The next day, we traveled down to Sheffield, Alabama, to play a couple of shows, and a new artist named Johnny Cash joined us for those appearances. The audience didn’t seem too interested in headliner Webb Pierce, and that made Webb, a bona fide country legend, a little mad. I think he left before the show was over. We headed on to Arkansas to play in both Little Rock and Camden. I know most of the crowds were coming out to see Elvis, but I was getting a good reception, too. By the time we got to Camden, I was going on just before Elvis’s closing set, and we were both getting multiple encores.
It was after one of the shows on that tour that Elvis asked me out after a show to get a Coke. Of course, I had to ask Daddy. I didn’t like all his rules, but I knew he was looking out for my best interest. Daddy said that it would be all right and, after that, he was pretty good about letting me go on a drive with Elvis or catch a movie or something with him if we got to a town early for a show. Daddy didn’t mind if Elvis or any of the other guys ever rode with us, but of course I never could ride with Elvis from town to town.
Elvis, Scotty, and Bill usually rode in Elvis’s Cadillac. They were just starting to get air conditioning in cars at that time. Up until then we just had to roll the windows down and let it blow. I used to have an Uncle Henry who kept the windows up in the sweltering summer heat because he wanted to impress folks by making them think he had air conditioning! Elvis really did have it, but he wouldn’t use it at first because he said it closed up his throat. I don’t know if it was because his bandmates threatened to kill him, but I think he got used to it pretty fast.
We usually went out to eat after our performances. I still do that. I’ve never been able to eat right before a show. A lot of times a group of us would head out together for hamburgers or whatever. One night after a show we went out with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. The three of them were in the backseat, while Daddy was driving and I was in the passenger seat up front. Elvis liked to tease me, so he started horsing around in the backseat and flipping my ponytail back and forth. That’s when we girls were just starting to wear hair pieces. My hair wasn’t long enough at the time to make a pretty ponytail, so I got a fake one on a comb and set that over my real one. Of course, we didn’t let the guys know our beauty secrets back then, so Elvis thought he was just flipping my hair around. He started coughing and gagging and carrying on.
“Wanda,” he joked, “don’t you ever wash that ponytail?”
I reached up, yanked it off, threw it in his lap and said, “Here, you wash it!” That gave him a pretty good shock. He hadn’t ever seen anything like that before, and we all had a big laugh over it.
We finished up the tour playing for several thousand fans at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis. Most of the acts we’d been playing with all week were there, but several others joined us, including Sonny James and Carl Perkins. That afternoon, before the show, Elvis picked me up and took me to his house where he lived with his mother and father. I’m surprised Daddy let me go, but Elvis had pretty well won him over at that point. Though skeptical at first, Daddy had come to see that Elvis was a sincere and polite young man. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you were around Elvis for very long, he would win you over. He had a childlike innocence about him and was very respectful. He always said “ma’am” and “sir,” and had those Southern manners that fascinated people even back then. I think Daddy got to where he really liked Elvis.
When I arrived at the door of his house, Elvis introduced me to his mother before taking me down the hall to his bedroom. He had a record player and a lot of records stacked up next to it. He had been telling me all week that I should start singing this new kind of music he was doing, but I didn’t think I could pull it off. He began playing different records to help me get a grip on the feeling of what he was doing. He told me I needed to let loose and have more fun. That’s the same thing Hank Thompson had told me way back at the Trianon Ballroom. I didn’t realize I was being uptight on stage, but maybe I was.
Elvis would play an R&B record and then pick up his guitar and say, “Look, instead of playing country style by plucking each individual string, you need to strum all of them at once like this.” I had actually started out playing that way, but Daddy said not to do it like that. He taught me to pick the strings, and didn’t like me strumming them all at once. After the episode with the felt pick during my recording session in Nashville, I’d done my best not to play so heavy. Elvis wanted me to unlearn. That was my real introduction to how to play rock and roll. Elvis’s career was really booming, yet he was still concerned about me and my little career. He knew I loved it so much, and I think he sensed that I would be around for a while in the business. It meant a lot that he took an interest and encouraged something he saw in me that I couldn’t yet see for myself.
I’ve been asked several times over the years what the records were that Elvis played for me that day. Give me a break! I was a seventeen-year-old girl in Elvis Presley’s bedroom. Do you honestly think I was paying a lick of attention to remembering what exact records I was hearing? I was just trying not to jump out of my own skin or pass out on the floor like all those girls at his shows. You know how Elvis on stage could drive a young woman to hysterics? Try getting a private concert from him in his bedroom when the physical attraction between the two of you is palpable. I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. At one point we were interrupted when Elvis’s mother tapped on the door and poked her head in.
“Honey, I’m going to the store now,” she said. “What would you like for supper?”
Elvis thought about it for a second and said, “I think I’d like some weenies and sauerkraut.”
She nodded. “Okay, that’ll be fine. I’ll be back shortly.”
I kind of smiled to myself thinking about how much his family was like our family. The parents’ lives were wrapped around their child as they did all they could to support those musical dreams.
Suddenly Elvis and I were alone again. He ran his fingers nervously through his hair. Elvis always seemed to be full of kinetic energy and couldn’t stop fidgeting no matter where he was or what he was doing. His restlessness sometimes made me feel a little nervous. He got up from the edge of the bed and removed the needle from a record that was still playing. The room was suddenly silent. It was the first time we had ever been together with no distractions, and the thought of being alone with him made my heart pound so loudly in my chest I wondered if Elvis could hear it. He reached over and shut the door before slinking over to the chair where I was sitting by the record player. He took my hand, interlocking his fingers with mine as he leaned in close. You know what happened next? Well, I’m a lady, and a lady never kisses and tells.
I didn’t play with Elvis again until a week-long stint through Texas in mid-October. He was the advertised headliner by that point, and our traveling show included Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Jimmy C. Newman, and Bobby Lord. After a show at the Memorial Hall in Brownwood, we went on to Abilene, Midland, Amarillo, and Odessa.
I wouldn’t see Elvis again until April of 1956. I met up with the tour in Denver, Colorado, and we played twelve cities in thirteen nights, usually two shows per day. By that point we were drawing crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 people per show. I remember the third stop on that tour was in Lubbock, Texas, where we staged two performances for a capacity audience at the Fair Park Coliseum. There was a local singer who opened the show, and someone said we should watch him because he was really good. Elvis thought he was just great. He seemed like a nice kid, but he wasn’t handsome. I have to admit I was into handsome in those days, so I didn’t really appreciate this young man named Buddy Holly until later on. Truth be told, I had eyes for Elvis and that was about it. I didn’t yet have the maturity to know what to look for in an artist, and I didn’t see the raw talent. I was still kind of boy crazy. Or at least pretty Elvis crazy!
I’m embarrassed to say that Johnny Cash didn’t make much more of an impression on me than Buddy did at first. Johnny always seemed like kind of
a loner to me. Any time I saw him he was off by himself leaning up against a wall having a cigarette. I didn’t go out of my way to try to talk to him, since he was a bit older than me and was already married with a family. To be honest, I didn’t really care that much for him at first. Daddy and I both thought he was trying to copy Elvis because he had the same three-piece band configuration Elvis did with a lead guitarist and upright bassist behind his rhythm guitar and vocal. Elvis saw his talent before I did. Any time we were all playing a package show together, Elvis would find me and say, “Come here! We’ve got to watch Johnny!”
“Oh, I don’t even like him, Elvis,” I’d say.
He got on to me one time and said, “Johnny’s a great talent. I predict he’s going to be the biggest name in country music. He’ll be a legend.”
I would stand there and watch Johnny’s show from the side of the stage, while Elvis would squat down with a big smile on his face, just totally engrossed in what Johnny was doing. Maybe I was just too focused on Elvis to see it at the time, but of course he was right in his assessment of Johnny. I came to understand what a powerful entertainer he really was in later years, and we became great friends.
Early in the tour Elvis got word that “Heartbreak Hotel” had officially become his first single to sell more than a million copies. Everything was accelerating for him during that time, and it seemed as if he was on a merry-go-round that was spinning faster and faster with each day. Midway through the tour we played two shows in Amarillo, Texas. Late that night, Elvis and his band jumped on a plane and flew to Nashville for a recording session the next day. I believe they recorded “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” That gave us one night off, and Elvis and the boys returned in time for the next set of shows in San Antonio.
Somewhere along the way we played both a matinee and an evening performance. I remember it being a Sunday. Between the two shows Elvis asked me if I would step outside with him for a moment. We were in the parking lot next to one of his pink-and-white Cadillacs. “You know I really like you, Wanda,” he said as he leaned against the car.
“I like you, too, Elvis,” I smiled. He took my hand.
“I was hoping that maybe, if you want to, that you’d be my girl.”
Of course, I said “yes” right away. I don’t know if he’d even gotten the words out completely, but I wasn’t about to hesitate. He was wearing a ring with some itty-bitty chip diamonds in it. He pulled it off his finger.
“I’d be honored if you’d wear this,” he said.
Of course, the minute I got back to the motel room that night, I took a simple gold chain from my jewelry box and proudly put that ring around my neck.
I was thrilled to be Elvis’s girl, and I was thrilled when we had the chance to play in Oklahoma City near the end of the tour. Apparently, some city officials were warned that Elvis’s hip gyrations at the previous night’s show in Tulsa were vulgar. The Chief of Police dispatched dozens of officers with orders to stop the show if things got out of hand. That kind of thing really hurt Elvis. He would tell me, “They’re taking something fun and trying to make it into something dirty. That’s not what I mean by any of it.” It would make him pretty angry when he heard that kind of talk because, to him, what he was doing on stage was just dancing and feeling the music. He was angry that they couldn’t see that the young people just wanted their own music. Elvis told me what the headlines were in Tulsa. He said, “If they think Tulsa was bad, wait until they see what I do tonight.” But, fortunately, the show came off without incident.
The auditorium in Oklahoma City was on the second floor, and when Elvis was coming down the back stairs after the show, it seemed like girls appeared out of nowhere chasing him and trying to touch him. When he finally got in the car he was kind of rumpled up. He had to get his coat back on because they had been pulling at him. Later Mother said, “That poor guy! He’s not going to be able to go anywhere.” Daddy just shook his head. “Elvis is creating a monster, I’m afraid.”
Chapter 10
IF YOU DON’T, SOMEBODY ELSE WILL
When we weren’t playing dates with Elvis, Daddy and I were usually out on the road doing country package shows or onenighters anywhere we could book. To save money we always shared a motel room. These days it would be really frowned upon for a teenage girl to stay in the same room with her father. It sounds awful, but we never thought a thing about it. Our family was close, and we’d always lived in cramped quarters. We worked it out so we both had privacy. Daddy stayed dressed, and he didn’t really see me dressing, either. He’d wake up before I would and go get breakfast and a newspaper. He’d return to the room, wake me up, then go off and read the paper somewhere while I got ready.
We kept up a pretty aggressive schedule, and Daddy was very helpful to me in those early days of traveling. I appreciated that he always gave me honest feedback about my performances. He didn’t just rave about everything or tell me I was great when I wasn’t. He could see things that I needed to change, but he knew how to give constructive criticism in an encouraging way. I listened to him because I knew that any suggestions he offered came from a desire to push me to be the best I could be. I valued the fact that Daddy didn’t give empty flattery, and that when he gave a compliment he really meant it. If he thought a show went well, he’d come in that night, sit on the foot of the bed, and tell me what a good job I’d done and how proud he was of me.
I’ve been asked over the years how a little person like me wound up with such a big voice. I can thank Daddy for that. When I started singing there wasn’t really any place to perform but honky tonks and dance halls. I’d come offstage and Daddy might say, “I couldn’t hear you very well. You’ve got to sing louder and get in that microphone. I want the guy who’s sitting all the way in the back to be able to hear you perfectly clearly.” So that was my aim. I learned to really belt it out and sing with power. That wasn’t the way the demure ladies of country music did it in those days, but I didn’t care. I was never interested in trying to sound like anybody else. Daddy always told me to do it my way and to be who I am. I got a lot of encouragement from him on that.
Daddy wasn’t a big talker, but when he did speak, everyone listened. He was a sweet and jovial man, and everyone liked him. As we spent more time on the road together, he began to open up more during our conversations in the car. We’d tell jokes and stories and talk about the music business. We listened to the radio and analyzed the songs together. Our relationship deepened in those years, and I came to really value his insights. Daddy had what country folks call “good horse sense,” and was a bit of a philosophizer. He had a gift for cutting through all the fluff and getting to the heart of a problem. Maybe that’s just the difference in the communication styles of men and women. Mother and I would talk, talk, and talk some more about some issue. Then Daddy would simply say, “Well, here’s the basic problem and what you can do to fix it.” I still find myself saying, “Daddy always said …” I appreciated his input and instruction, and I feel like I gained a lot from his wisdom.
I always had good crowds because I worked hard. During every intermission I would walk around and greet people to get to know them a little bit. That didn’t come naturally to me, but that’s what Hank Thompson did. I’d seen him make a point of working the room every time I performed with him at a dance hall, and I recognized that the fans loved it. Here was the Hank at their table having a drink or taking pictures. Daddy also recognized it was an important strategy for connecting with fans and making sure they’d come see you the next time you were in town. It wasn’t always easy because I’m actually a bit of an introvert. I didn’t always feel like doing it—especially if I was suffering with menstrual cramps—but Daddy always reminded me it was part of the job. “This is the job you chose,” he’d say. “You don’t have to get up at seven in the morning and punch a time clock and stand on your feet all day, but this is part of the responsibilities of your chosen career.” I always made sure to make my way around the whole room
and to do it early before the crowd got to drinking too much. I’d shake hands and see if there were any song requests, and that kind of thing. As long as I was in that club, I was “on” and I appreciated Daddy for helping me stay focused.
Another thing he emphasized was presentation. Daddy wanted me to dress nicely and conduct myself appropriately any time we were in public. He liked to see me in those fancy dresses and looking like a star. He was always reminding me to keep my legs together on stage and to remember to carry myself with dignity and class. He had a little pity on me during those long road trips at least. I was young so I could go without makeup. I’d wear my hair in rollers or pin curls, and wear jeans, pedal pushers, or long pants when we were in the car. At least I didn’t have to make three-hundred-mile road trips in tight dresses and heels!
I trusted Daddy completely. He couldn’t understand why, on the rare occasions I would do a show without him, I would forget to get paid. I just never had a mind for business, and I didn’t think about that stuff. I couldn’t get interested in anything but music. I can remember several times Daddy would say, “Wanda, don’t you want to know how much money you have in the bank?” I’d say, “Well, no, not as long as you know.” I figured I was the talent and he was the brains. Together, Daddy and I were Wanda Jackson Enterprises. Mother was our silent partner, holding down the fort at home and working so hard on my stage costumes. They even built me a room off my bedroom that was like a den. I had my record player and my piano in there, as well as a little desk to sign autographs and mail letters and things. My parents were so accommodating and supportive. It was always a family business.
In July of 1955 I performed on the Ozark Jubilee for the first time. Hosted by Red Foley in Springfield, Missouri, the Jubilee aired on ABC-TV, and was really the only national country music program on television at the time. Broadcast live on Saturday nights, it was a popular show, thanks largely to the strong reputation Red Foley had earned as the host of the Grand Ole Opry segment that was carried on the NBC radio network each week.
Every Night Is Saturday Night Page 10
