“He was a beautiful young man,” Marion said of Sam in describing to Peter Guralnick how it all began in 1950. “Beautiful beyond belief, but still that country touch, that country rawness. He was slim and had those incredible eyes … with touches of real elegance, beautifully groomed, terrible about his hair.” Marion sounded like a woman in love, and she acted the same.
She was with Sam when he discovered the empty building in just the right location, a few blocks east of the Peabody, just off Union and a few blocks north of Beale Street. “One day we were riding along,” she recalled years later, “and he saw that spot on Union, and he said, ‘That’s the spot I want!’” Continuing her story, Marion switched to the first person plural. “With many difficulties, we got the place, and we raised the money, and between us we did everything,” she said. “We laid all the tile, and we painted the acoustic boards, I put in the bathroom, Sam put in the control room—what little equipment he had always had to be the best.” Soon the business opened as the Memphis Recording Service.
Why was Marion there? “I knew nothing about the music, and I didn’t care a bit,” she said. Also, she was not into the business of social revolution. “My association, my contribution, my participation was based totally on my personal relationship with Sam in a way that is totally unbelievable to me now. All I wanted to do was to make it possible for him to fulfill his vision—all I wanted to do was to do what would make him happy.”
Divorced and raising a nine-year-old son, she nevertheless quit her job at WREC and went to work with Sam. She was receptionist, secretary, typist, bookkeeper, everything up front. Sam, when he was there, either worked in the studio in back or took his current visitor to what was called “the conference room,” actually the third booth on the window side in Mrs. Taylor’s cafe next door.
Sun Records
In early 1952, encouraged by the success of recordings he had produced for other companies, Sam established his own label, Sun Records. By the summer of 1953, he had scored a big hit with blues man Rufus Thomas’s “Bear Cat.” Two others soon followed: “Feelin’ Good” by Little Junior Parker and “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” by the Prisonaires. Both rose into the charts that fall. The Prisonaires were, literally, black prisoners brought over from the state penitentiary in Nashville. Both the warden and the governor, Frank Clement, supported the rehabilitation of criminals, and this was a very visible and audible move in that direction. It was probably the first time ever that uniformed and armed prison guards had attended a recording session in a studio.
African American artists soon learned that Sam Phillips was the man in Memphis who understood their music, who was fair, and who might record and sell their work. They were drawn to the little storefront studio on Union Avenue, and he recorded many of them, including Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. (“Blues Boy”) King, and Ike Turner, the first husband of Tina Turner.
Ike Turner, like blues pioneer Muddy Waters, came out of that amazingly rich wellspring of creativity in the Mississippi Delta, Clarksdale. In the 1910s, it was the childhood home of Tennessee Williams. In the early 1920s, Clarksdale was also the playground for sexually challenged and desperately searching William Faulkner and his older bachelor buddy, the Oxford lawyer Phil Stone. It was a place where they could drink and gamble, often at the elite but famously profligate Moon Lake Club north of town. Recurrently, Memphis reformers drove bootleggers, gamblers, madams, and prostitutes out of the city, and many took refuge in and around Clarksdale, where they continued their operations unabated. Faulkner soaked it all up, and it poured forth magnificently in his fiction.
Faulkner had a beautifully supportive female friend in Clarksdale, a uniquely marvelously independent young woman named Eula Dorothy Wilcox. “Dot” owned a “beauty parlor,” a vital institution in every Southern community that totally excluded men and gave women a place to regularly express their thoughts and feelings. Born in Oklahoma, Dot was orphaned at twelve and put herself through beautician’s school. She opened her own shop in Clarksdale, bought a house, and erected a high, solid wooden fence around it. Just as some black businessmen ran all-black businesses, drew their money from black people, and thus gained some insulation from white people, Dot had an all-woman business that drew its money from women and gave her some insulation from that male-dominated world. William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Elvis Presley were all born within seventy-five miles of one another in northeastern Mississippi. Sam Phillips was born just across the state line in northwestern Alabama. This was the very heartland of slavery in America in the generation before the Civil War and the heartland of repressive racism for generations after. Slavery, and after slavery race, permeated the culture and tortured Southerners both black and white. It was precisely the complex, unrelenting, and deeply painful frustrations generated by Southern culture that informed the art of Faulkner and Williams—and Presley—and gave it great power. In the black belt South, the suffering was extraordinarily keen and compelled expression, the kind of expression that could only come with art—with writing, with music, and with performance. It was precisely because the culture wracked its people with such emotional violence over generations that its artists in the twentieth century achieved such power in interpreting humanity in America. The strikingly close geographical congruence of the origins of these highly creative people is no coincidence.
Sam Phillips shared that culture. He too felt keenly the disjunction between what was and what ought, humanely, to be. He was an artist who dedicated his life to the ideal that people should be able to express freely what they felt, to be what they felt themselves truly to be. His medium was technical—sound electronically rendered—but it was art too, just like fiction, song, or performance. Sam began with blacks and moved on to whites. What he did with whites was informed by what he had done with blacks.
The Very First Elvis Record
It was Marion Keisker who was there up front at her desk in the Sun studio one Saturday morning in the summer of 1953 when young Elvis Presley, then age eighteen, walked in. He was white and working class. He was probably unemployed, having worked only one month during that whole summer. It was another steaming hot day in Memphis, and the Venetian blinds were already slanting against the south-side sun beyond the plate glass windows on either side of the front door. In her midthirties, cool and crisp in her starched cotton dress, fair of skin, red-blond hair fixed in a permanent wave, Marion, like her radio talk show persona Kitty Kelly, could meet anyone with poise, with real but measured interest, including this rather strange-looking boy with the long sideburns.
For Elvis it was an exciting, upbeat day. In Marion’s memory, however, she associated that first meeting with Elvis with tears—her tears. Sam had spoken harshly to her. Sometimes, in her memory, Sam is in the studio arguing with a partner over money; sometimes he’s in the restaurant next door. Both were common occurrences.
Marion recalled vividly the image of the teenager poking his head in shyly through the doorway. She noted the hair—long, dirty-blond, and greasy. He approached her desk, diffidently, almost sliding forward. She asked if she could help him. Then her exact memory faded again. Perhaps he said, actually mumbled, that he wanted to make a record “to surprise my mother.” Or, perhaps he said, “I just wanted to hear what I sounded like.” She gave him the price: $3.98, the cost of eight trips to the movies for his date and himself at Suzore No. 2 on Main Street. Not cheap, but it was something he had thought about carefully and wanted very much to do. While they waited for Sam to call Elvis into the studio, they talked.
“If you know anyone that needs a singer,” he said. The tip of his hidden agenda became barely visible. He was looking for a job as a singer. He had recently won the talent contest at Humes High; he knew he had talent. He did not want to work in a machine shop, at Sears and Roebuck or Kroger, or take a job as a delivery boy, all possibilities generated for him by the Tennessee Employment Security Office that summer. He was announcing his availability as a singer. Not knowing what else t
o do, he pushed his shyness in front of Marion, a woman who seemed receptive to him. He was not begging, but asking, hoping.
“What kind of singer are you?” Marion asked.
“I sing all kinds,” Elvis replied.
“Who do you sound like?” asked Marion, patient, encouraging.
“I don’t sound like nobody,” Elvis said.
Marion tried yet again, “What do you sing … hillbilly?” she suggested.
“I sing hillbilly,” he said.
“Well, who do you sound like in hillbilly?”
“I don’t sound like nobody,” he said again.
Later, in the studio, Sam watched through the glass window of the control booth while Elvis performed. Elvis did not, indeed, sound like anyone else. He sang and picked at the battered, beat-up guitar that he never played very well and often carried about with him as if to draw attention. First came “My Happiness,” a 1948 hit. It was a sweet, melting, sentimental ballad that he had sung scores of times for his friends. On the flip side, he did “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” a weepy song made a favorite among whites by a black group called the Ink Spots. Elvis ran out of song before he ran out of recording time and simply terminated the session. “That’s the end,” he announced.
Elvis looked at Sam in the control booth. Sam nodded and said he was an “interesting” singer.
“We might give you a call sometime,” he said. Sam asked Marion to write down Elvis’s name, and she noted beside it: “Good ballad singer. Hold.”
Out front at her desk, Marion typed out the titles of his songs and his name for the labels. Elvis lingered, talking with Marion. But Mr. Phillips did not come out. After a while, Elvis took his shiny black, brittle acetate disc and left.
All fall Elvis would drop by the studio—or Mrs. Taylor’s cafe next door—and talk to Marion. He could talk to women. Mr. Phillips would be in and out, but very busy. Sun Records was alive and moving, but finances were precarious, and Sam was under tremendous pressure. In January, Elvis cut another record for himself. This time he did two country songs, “Casual Love Affair” and “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way.” Sam saw possibility, but still he was noncommittal. It was all right, though. By then, there was the church on McLemore, offering him heady proximity to the Blackwood Brothers … and to Dixie Locke.
The Starlite Wranglers
Sam Phillips was determined to give talented African Americans an outlet for expressing their art, and he was no less committed to talented whites of the lower social orders. It was almost as if he were waging a war on privilege, on people at the top who allowed little or no chance to those who were born without advantages. “I don’t remember when,” he told Peter Guralnick, “I thought to myself: suppose that I would have been born a little bit more down on the economic ladder. I think I felt from the beginning the total inequality of man’s inhumanity to his brother.” Sam rejected Southern social orthodoxy. He was fiercely individual, and he was, in his own unideological, self-determined, and driven way, a rebel against the established order.
Sam began with African Americans, and in 1953 he was achieving some success. By the spring of 1954, however, he was also well into a search for talent among working-class men on the white side of the line. One group he recorded was the Starlite Wranglers, led by Scotty Moore. Scotty’s daytime job was “blocking” (cleaning and reshaping) men’s hats in his brother’s dry-cleaning shop on McLean Street just north of the zoo in Overton Park and, incidentally, within a hundred yards or so of where Tennessee Williams’s grandparents lived and a backyard nearby where amateur actors had presented his first performed play in 1935. Scotty’s other job, the one he truly loved, was playing his guitar with the Wranglers, a country and western band that performed in honky-tonks in and around Memphis. Also in the band was Scotty’s best friend, Bill Black, who played bass fiddle. Bill was a “tire builder” at the Firestone plant on the north side of town. Other Wranglers also worked at Firestone. Both they and their audiences were very much “country come to town,” virtually from the cotton patch to the production line.
Scotty himself was reared on a farm near Humboldt, Tennessee, seventy-five miles northeast of Memphis. His full name was Winfield Scott Moore, named after his father, who was named after the general who took Mexico City in 1847 during the Mexican War. It was a war dear to the hearts of the slaveholders in the Old Southwest. Victory meant that their land, the American South, extended through West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California all the way to the Pacific Ocean. After the war, the South was filled with little Winfields or Winfield Scotts and dotted with little towns named for the war’s battle sites—Monterey, Buena Vista, and Saltillo. At sixteen, Scotty falsified his age to join the navy and was sent to Korea, the global struggle that would so deeply mark him, Elvis, and other young people of their generation.
By 1953, twenty-two-year-old Scotty was in Memphis working in his brother’s laundry. He was already the father of two children, but his wife had left him and took the children back to her hometown, Bremerton, Washington. His guitar, not his wife, was the love of his life. He had just acquired a Gibson ES-295 semiacoustic jazz guitar. It was “feminine,” he said. “I could make out with the Gibson.” Even so, in June, he married again. He had met Bobbie Moore at Shadow Lawn, one of the raucous night spots around Memphis where he played on weekends.
Scotty recruited the musicians who made up the Starlite Wranglers, put them in matching cowboy hats and shirts, and even constructed a six-foot star out of Christmas lights to background their performances. He secured bookings in and around Memphis and got them a regular radio spot on station KWEM across the river in West Memphis. Also in West Memphis, a month after his marriage to Bobbie, he got an aspiring young country singer pregnant. His daughter was six years old before he knew she existed.
Scotty well understood that real success in bookings required radio play, and radio play required a record. Like many others, he thought that Sam Phillips was the man who held the keys to the kingdom. In the spring of 1954, the Wranglers made their record. It sold only several hundred copies, but it brought Scotty and Sam together. Scotty got into the habit of dropping by the studio almost every afternoon after work. He and Sam often consulted over coffee in “the conference room,” trying to figure out where music ought to go. Both men were always on the lookout for talent.
Sam wanted to make a record like no one had ever made before. He wanted to show the world what raw, untutored, unfettered talent could do. He could not say exactly what the sound would be, he told Scotty, but he would know it when he heard it.
Is This the Right Place?
On Saturday, June 26, 1954, Sam saw his chance. The same man who had sent him a hit with the Prisonaires had mailed a recording of a song: “Without You.” It was an amateurish production; Sam said it sounded like a fusion between a sentimental Irish tenor and the Ink Spots. Yet it was intriguing, and it brought to mind the voice of the strange-looking kid who was still hanging around the shop talking to Marion.
Sam asked Marion to call Elvis and invite him to come down to the studio. She telephoned him at home on Alabama Avenue, several blocks away. “Can you be here at the studio by three?” she asked. Elvis later loved to tell the story. “I was there by the time she hung up the phone,” he would say and laugh.
Sam and Elvis tried hard with the new song, but just never got a feel for it. Sam did not then send Elvis away. On the contrary, he kept him there all afternoon. They tried virtually every song, or fragment of song, that Elvis could remember. As Elvis’s spirit sank, Sam caught his eye, nodded, and spoke reassuringly. “You’re doing just fine,” he said. “Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you now.”
As Sam later recalled, what he wanted was communication, music that would communicate the richness of life among Southern blacks and unprivileged whites. Big bands were not the only musicians worth hearing. The wall against innovation might be breached with young people. Sam knew that they list
ened to black music on their radios, even if they didn’t buy the records. There was a restlessness that bred tolerance among young people, he thought, almost a need to break out and experiment with something new, whatever it might be, black or white.
Sam was impatient for success, but he had tremendous control. He probed and pondered. He knew that Elvis had something. It was precisely the kind of raw untrained talent that he had sought and found among black artists. But he was not asking Elvis to sing “black.” He was asking him to sing what he felt.
Elvis had not clicked on the first try. Someone less perceptive and less determined than Sam might have passed this young man by as another investment that had not paid off. Instead, he enlisted Scotty Moore to work with Elvis. He did so during another “coffee conference” with Scotty and Marion at Mrs. Taylor’s cafe on Saturday afternoon, July 3. Encouraged by Sam, Scotty invited Elvis over to his house on July 4.
Bobbie Moore remembered Elvis coming up the walk to her front door. He was a study in color: pink pants, as she recalled, with a black stripe running down the side of each leg, white lacy shirt, and white buck shoes. He was carrying his guitar.
“Is this the right place?” he asked.
Bobbie invited Elvis in and brought Scotty up from a back room where he was practicing his guitar. She offered Elvis a Coke. Then Scotty sent Bobbie down the street to ask Bill Black to join them.
During the first month of their marriage, Scotty and Bobbie had lived in a room in his boarding house. Then for almost a year they lived with kinfolk. In June 1954, just a month before, they had moved onto the same street with Bill and only three doors away. Scotty wanted to be close to Bill in North Memphis, where he lived to be near his day job at the Firestone plant. To make more room for his family, Bill kept his big bass fiddle in Scotty’s living room.
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