At church, Elvis met Dixie Locke. Fifteen, bright, balanced, and beautiful, Dixie first saw Elvis soon after he began to attend church. Tall, clothed in pink and black with long, greasy, dark blond hair, he stood out in a crowd. “He was just so different,” she recalled for Elvis’s biographer Peter Guralnick some four decades later. “All the other guys were replicas of their dads.” Elvis decidedly was not a replica of his dad.
One Sunday while seeming to talk casually with some of her friends at church, Dixie deliberately talked loudly enough for Elvis to hear that she was going skating with girlfriends at the Rainbow Rollerdrome on Saturday. When she got to the Rollerdrome that night, she saw him. He was wearing his bolero jacket over a ruffled shirt and pegged black pants with pink stripes down the legs. She introduced herself to him. “Yeah, I know,” he said, hanging his head, then raising it and tossing his hair sidewise. Of course he knew who she was; that was why he was there after a week of sanding down artillery shells and measuring the thickness of shell casings at Precision Tool.
Elvis invited Dixie for a Coke. Then he began to talk. And talk. He talked until ten o’clock and still that was not enough. He invited her to K’s Drive-In for hamburgers and milkshakes. She sat close to him in the old Lincoln and gave him a chaste kiss in the drive-in parking lot. They ate and talked, and talked some more, and finally he drove her home; she lived just off South Third Street. Elvis had found an audience of one—other than his mother—who accepted and liked him for who he was. As for Dixie, she knew that it was love. The next night they went to the movies.
Dixie’s parents and three sisters were not so sure about this boy. The hair and the pink clothes gave them pause. One of Dixie’s sisters had eloped at fourteen and was back home again. Her father grilled Elvis. Mr. Locke was a big man, six-two and strong. The boys who came calling on his daughters were generally intimidated by him. Elvis, as always, met authority with cast-down eyes and great deference. “Yes, sir. No, sir,” he would say. Dixie’s mother grilled her in the kitchen while her father talked to Elvis in the front room of the flat in which they lived on the south side of town. Dixie defended Elvis vigorously. Looks deceive, she said. She had met him at church. He was nice.
Elvis was exceedingly anxious about introducing Dixie to his parents. He thought the Lockes were of a higher social class. In reality, he was probably impressed by the fact that Mr. Locke worked hard to earn a steady support for his wife and four girls. The Lockes seemed to feel secure in a way he had never known.
Two weeks later, Dixie met the Presleys at their home on Alabama Avenue. Mrs. Presley sent Elvis and Vernon out of the room and then interrogated Dixie. Mr. Presley seemed to have nothing to say. He was out of work with a bad back. Mrs. Presley was no longer working at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Elvis was the only one working and the sole support for his family. Even so, the Presleys had a television set, a telephone, and a piano, all possessions the Lockes did not have. A day or so later, Dixie asked Elvis what his mother thought of her. She learned that Gladys really liked her. What Vernon thought seemed not to matter.
After the first meeting, Gladys rushed to embrace Dixie with striking rapidity. They talked over the phone often and at length, Dixie using a neighbor’s phone. Dixie began taking the bus up to Alabama Avenue after school while Elvis was still at work. They developed a woman-to-woman relationship centered on Elvis that did not include him. Gladys shared her recipes with Dixie and took her to a Stanley Products house party, where a local woman invited homemakers from all around the neighborhood to socialize, try out utensils, and buy household goods at low prices. Gladys and Dixie often went shopping together, maybe to get something personal—like clothing—for Elvis. They talked about him a lot.
Once, a girl from the Courts stopped by while Dixie was there. She seemed to have some special claim on Elvis and the Presleys. When the girl left the room to prepare a drink for the three of them, Gladys reprimanded Dixie. “I could just pinch you,” she said. “Why did you sit there and let her take over? Don’t you ever do that again. You know you’re just as at home here as Elvis is. You get up and do something next time, just like you would if you were in your own home.” Gladys was like a second mother to her, Dixie thought. Obviously, Gladys was training Dixie to become Elvis’s wife.
Dixie soon saw that the Presley family was very different from other families. They seemed uneasy in the world, suspicious. “Mrs. Presley was a very humble person,” she said. “It was almost like she felt inferior around people where she didn’t feel like she quite fit in.” Vernon was strange. “I never saw him be unkind. I never saw him drink or be unruly,” she said. “I’m sure he was a very loving husband and devoted to his family.” But “it was like he was an outsider, really, he wasn’t part of Elvis and Mrs. Presley’s group.” Elvis and Gladys loved and respected each other, Dixie thought, but “I didn’t think there was a lot of respect for him during that time.”
Dixie compared Vernon unfavorably with her father. Vernon’s “bad back” was excuse enough for him to stay home rather than go to work. Dixie’s father also did heavy lifting in his job with the Railway Express Company, which transported packages, parcels, and freight rapidly. Dixie had seen her dad “go to work with a brace on his back for years.” Her father was a real man, a provider and a protector, and Vernon was something less.
It was not that Vernon was bedridden or housebound by his affliction. Occasionally, he even drove down to pick Dixie up after school and bring her home to meet Elvis when he got home from work. But when Vernon did not feel like driving, Dixie had to take the bus. Vernon was not dependable. “It was almost like Elvis was the father,” Dixie concluded, “and his dad was just the little boy.
Crown Electric
On Friday, March 19, 1954, Elvis quit his job at Precision Tool after they made him get a haircut. He was so ashamed of his new look that he hid behind a clothesline full of clothes so that Dixie’s mother could not take his picture. The loss of income must have thrown the Presley household into turmoil again. Two weeks later, on Tuesday, April 6, Elvis was back at the state employment office. He told them that he had worked at Precision Tool for six and one-half months and was in the process of doing a “reevaluation” of his place in the workforce. He did not bring up his previous preferences for working with people or keeping clean, nor even in machine maintenance. Now he thought that a “machinist appr. [apprentice] job would be fine.” He “really wants to operate [a] ‘big lathe,’ ” the interviewer noted, putting “big lathe” in quotes. Probably, Elvis equated “big lathe” with big money, and the quotes inserted by the interviewer indicated to the staff that they should not narrow their search for a fitting place for Elvis in the working world to operating a large lathe. Nor did they. This time they made a match for Elvis that included love as well as money, but not much money.
On April 20, 1954, the employment office sent Elvis to interview for a job with Crown Electric Company on Poplar Avenue just around the corner from where he lived. The company was owned and run by Jim and Gladys Tipler, a middle-aged couple. Before Elvis came for the interview, the woman who sent him called from the employment office to tell the Tiplers that he was a nice boy who simply looked different. The Tiplers hired him immediately after he said that all he wanted to do was to take care of his mother. Soon he was driving a Crown Electric panel truck delivering supplies to electricians who were working all around town. Women in public schools and women in public housing had saved Elvis before. Now women in the public employment service did the job.
Elvis’s take-home pay was about $41 a week, substantially less than the $62 a week he had earned at Precision Tool. But, just as Vernon during World War II found driving a truck delivering goods to grocery stores much more congenial than working as a carpenter in wartime jobs, Elvis found driving a delivery truck for an electrical contractor much more congenial than working in a plant producing artillery shells. Earning money, after all, did not seem to be the most important thing in the world for eit
her man. Elvis could keep relatively clean, do his hair how he pleased, deal with people, and drive a truck around Memphis and its environs all day with his guitar by his side. Sometimes Dixie joined him in the panel truck.
Every Friday Elvis continued turning over his pay to his father, taking out just enough to take Dixie to a double-feature movie at Suzore No. 2, have hamburgers and milkshakes at the drive-ins, and buy gasoline for the Lincoln. During the winter and spring, Elvis also took Dixie to gospel sings at Ellis Auditorium, to the annual Minstrel Show at Humes High in March, and to the talent contest there in April. Dixie came over to the Presleys’ for Easter dinner on Sunday, April 18, and in early May they attended the Cotton Carnival and an Oral Roberts revival. It was a beautiful life. Possibly, Elvis was again at the employment office on June 4 and 29. With a take-home salary of $41 a week and rent at $50 a month, perhaps the Presleys were in money trouble again, and Elvis was thinking “big lathes” again. In any event, nothing happened.
Elvis and Dixie were always together when not at work or in school. Often they were alone, and at times they were with Elvis’s kinfolk. Indeed, the Presleys seemed to have few friends who were not kinfolk. Elvis’s closest male friend was still his cousin Gene Smith. When Elvis took Dixie over to Humes High during school hours for a visit, she met boys who had previously been his friends both there and in the Courts but learned that he no longer saw them.
It seemed to Dixie that increasingly she and Gladys were his whole life. He began to talk to Dixie in the baby-talk way he talked to his mother. He would put his face up close to her face and tell her how sweet she looked. He did so in front of Gladys, and Dixie was afraid it might offend her, but she continued in her affectionate ways. Everyone seemed to assume that they would marry, and everyone seemed fond of the idea. At one point they talked of running off to Hernando, Mississippi, just across the state line to get married. It could be done in Mississippi in a matter of hours, start to finish, provided that both parties were either black or white and over thirteen years old. They decided, however, to wait a while.
Dixie was not aware of the depth of Elvis’s ambition for a career as a singer. She thought he was simply a boy who loved music and played the guitar for fun. She did notice, however, that his shyness did not at all preclude his performing informally before any audience if someone asked. Elvis, she saw, loved attention, any attention. She had seen it in Bible class when the new kid with the long hair and strange clothes engaged himself intensely in whatever subject was under discussion. Increasingly, she realized how Elvis would work hard not merely for attention but to be the center of attention, however briefly, whatever the audience. It was one role in which he felt comfortable. Dixie saw that he could perform easily for a roomful of people. She thought he could perform as easily for thousands.
Dixie also learned that Elvis adored gospel music. They faithfully attended the monthly all-night sings that the Blackwood Brothers organized. She knew that he aspired to sing with an amateur gospel quartet, but it came as a total surprise that he also aspired to sing country and western. She went with him one night to the Bel Air, a country and western nightclub, where the management gave him a trial run. He was clearly a failure. Elvis seemed to be a natural-born truck driver, the audience implied by its response.
On July 3, Dixie and her family left for a two-week vacation to visit relatives in Florida. When she returned she found that the young man she expected to marry had become a celebrity in Memphis. The catalyst for the change was a brilliant young record producer named Sam Phillips.
Sam Phillips
Sam Phillips, born in 1924, was reared on a two-hundred-acre farm near Florence in northwestern Alabama, where he drank thirstily from the broad stream of black culture that flowed all around him. As a boy, he would stand outside an African Methodist Episcopal church just down the road from his own church and listen while the congregation sang and music poured out of the open doors.
More intimately, there was an older black man, Uncle Silas Payne, who worked for his father. Silas would tell him stories about mythical sausage and butter-cake trees in Africa and about the Molasses River. It was as if both man and boy had taken their script from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales. Uncle Silas was Uncle Remus, comfortably settled on the floor of the open doorway of his cabin on the mountain, smoking his pipe, telling stories to Mars Tom. At Uncle Silas’s feet young Sam learned about the richness and wisdom of black life and made it his mission to convey it to white people. Uncle Silas also played the guitar and the harmonica and told Sam about Beale Street in Memphis.
Sam loved music, but his experience as a musician ended when he left high school and gave up playing the tuba in the school band. His genius, he soon discovered, was in reproducing music by electronic means. In 1945, Sam came to Memphis with a wife, a son, and four years of experience in radio in northern Alabama and, briefly, Nashville, Tennessee. He went to work for station WREC, where his older brother Jud sang with the Jolly Boys Quartet. Soon, he became the engineer for the nighttime nationwide broadcast over CBS of the big bands that played in the rooftop Skyway Room of the Peabody Hotel. Increasingly, he grew frustrated with the formulaic, stiff, stilted manner of the big bands. He was irritated by the sight of the always carefully made-up beautiful girl singer attired in an evening gown sitting on the stage, hands folded demurely in her lap, and the rows of identically dressed musicians all mechanically turning the pages of their music at the right moment in spite of the fact that they had played the same song in the same way a thousand times and could have written it out from memory. It was all too boringly predictable. “I was shooting for that damn row that hadn’t been plowed,” he told Elvis’s biographer Peter Guralnick four decades later, using the imagery of his rural origins.
In January 1950, Sam established his storefront Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue, a few blocks east of the WREC studios in the Peabody Hotel. His company would do anything, record anything—weddings, bar mitzvahs, recitals, anniversaries—to survive, but Sam put it there, he said, to give some of the “great Negro artists” a chance to be heard. He said he wanted “genuine, untutored Negro” music. He wanted “Negroes with field mud on their boots and patches in their overalls … battered instruments and unfettered techniques.”
Sam survived, but barely. He was working eighteen hours a day. In the studio, he was recording “cotton patch blues” as well as rhythm and blues. Sometimes he sent his recordings to a “race” label—such as Chess in Chicago or RPM located in the Watts area of Los Angeles—which would market the record through its well-established networks. One of his best records, appearing in late 1951, was B. B. King’s “Three O’Clock Blues.” Another, “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and his saxophonist and sometimes singer Jackie Brenston, held first place on the nationwide rhythm and blues chart for seventeen weeks. Seminal in the R&B movement, it became a classic. All in the same day, Sam might wire a baseball stadium for sound, go to the studio to record primal blues man Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), then go on to the Peabody for the late-night Skyway broadcast.
Respected by his fellow workers for his skills as an electronics engineer, Sam nevertheless had to pay for his unorthodox interest in black people. At the radio station in the Peabody someone might say to him, “Well, you smell okay. I guess you haven’t been hanging around those niggers today.” White Southerners who manifested too much respect for black people earned epithets such as “nigger lover” and paid a price in the white world for their lack of conformity. Only a fool would tamper with established race relations.
Sam was working day and night, seven days a week, with a wife and two sons to support. Twice he suffered nervous breakdowns and retreated to the Gartley-Ramsey Hospital, a private—and discreet—resort for emotionally exhausted persons. Located on Jackson Avenue in a huge two-story Victorian house with a wide, wrap-around porch, the hospital was just around the corner from Humes High on Manassas.
William Faulkner, whose bouts with alc
ohol recurrently forced him into such retreats, would have been in the Gartley-Ramsey about the same time as Sam Phillips. Perhaps Sam and the silent and brooding Faulkner, both men who struggled with racial and class orthodoxies in their native South, sat in rocking chairs on the broad front porch of the Gartley-Ramsey, watching Elvis Presley, the shambling teenager, making his less-than-eager way down Jackson from his home in the Courts to Humes High.
In June 1951, when Sam’s boss remarked critically on his absences, suggesting that his other business endeavors impinged on his work at the radio station, he quit his job at WREC. Then he was on his own—but not quite.
Marion Keisker
Marion Keisker was an amazing woman. Born in 1917, she was heard on WREC in 1929 on a weekly children’s show, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. In 1938, she graduated in both English and Medieval French from Southwestern (now Rhodes) College, Memphis’s highly prestigious private school. She married, gave birth to a son, continued her career in radio, and later divorced. In 1946, she began to host the Meet Kitty Kelly talk show on WREC five days a week. While she was becoming a well-known and very popular radio personality, she was also writing, producing, and directing as many as a dozen shows in addition to her own, including the nightly Treasury Bandstand broadcast from the WREC studio in the Peabody Hotel basement.
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