Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Bill arrived, and Elvis ran through every song he could think of. Scotty was astounded at the number and range of songs that Elvis knew—“every damn song in the world,” he said, from Eddy Arnold to Billy Eckstine.

  Down the street, Bobbie visited with Evelyn Black for an hour or two. When she returned, they were still at it. She recalled Elvis singing a lot of “Because” songs—“I Love You Because (You Understand Me),” “Because of You,” “Just Because You Think You’re So Pretty.” Evelyn was thinking that he was only a pimply-face kid with greasy, duck tailed hair.

  After Elvis left, Scotty asked Bill what he thought.

  “Well, he didn’t impress me too damned much,” Bill said.

  Scotty thought that Elvis had a good voice and good timing, but nothing new jumped out from the material. He called Sam. Elvis did know a lot of rhythm and blues songs, he said. They agreed that it was worth bringing Elvis into the studio for another audition. Sam did not think they would need any of the other Starlite Wranglers as backup musicians, just Scotty and Bill.

  Early the next morning, Bobbie left for her job in the billing department at Sears, Roebuck. Scotty left for the dry-cleaning shop, as always carrying his guitar for lunchtime practice.

  Wynette Pugh, age twelve, was probably in and out of the steamy laundry that day, as she was all during that summer. Her mother worked in the laundry office. They had come to Memphis from Itawamba County in northeastern Mississippi, near Tupelo. Her father died before she was born. He had been a locally famous musician, and she grew up in a house full of musical instruments and an aura of music. Wynette loved to hear Scotty play his guitar. Later, she would stick around to listen as Scotty and Elvis practiced in an upstairs room in the laundry, balancing her fascination with the music against her apprehension of having to walk home in the dark alongside the zoo in Overton Park with its growling lions, silently slithering snakes, and shrieking monkeys. As a teenager, Wynette moved to Birmingham, where she began a long, difficult, and determined rise as a country singer. With success, she changed her name from Wynette Pugh to Tammy Wynette, and married George Jones, one of the great country singers of his time. George turned out to be severely unbalanced and very alcoholic, and Tammy’s great song turned out to be “Stand by Your Man.” Sorely taxed, Tammy finally gave up on her man, divorced George, and gained the fame she deserved.

  Sam’s First Elvis Record

  Monday evening, July 5, Sam was again in the control booth. The three musicians were in the sound room. Again Sam trolled patiently, one song after another. Nothing worked. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were exhausted. They had worked all day at their regular jobs while the temperature in Memphis climbed from the mid-70s at dawn to 100 degrees in the early afternoon and the humidity hovered at 92 percent. The dreary prospect of having to go to work the next morning rose before them. About midnight, they were lying about in various stages of collapse. Sam was in his control room adjusting his equipment. Suddenly Elvis jumped up and started flailing away at his guitar and singing a blues song, “That’s All Right, Mama.” Bill, never reverent toward his instrument, was sitting on his bass fiddle. He leaped up and joined in, then Scotty. Sam knew the song right away. It had been first recorded in 1946 (as just “That’s All Right”) by the black singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup.

  Lights do sometimes flash on the road to Damascus. The light flashed for Sam, and he saw Elvis as if for the first time, a white boy picking up on a black man’s song. “That’s All Right” was a song that Elvis simply by his color and youth had no right doing. Because Elvis was not born and reared black, his rendering could never be black. Yet Elvis was a young white man to whom this black man’s song meant something, something he could feel in his own life, feel around him, and express in his singing. Elvis’s performance was an appropriation from another culture, a piece plucked out of its original setting and plunked down in his world. Of necessity, it was new, a mutation, in itself a creation.

  It was a song with a message. It was about a universal and vital issue—how men and women relate to one another. When Elvis said, “That’s all right, mama,” he was singing about his world. Vernon and Gladys, Minnie Mae and Jessie Presley, Elvis and Dixie. It was about all those men and women, mamas and papas that he had known, white folks, not black folks, plain white folks. The lyrics suggested the possibility of a more comfortable relationship between the sexes than obtained among adult whites in the patriarchal South in the 1950s. “That’s all right, mama, any way you do.” It was wisdom out of the mouths of babes, out of a new and rising generation free for a moment at least from the crippling baggage of maturity.

  Poking his head through the doorway of the engineer’s room, Sam asked, “What are y’all doing?”

  “Just foolin’ around,” Scotty replied.

  “Well, it didn’t sound too bad,” Sam said. “Try it again.”

  After several tries during which Sam moved Elvis closer to or away from the microphone, they turned on the tape recorder and ran through the whole song. Sam played it back.

  “Man, that’s good,” he declared. “It’s different.”

  They needed a song for the back side of the record, but it was almost 2:00 a.m. before they finished the A-side. Well satisfied with what they had done, they decided to quit for the night. Tuesday morning everyone went back to his day job. That evening they came together again in the studio to try for a B-side, thinking that it should in some way match the A-side. Nothing worked. They came together on Wednesday evening and ranged through every song they could think of, black and white, pop and country. Again, nothing worked. Sam decided to put the record on the air with just one side and see what happened.

  On Thursday evening about 9:40, Sam’s good friend Dewey Phillips, a disc jockey at station WHBQ, played “That’s All Right, Mama” on his show, Red, Hot, and Blue. Dewey, who kept up a boisterous, often nonsensical, and always rebellious patter between records, was exceedingly popular with young white people. One of his ploys was to call people he didn’t like “pissants” on the air, a practice so close to using foul language that it jeopardized the station’s FCC license. Dewey played black music as well as white, a practice that distressed many white parents. Often young whites would listen to him secretly. One white teenager, for example, practiced football with his high school team every afternoon, then helped out at his father’s filling station before he went home. After dinner, he went into his bedroom, put his radio under the covers of his bed so that his parents couldn’t hear it, tuned it in to Dewey, and crawled in beside it, pulling the covers over his head.

  The response to Elvis’s record was immediate and massive. The phones began to ring on the first play. Dewey played the record seven times in a row, and still the phones kept ringing. Dewey’s fans could not get enough. Some of the callers were black. Dewey actually favored black music over white on his show, and listeners generally thought that this new singer was black. Dewey fixed that quickly. He brought Elvis in for an interview right away and elicited the fact that he had gone to Humes High School, an all-white institution. Memphians then knew instantly that the singer was white, and the sound was thus even more remarkable. Simultaneously, they knew more. Humes was not only white, it was also working class.

  The next day, orders began to pour into Sun Records and soon rose to five thousand. And still they had no back side for the record. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday they came together in the little studio. Again they ran through the spectrum, song after song. They were still thinking that it should somehow match the blues song on the front side.

  It was Bill Black who found the back side, probably on Sunday. During a lull in the proceedings, Scotty recalled, Bill “jumped up and grabbed his bass and started slapping it, at a fast tempo, singing ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ in a high falsetto voice.” Elvis joined in, then Scotty on his guitar. Again Sam knew it when he heard it. Poking his head through the doorway of the control booth, he shouted, “Hey, that’s the one!”

  Given the A-s
ide of the record, so obviously inspired by black blues, Bill had no right to think of this one for the flip side. It was not blues or rhythm and blues. On the other hand, in terms of his all-white, grassroots country heritage, Bill had every right to think of it. It was about as white as one could get.

  “Blue Moon of Kentucky” had become a hit in 1947, a year after Crudup did “That’s All Right.” It was recorded by Bill Monroe and his band. The lyrics bespeak the usual lament over the loss of a lover. The novel element is that the lover asks the blue moon to “shine on the one that’s gone and proved untrue.” He laments but accepts his loss, and wishes her well, blessed by that marvelous moon. Monroe had sung the song in a high keening voice and played it in waltz time. Listeners of The Grand Ole Opry knew Monroe’s rendition well, and they loved this hillbilly lament.

  “Blue Moon of Kentucky” as rendered by Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys was back-looking. The keening sound that carried the message might be read as a yearning for family and community and the soft healing light of the moon on the hills of home. It was definitely not a celebration of moving on with life in the big city and such things as the great Firestone plant in north Memphis where Bill Black and other Starlite Wranglers made tires, or Precision Tool where Smiths and Presleys made artillery shells.

  Sam, Elvis, Bill, and Scotty began to work on the song. By now, they were well attuned to one another. After one of the takes, Sam announced his judgment from the control room. His voice can still be heard on the tape.

  “Hell, that’s different,” he said. “That’s a pop song now, nearly about.”

  Elvis, Bill, and Scotty totally turned the mood of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” around. They made a record that was upbeat and bubbling over with exuberance. Instructions on sheet music printed in 1978 advised a “Bright ‘jump’ tempo.” The past on the farm was just fine, but also we are okay in the city today, it seemed to say, working in the shop or factory or driving a truck.

  The record was indeed different, and Sam as engineer added to the difference of the sound in the final product. He had invented a double taping process that gave more body to the music he recorded. Scotty Moore said that “Sam treated Elvis as another instrument and he kept his voice closer to the mike than was the norm at the time.” The norm was to put “the singer’s voice way out front.” Revolutionary innovation in the electronic arts—so much a part of Elvis’s rise in records, radio, television, and film—was there in his first great, popular, and commercial success. “Sleepy Eyed” John Lepley, a very popular country DJ on WHHM, described “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and “That’s All Right, Mama” as highlights of Elvis’s attraction.

  Sam made copies of the completed record and passed them out to Memphis disc jockeys. Dewey Phillips still loved the A-side; others liked the B-side, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Soon the B-side was more popular in Memphis than the A-side. On this and the next record they would make, the artists were identified as “Elvis, Scotty, and Bill.” On the third they became “Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys.”

  On July 27, Edwin Howard, an entertainment reporter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar, interviewed Elvis, his first ever with the press. Fortunately, Marion Keisker, who brought him to the newspaper office for the interview during his lunch-hour break, did most of the talking. Elvis seemed happy enough in simply responding “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to the reporter’s questions. “The odd thing” about the new record, Marion said, “is that both sides seem to be equally popular on pop, folk and race record programs.” And then she captured the Elvis phenomenon succinctly and perfectly in a single sentence, not only for the moment but for decades to come. “This boy has something that seems to appeal to everybody,” she said.

  Forty-three years later, Scotty Moore looked back on what they had done. On one side, he said, “Elvis took a blues song and sang it white.” On the other, “he took a country song and gave it a bluesy spin.” It should not have worked, Scotty thought, this blending of black and white, but “in the laid-back, anything goes atmosphere of Sam’s studio, it seemed perfect.” What was new was not the songs, nor even, so much, the music. It was the people who made—and heard—the music. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” had the same sort of feel as “That’s All Right.” “After that,” he said, “we sort of had our direction.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A GIRL IN THE BED

  The Loss of Dixie

  When Dixie returned after two weeks of vacation, she was surprised to find that her young man had become a local celebrity. She was very proud of him and, for a time, shared in the excitement. She sat with Evelyn Black and Bobbie Moore, “the girls,” while the boys practiced at Scotty’s house. She went with Elvis downtown to the studios of WHBQ in the Hotel Chisca to visit his new friend Dewey Phillips, the frenetic, racy-talking disc jockey. Ironically, she felt at ease with Dewey, but when she met Sam Phillips at Sun Studios she did not feel warmly welcomed.

  Sam was intensely focused elsewhere, and perhaps he wanted no distractions. He was working feverishly to get an audience for Elvis. He succeeded in getting Bob Neal to add him to the country and western show Bob was organizing for July 30 at the Shell in Overton Park. Name recognition for such a newcomer as Elvis was not easily achieved. His name itself was a problem. Few people in the world had ever even heard of anyone named “Elvis.” One newspaper advertisement for the show gave his name as “Ellis” Presley. Another left him off the bill altogether. His high school yearbooks once had the same difficulties with “Elvis.”

  On the way to the performance, Elvis drove his 1941 Lincoln coupe from his house on Alabama Avenue to the south side of town to pick up Dixie. In the car she sat close, nestled supportively beside him, not quite sixteen, long dark hair, round of limb, fair and smooth of skin. Elvis drove north, then turned east on Poplar Avenue toward the park. He was exceedingly anxious and drummed the fingers of one hand nervously on the dashboard as he drove. Dixie herself was fearful that the audience might not appreciate his unique style. This was, after all, a country and western show. It featured Slim Whitman, whose latest record, “Indian Love Call,” was all the rage, and Billy Walker (“the Tall Texan”), who had just made it with “Thank You for Calling.”

  Elvis went backstage, and Dixie took her seat among some two thousand people arrayed in tiered rows facing the stage set under a shell-like cover. Finally, Elvis came on.

  Dixie was not surprised by Elvis’s movements onstage. Some musicians keep time by tapping a foot. To keep time Elvis had a way of shaking his left leg, which somehow got amplified in the baggy, deeply pleated trousers he wore. The gospel quartets that she and Elvis heard at the all-night sings in Ellis Auditorium were also movers, gliders, and shakers, and they too brought large audiences to their feet shouting, swaying, and clapping in time. These were highly spiritual experiences, but they were also highly physical and sensual. It was a public venue in which good women had a license to move their bodies in ecstasy. For some people, it was also sexual. During an interview with a writer, one quartet member affirmed that gospel singers on tour had sexual relations with fans. “Sure,” he replied with a wicked grin. “There’s no ____ as good as Christian ____.”

  Dixie knew that the bass singer with Elvis’s beloved Blackwood Brothers Quartet shook much like Elvis, and the women just loved it. He was called “Big Chief” because he had Indian blood. But what Dixie saw when the girls broke out at Overton Park was very different from what she saw at Ellis Auditorium. Elvis was not performing like a member of a quartet celebrating salvation and a “glory land” of eternal happiness “up there.” Typically the four gospel singers would be in business suits and with this line would simultaneously point their right index fingers heavenward, smiling confidently and nodding their heads affirmatively. Whatever Elvis intended to convey to his audience, his performance was read by the girls as sexual, and they responded loudly, physically, and with striking sexuality.

  Dixie was outraged. She wanted to leap to Elvis’s defense and tell the gir
ls to “shut up and leave him alone.” She wanted to challenge them: “What do you think you are doing here?” Forty years later she looked back and saw that this was the beginning of the end of her dream of living her life with Elvis and bearing his children. “I felt like all of a sudden I was not a part of what he was doing. He was doing something so totally him that I was not a part of it,” she recalled. “And he loved it.”

  Dixie was absolutely right. Elvis had revealed a large part of himself that she had not known before, and within weeks he began to construct a way of life that had no clear place for Dixie, nor, indeed, for any one woman. It was then that Elvis lost his capacity for loving one girl, one woman, and took up the mission of loving them all. It was then that he lost the wife and the children who would have been born every other year—Gladys had wanted to have three. He lost the secure position he would have had as, perhaps, a master electrician in the trades in growing Memphis, a predictable well-paid forty-hour workweek with a two-week vacation every summer—hopefully at the beach on the Gulf Shore. He also lost the pleasures of a three-bedroom, red-brick ranch house with a two-space carport in a solidly blue-collar Memphis suburb such as Whitehaven or Raleigh, singing with the choir in the new Assembly of God Church building on upscale McLemore Street on Sunday mornings, and dinner every Sunday after church with his parents, his wife, and at least one little Elvis in a white suit and one little Dixie in bright frills. This, more or less, was what always happened with his friends from the Courts and Humes High.

  The breakup between Elvis and Dixie began at the Shell in July 1954, but it took fifteen months of increasing pain on both sides for both to fully recognize that they were not to spend their lives together. Dixie suffered from his absences; Elvis suffered from his suspicions that Dixie was intimate with other young men while he was gone. At first, on the surface, they carried on much as before. When Elvis was home they would go to the movies, eat hamburgers, drink milkshakes, and sit on her front porch at night and “spoon.” Sometimes Dixie would go with Elvis to Scotty’s brother’s dry-cleaning plant on North McLean Street just beyond Overton Park and listen while the Blue Moon Boys rehearsed. Other times he would leave her and go hang out with Dewey Phillips, who would take him down to Beale Street to meet and listen to the black musicians, or home to his garage where he screened movies privately for himself and his male friends. The movies were perhaps sexual in nature.