by Alanna Nash
Elvis just couldn’t get enough of music, and he was discovering the wealth of what Memphis had to offer. On Sundays, he and Dixie would sometimes slip away from their own church services to go to the all-black East Trigg Baptist Church just a few blocks away. There they’d sit in the balcony and let the waves of black gospel wash over them, get baptized in the beat of the Lord. Already Elvis was thinking of a way to meld black and white gospel together. But there was no gospel like black gospel, with its near physicality, and East Trigg’s pastor, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, was no ordinary preacher. A celebrated civil rights activist and fiery orator, he was also an accomplished gospel songwriter. Mahalia Jackson would record his “Move on Up a Little Higher,” and Clara Ward his “How I Got Over.”
By spring 1954 Elvis was driving a truck for Crown Electric, delivering supplies for $1 an hour, and training to be an electrician (“Sometimes they would let me help wire or something”), though, as he said in a 1956 interview, he worried if he were cut out for it. “You had to keep your mind right on what you’re doing, you can’t be the least bit absentminded, or you’re liable to blow somebody’s house up. I didn’t think I was the type for it, but I was going to give it a try.”
Things were looking up, on the whole, and he and Dixie were seeing each other almost every day. That May, they attended the Oral Roberts Crusade, though most of their dates were less serious-minded. They’d climb in the old Lincoln and head off to the movies two or three times a week, or go down to the WMPS Radio studios at the corner of Union and Main for deejay Bob Neal’s “High Noon Round-Up” show, where the Blackwoods appeared regularly.
On the other end of the scale, they also loved Dewey Phillips’s “Red, Hot, and Blue” radio show for its mix of blues, boogies, and spirituals. The couple would listen to it in Elvis’s car, parked at McKellar Lake, or maybe over at his parents’ house. Dixie was more a fan of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, but the WHBQ show was the hottest in town for black and white teenagers alike. Phillips, wild, wacky, and often hopped up on amphetamines, called himself “Daddy-O,” and he struck fear in the hearts of legions of God-fearing Memphians. “So many of our Christian parents wouldn’t even let [their children] listen to it,” Dixie remembers.
Phillips’s broadcasts often spurred Elvis to drop by Charlie’s Record Shop on North Main to peruse the new R & B records, Dixie in tow. Elvis had gotten brave one day and talked the proprietor into putting his first acetate on the jukebox, and man, that was a thrill! Elvis needed a boost about then, too. He’d tried out for the Songfellows and was crushed at the rejection, hearing over and over in his head that they’d said he couldn’t sing, when what they had really said was that he couldn’t sing harmony. And he was rejected as a vocalist with the Eddie Bond band at the Hi-Hat club, Bond telling him to go back to driving a truck. Years later, his words still stung. “Man,” Elvis would tell George Klein, “that sonofabitch broke my heart.”
It was a delicate period in all their lives. The more time that Elvis and Dixie spent together, the more Dixie sensed that Gladys felt slighted, even though she seemed like a second mother. The two shared recipes and went places together, once to a Stanley Products party (the Tupperware of the early 1950s), or simply spent hours talking. They never had cross words. But even as a teenager, it seemed to Dixie that Gladys was almost jealous of her relationship with Elvis.
“She and I were real close and enjoyed each other. But I think if she had been able to, she would have just kept him to herself. I felt that way myself. I would have kept him just for me, and not let the world have him.”
Marion Keisker went to work one day in mid-1954 and found that Sam had pulled out the note she’d made months earlier: “Elvis Presley, good ballad singer.”
“What’s this for?” she asked him and smiled at the funny memo she’d made (“Timothy Sideburns”) to remind her what Elvis looked like.
“Oh,” Sam said. “That kid was in here again. I liked him, but I don’t have time to work with him. I told him I would call him sometime.”
As Marion told the story, every time a song would come up and Sam would say, “Who should we get?” she’d say, “The kid with the sideburns. Why don’t we give him a chance?” But Sam would invariably say, “Oh, I don’t think he’s ready yet.” Elvis still persisted, though, dropping by periodically.
Finally, in June 1954, he got his break. Sam had a new song from Nashville, a ballad called “Without You.” Marion placed the call, and Sam got on the line and gave him the good news. The studio was ten or twelve blocks from Alabama Street, and Elvis ran all the way, Sam said. “I no more than hung up the phone, hardly, and he was there in no time flat.” Without a doubt, Sam loved the plaintiveness in his voice, the yearning for lost dreams. But no matter how many times Elvis sang “Without You,” he never quite got it to Sam’s satisfaction. “He sang it well, but I said to myself, ‘We just can’t do a ballad on Elvis.’ ”
“We were taking a break,” Marion remembered, “and Sam said, ‘What can you do?’ Elvis said, ‘I can sing anything.’ Sam said, ‘Let me hear you.’ So he just started playing snatches—gospel, western, anything. Doing real heavy on the Dean Martin stuff. He must have been convinced if he was going to sound like somebody, he was going to sound like Dean Martin. The three of us stayed there far into the night, just Elvis playing and talking.”
Elvis recalled the same thing to Bob Johnson of the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1956. “I guess I must have sat there at least three hours. I sang everything I knew—pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered.”
Sam prided himself on his ability to read people and to coax the best out of them. (“There is not a human being on the face of God’s earth who could get more out of totally untrained musicians than me.”) Now he looked out the control room window and locked eyes with Elvis, who searched Phillips’s own for reassurance. Elvis knew the whole thing was a disaster, but maybe they would hit on something.
“You’re doing just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you,” Sam said, trying to get the boy to communicate whatever was in his heart. “If you make a mistake of any sort, I don’t care what it is, I want a big one. If you hold back, you’ll kill the feel of the whole damn thing.”
Three days after Elvis’s big audition, his world fell apart. R. W. Blackwood and Bill Lyles of the Blackwood Brothers quartet were killed in a plane crash in Alabama. Elvis drove straight to Dixie’s after work, and they cried in each other’s arms. To Elvis, Bill and R. W. were more than great singers—they were friends now, from church, but Dixie had known the whole family for years, and these were close deaths. She and Elvis held hands at the funeral on July 2, which was all the more emotional because the Lockes were leaving for a two-week family vacation in Florida the next day. It was the first time Elvis and Dixie would be separated.
They’d talked several times about eloping, and now they discussed it again before she left, since Dixie was scheduled to start her summer job at Goldsmith’s department store when she returned. But she was so young, she knew it would break her parents’ hearts if they ran away and got married. Of course, they were not intimate—the church frowned on premarital sex—and they wouldn’t have done it anyway. They were saving themselves for marriage.
The night Dixie left, Elvis got a phone call from Scotty Moore, a local guitarist whose band, the Starlite Wranglers, had just signed with Sun Records. Elvis had mentioned to Sam that he was looking for a band, and Sam had passed the word along. The Starlite Wranglers already had a lead singer, Doug Poindexter, but Scotty, whose day job was cleaning and blocking hats in his brother’s laundry business, had been working with Sam for several months, trying to come up with a record, an artist, a song—anything they could make a buck out of, as Scotty said. Elvis’s name came up, and Sam gave Scotty his number.
He showed up at Scotty’s house on a Sunday afternoon, the Fourth of July, wearing a black shirt, pink pants with white stripes down the
leg, white shoes . . . and “just a lot of hair. I thought my wife was going to go out the back door.”
Bill Black, who played bass for the Starlite Wranglers when he wasn’t building tires at Firestone, lived down the street, and he came, too, for a few hours. The three sang everything they could think of, though they had little repertoire in common. They made an odd trio—Elvis, nineteen, with grease in his hair, looking like a space-age garage mechanic; Scotty, twenty-three, quiet and unassuming, with sloping features that spoke to a country background; and the jocular Black, twenty-eight, whose soft body nearly ran to fat, and who held his bass together with baling wire.
Afterward, Scotty got on the phone to Sam. “Well, the boy sings pretty good, but he didn’t knock me out.”
“Well, what do you think? Do we need a song, or what?” Sam said.
Scotty thought for a minute and then replied, “Yeah, with the right song, I think he would be good on record.”
The next night, they were all in Sam’s little two-room studio for what was supposed to be basically a rehearsal. The first song Elvis put down on tape was the Leon Payne ballad “I Love You Because,” and then he sang a couple of country numbers. They were all right but not special, so they took a break, and got some coffee and a Coke while Sam monkeyed with the console.
Then Elvis remembered an old loose-jointed Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup song, “That’s All Right (Mama),” that he’d heard on Dewey Phillips’s show. Crudup was a man apart. His music didn’t follow standard black blues patterns—a mile-wide hillbilly streak ran through it—which is probably what commended it to Elvis. Now he picked up a guitar and banged on it and started singing, keeping the primal energy of Crudup’s recording but hopping up the vocal, jumping around the studio in a dance, just cutting up to break the tension. Bill picked up his bass and started slapping the strings, helping the beat along, and clowning, too, and then Scotty tried to get in somewhere with a rhythm vamp. They were just making a bunch of racket, as Scotty saw it, not realizing they were striking rock’s seminal lightning bolt.
“The door to the control room was open, and about halfway through Sam came running out, saying, ‘Wait a minute! What the devil are ya’ll doing? That sounds pretty good through the door.’ Everybody looked at each other, like, ‘What were we doing?’ We said, ‘We don’t know.’ Sam said, ‘Well, find out real quick and don’t lose it! Run through it again and let’s see what it sounds like.’ ”
“Sam,” Scotty said, “it just flipped him. He thought it was real exciting.”
They backtracked, playing it twice, once for Sam to get a balance. Elvis ran the words again in his head and changed Crudup’s line, “The life you’re living, son, women be the death of you,” to, “Son, that gal you’re fooling with, she ain’t no good for you.” Then they put it on tape.
That one simple action set the wheels in motion to make Elvis Presley the most important star of all time.
The following day, Sam called Dewey Phillips and told him he had an acetate he wanted him to hear. They sat together and listened at the WHBQ studios at the Hotel Chisca, and Dewey jumped out of his seat, wanting to know who it was. Nobody would believe Elvis was a white boy, not sounding like this. Dewey played the song on the air July 8, and the switchboard lit up, so he spun it over and over, finally calling Gladys and Vernon and asking them to get Elvis into the studio. He wanted to interview him on the air.
Elvis had been too nervous to listen, so he went to the movies to try to take his mind off it. The Presleys went to the Suzore No. 2 and combed the dark aisles, peering into the long rows of faces until they found their son. Down at the station, Dewey could tell how rattled Elvis was, so he just made casual conversation with him, never telling him he was on the air until it was over.
Sam Phillips, awed by the reaction, knew he’d finally found a white man with the black sound, and called the trio into the studio the next night. He needed a second side to release a single, but the problem was finding something in the same vein, as Elvis seemed stuck on ballads. Again, the guys ran through every song they could think of, and then Bill took off on Bill Monroe’s bluegrass waltz, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He rendered it as a kind of goof, souping up the tempo with a rhythm-and-blues feel, and mimicking Monroe’s high-lonesome tenor as he slapped the bass. Elvis joined in, scrubbing the rhythm on his acoustic guitar, and then Scotty laid down his clean lines on the electric.
“Hell, that’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout,” Sam Phillips famously enthused.
“We just sort of shook our heads and said, “Well, that’s fine, but good God, they’ll run us out of town!” Scotty remembers. “I think we all knew immediately when this happened that this might be what we was looking for. So we just figured out where to start and stop, and that was it.”
By this time, Dixie knew that Elvis had been recording at Sun Records, but she was shocked to get a telegram from him on vacation: HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT. Then, as the family drove back into Memphis, they heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the radio. It was one thing to hear three guys sitting in the kitchen practicing a song with a couple of guitars, Dixie said, but another to hear it on the airwaves.
“I was totally stunned. But I recognized him immediately. Everybody in the family was just ecstatic. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me.”
Neither of them had any idea of the magnitude of it all (“It was almost disbelief that the disc jockeys would even play it,” Dixie said), even though Elvis was thrilled to be playing the Bon Air club as an extra added attraction with Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers. “He was still just totally innocent and spontaneous,” in Dixie’s view. “There wasn’t a conceited bone in his body.”
In fact, he was still interested in doing the old things, like going to the Humes football games. One night, Charlie Fisher, who remembered him from ROTC, watched him come and sit in front of him at Crump Stadium, named for the congressman and former demagogue mayor E. H. Crump. Elvis was decked out that night, wearing a lavender Ike jacket and matching lavender pants.
“My wife, Steve, took one look at him and said, ‘My God, who is that?’ ”
“I told her, ‘I think that’s Elvis Presley. He’s supposed to be making records these days.’ ”
The whole town was talking about him, but few had actually seen him, and there was some confusion about what race Elvis was, as Dixie soon discovered. Her mother worked with a couple of young black girls, who mentioned how much they loved “That’s All Right (Mama).” Mrs. Locke spoke up and cheerfully said, “My daughter dates him.” The girls blinked, incredulous that Mrs. Locke’s daughter dated a Negro. She set them straight, told them he was white, but “they couldn’t believe it,” says Dixie, “because the type of music that he was singing was typically related to a black musician.”
Memphis would see for itself on July 30, 1954, when Elvis played the Overton Park Shell, an outdoor stage in the city’s leafy park of the same name. Four days before, Sam Phillips, who had just formally signed Elvis to Sun Records, had gone to Bob Neal, the WMPS disc jockey whose noonday show Elvis and Dixie frequently attended. Neal, who also ran a little record shop with his wife, Helen, sometimes promoted country concerts. Now he was bringing in a “hillbilly hoedown,” a package show starring Slim Whitman and Billy Walker from the Louisiana Hayride, the live radio show broadcast from Shreveport over KWKH. Since his own show was all requests, Neal was playing Elvis’s two songs.
“Why don’t you put him on the bill?” Sam said.
Bob, knowing that Sun was a nonunion label, asked if he’d been cleared with the musician’s union.
“No, but I’ll get him in the union.”
“I said, ‘Fine,’ ” Bob recalled two decades later. “ ‘Let’s put him on.’ It was his first big appearance in a commercial performance.”
But Sam hadn’t gotten him in the union, and when Elvis arrived at the park, the president of the local Federation of Musicians refused to
admit him to the stage area. Sam quickly scrambled for the money to make Elvis a member, and then the boy mounted the stage.
Elvis went on before Slim Whitman, a big favorite at the time. He launched into “That’s All Right (Mama),” and whether from nerves or imitation of his hero, “Big Chief” Weatherington of the Statesmen, he suddenly began to shake, his legs a blur of rhythm and romance. Something like electricity zigged through the audience, and Neal was astonished at what he saw.
“When Elvis came on, he automatically started with a wiggle and a shake. The audience was just screaming and shouting. There was no hype. They were simply reacting to what was on the stage before them. It was almost unbelievable.” Of course, this was his hometown, Neal realized. “But still he made a big hit right there. He stole the show right from the first.”
When Slim Whitman came on, the audience nearly turned him away. “Bring back Elvis! Bring back Elvis!”
Among the enthusiasts was Marion Keisker.
“I’m a very restrained person, and I heard all this female shrieking. One voice just completely stood out. Suddenly, to my chagrin and horror, I realized it was me. Here I am, mother of a young son, on my feet, screaming and whooping like I’d totally lost my stupid mind. I was just transported. But the whole audience was exactly that. He just had that magical, once-in-a-lifetime quality.”
Dixie was wild with pride that night, but the extreme reactions of the women shocked and angered her. “I was like, ‘Good grief!’ I couldn’t believe it. Because I wanted to say, ‘Hey, he’s already taken, so y’all just back away!’ ”
From then on, Dixie was afraid of how Elvis’s new fame would affect their relationship, especially after they married. Elvis told her not to worry. He was just playing the little clubs around town—the Bon Air, and soon, once Scotty and Bill split off from the Starlite Wranglers, the Eagle’s Nest. But Dixie still fretted.
