. Elvis was attracted to Hoot’s pretty daughter, Mary Alice, but he was kind of nervous about asking Hoot, the steel player on Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call,” for permission to take her out. The gig at the Lake Cliff turned into something of a joke. Hoot and Curley had been playing there for six years, and they had their following, but unfortunately their following hadn’t been alerted to the fact that they wouldn’t be playing at the Lake Cliff that night, and if they didn’t throw things, they did practically everything but. By the end of the first set the club had just about emptied out, and it was, in Scotty’s assessment, “a complete bust.”

  On the basis of Tillman Franks’ enthusiasm, and his promise of work, they settled in at the Al-Ida for what was intended to be a two-week period in the middle of November, only to discover that Tillman, who had suddenly become persona non grata at the Hayride, couldn’t deliver. Just how panicked they must have felt can be deduced from Scotty’s vivid memories of being “marooned” in Shreveport, stranded without even the money to pay their hotel bill or buy enough gas to get back to Memphis. In fact they were not stranded for long, and they may simply have spent all their money in expectation of making more. In any case, within days Pappy Covington had work for them in Gladewater, Texas, some sixty miles west of Shreveport.

  Pappy called Tom Perryman, a young go-getter who had made his mark in Gladewater at radio station KSIJ, where he had been working since 1949. In addition to deejaying, he had served as engineer, newsman, sports announcer, sales manager, program director, and general manager at various times and also started a local talent show, which he broadcast first from the studio, then, as it grew, from the local community center and the three-hundred-seat movie theater in town. Eventually he put the show on the road, where it played schoolhouses and high school gymnasiums in towns throughout the outlying area. Perryman also booked Hayride shows and occasionally put recording artists with his traveling talent show as a kind of extra draw, which was how he met Jim Reeves, then a DJ in Henderson, Texas, whom he later came to manage and partner in various enterprises. He began to book some of these single artists into clubs and honky-tonks like the Reo Palm Isle in Longview and in general was one of the busiest promoters in Northeast Texas, a territory that appeared to be as music-mad as Memphis or any other region in the country. He had been playing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” since it first came out, “because of the unique arrangement. That sound was just something you never heard.” So he was not completely at a loss when Pappy Covington, with whom he had already booked quite a number of shows, called on a Monday morning and wondered “if I had a place where I could put an act right quick.

  “He said, ‘There are some boys down here that are broke, they don’t have the money to get back to Memphis.’ Well, I had a friend that had a honky-tonk right out on the Tyler Highway. So I said, ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ and I called this buddy of mine, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing anything, come on out. Who are they?’ I said it was this new act out of Memphis called Elvis Presley. So sure enough, I played that record a lot the next two or three days and come Friday night, here they come. Just Elvis and Scotty and Bill in a Chevrolet with that big old bass on top of the car.

  “The way it would work, I would book the show, the club owner would take the bar, and I would take the money off the door. My wife, Billie, would usually work the door. Then we would pay the expenses of the gig, if you had to pay a sponsor or what little advertising there might be. Most of the advertising was done on my [radio] show, and we’d do a live show from the studio, too, promoting that night’s performance. Then I would take fifteen percent of the gross, and what was left would go to the act. I never will forget: that first night we took in a total of ninety dollars. That was all we had. Of course I didn’t take any of it. I knew those boys needed the money, so I gave them all of it.

  “You know, he was really a natural. When Elvis was performing, everyone had the same basic reaction. It was almost spontaneous. It reminded me of the early days, of where I was raised in East Texas and going to these ‘Holy Roller’ Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people get religion. I said, ‘Man, that’s something.’ You’d see it in the later years with the big sound systems and the lights, but Elvis could do it if there wasn’t but ten people [in the room]. He never realized what he had till later years. He said, ‘Man, this sure is a good crowd in this part of the country. Are they always that way?’ I said, ‘No, man. They never seen anything like you.’ Nobody had.

  “It won’t happen again in this generation or the next, I don’t believe. He just came along at the right time with the right thing. Because it was after the war. People my age grew up with the big band music in t
he forties. But those kids, the generation that were children during the war, they had no music to identify with, they were looking for something they could identify with, and this new sound was a combination of it all.”

  On Thursday, November 25, Elvis was booked into Houston for the first time, at the Houston Hoedown, where he was listed way down on the bill but made a considerable impression on the MC for the popular live broadcast, KNUZ’s Biff Collie, who also happened to have a partnership in the club. Collie, a native of San Antonio and a ten-year broadcast veteran at the age of twenty-eight, was a highly influential figure in radio and in fact the person who had originally gotten T. Tommy Cutrer his job in Shreveport. It was through T. Tommy and Tillman Franks, with whom Biff also went way back, that Biff first heard of Elvis Presley. In fact, he had stopped off in Memphis with Tillman just the week before to see him perform, after first picking up Tillman in Shreveport on the way to the third annual Country Music Disc Jockey convention in Nashville, which Biff had had a considerable hand in organizing. Tillman’s act, Jimmy and Johnny, was booked into the Eagle’s Nest on Wednesday night with this new Memphis “phenom” that Biff had been hearing so much about, so he and Tillman stopped by the club.

  Biff was not that impressed. The boy was “different” enough but not really “sensational”; if anything, Jimmy and Johnny took the show. At the same time he was intrigued by a combination of elements that he saw coming together in one package for the first time—the boy seemed like “a Mississippi gospel singer singing black music, that’s about as real as I could figure.” On the basis of that observation, not to mention Tillman’s unflagging enthusiasm and the recommendation of Bob Neal, whom he saw out at the club that night and with whom he spent time at the convention, he was happy to book him on the Hoedown for $150, and he started playing Elvis Presley records as soon as he got back to Houston.