had listened to the song over and over, a plaintive lament called
"Without You," sung in a quavering voice that sounded like a cross between
the Ink Spots and a sentimental Irish tenor. It was undeniably am aJ
A N U A RY-J U LY 1 9 5 4 '" 8 5
teurish, but there was something about it, it had a quality o f yearning to it,
and Phillips felt with the right voice maybe it could be something. Its purity,
its simplicity, above all the very amateurishness of the performance,
put him in mind of the kid who had been stopping by - he was not a pest,
exactly, but he kept turning up - for the last nine or ten months. What
was his name? he asked Marion, who seemed somewhat taken with the
boy, a shy, insecure kid ("He was beyond shy," Sam thought) who had obviously
never sung anywhere in his life. "Elvis Presley," Marion said and
made the call.
They worked on the number all afternoon. When it became obvious
that for whatever reason the boy was not going to get it right - maybe
"Without You" wasn't the right song for him, maybe he was just intimidated
by the damn studio - Phillips had him run down just about every
song he knew. He wasn't much of a guitar player, but the world didn't
need any more damn virtuosos; what the world needed, Sam Phillips was
convinced, was communication, and that was what he sensed in there
somewhere, underlying everything, in this boy's voice. "I guess I must
have sat there at least three hours," Elvis told Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter
Bob Johnson in 1956. "I sang everything I knew - pop stuff,
spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered." Sam watched
him intently through the glass of the control room window - he was no
longer taping him, and in almost every respect this session had to be accounted
a dismal failure, but still there was something.... Every so often
the boy looked up at him, as if for approval: was he doing all right? Sam
just nodded and spoke in that smooth, reassuring voice. "You're doing
just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something
to you now." Soothing, crooning, his eyes locked into the boy's
through the plate glass window that he had built so that his eyes would be
level with the performer's when he was sitting at the control room console,
he didn't really know if they were getting anywhere or not, it was
just so damned hard to tell when you were dealing with a bunch of damn
amateurs, but it was only from amateurs, he firmly believed, that you
ever got any real freshness of feeling.
When it was over, Elvis was exhausted, he felt limp but strangely
elated, too. "I was an overnight sensation," he always told interviewers in
later years. "A year after they heard me the first time, they called me
back!" Everyone caught the boyish modesty, but they may have overlooked
the understandable pride. Mr. Phillips had called him back - his
8 6 " WI T H O U T Y O U "
perseverance had paid off. And while nothing was said about what would
happen next, there was little doubt in Elvis' mind that something would.
He had finally gotten his break. He drove over to Dixie's in a strange state
of detachment - they went to the movies that night, and he mentioned
in passing that he had made a record.
ON T H E E V E N I N G of Wednesday, June 30, tragedy struck. Dixie
came home the next day to find her mother waiting for her at the
door with the gravest expression. She sat Dixie down in the kitchen and
told her there had been a terrible accident - the Blackwood Brothers'
plane had crashed the night before somewhere in Alabama, it wasn't all of
them, it was just R.W. and the bass singer, Bill Lyles, but they had both
been killed. Dixie stared at her mother, she couldn't believe it at first, then
her eyes filled up with tears. Bill? R.W.? Bill's wife, Ruth, was her Sunday
school teacher. She was inconsolable. She called some of her friends. Nobody
could believe it. The Blackwood Brothers were their own; the most
progressive and businesslike of all gospel groups, they had had their own
plane since the fall of 1952. According to the news accounts they had performed
at noon with the Statesmen at the Chilton County Peach Festival
in Clanton, Alabama. Evidently, the sponsors had asked them to stick
around for the afternoon festivities, and when it came time to leave, there
was still a big crowd, with automobiles parked all around the field. R.W.
wanted to take the plane up before it got dark, to see how much clearance
they had for takeoff. When he made his landing approach, everybody
thought he was just showing off, but then the plane didn't straighten up,
it just bounced and burst into flames, and you could see the charred figures
in the plane. James Blackwood, a slight, slender man, screamed that
he was going in and started for the plane, but Jake Hess wrapped him in a
bear hug and didn't let go until James finally subsided. On the ride back to
Memphis that night James said to Jake that he would never sing again, but
Jake said he owed it to the people to go on.
Elvis came straight from work to Dixie's house - he didn't even
bother to change. It was obvious from his tear-streaked face that he knew
what had happened. They didn't say anything, just threw themselves into
each other's arms, even with her mother there. They went to Gaston
Park that night and sipped on milk shakes and cried and cried. What
would happen to the Blackwood Brothers? they wondered. The quartet
J A N U ARY-J U LY I 9 5 4 c-.. 8 7
would just fall apart. Their poor families. I t seemed like the world was
coming to an end.
The funeral the next day was one of the biggest in Memphis history -
it was the first time that a funeral service had ever been conducted at Ellis
Auditorium. The Statesmen sang, and so did the Speers and five other
quartets. Governor Frank Clement, who had been present at the Blackwoods'
last Memphis appearance, on June 18, delivered a sincere and
emotional eulogy; Clement, after all, was not only a friend to the quartets,
he had presided over the growth of the Nashville recording industry
and was one of the key factors in the Prisonaires getting their recording
break. There were close to five thousand people present - they opened
up the North Hall when the South Hall was filled, and so beloved were
the Blackwoods, reported the papers, that "a number of negroes called
the Auditorium asking if they could attend the funeral, and the galleries
were reserved for negroes, Chauncey Barbour, Auditorium manager,
said." The Reverend Hamill preached the sermon, and Dr. Robert G. Lee
of Bellevue Baptist Church delivered the prayer. Elvis and Dixie sat with
Mr. and Mrs. Presley and held hands. Dixie couldn't believe she was leaving
for Florida the next day. She couldn't leave - she didn't want to
leave - she wasn't going to leave him, not now. They clung to each
other through most of the night, and in the morning Elvis came over as
the Lockes packed up for their trip. He left around noon, after an exchange
of promises to be true. They would both write, they said, he
would try to call - he took down all the numbers and places she would
be staying. They could barely let go of each other. Her parents discreetly
left them alone. It had been a highly emotional time. When she came
back, Dixie reassured him, reassured herself through swollen, tearstained
eyes, nothing would have changed, everything would still be the same,
they would still have the summer, they would still have their whole lives
in front of them.
J UL Y 2 8, 1 9 5 4. (M E M P H IS B R O O KS M US E U M / M I C H A E L O C HS A R C H I V E S)
"TH AT' S ALL RI G HT"
TH A T A F T E R N O O N a young guitarist named Scotty Moore
stopped by 706 Union, ostensibly to find out how his record
was doing. He had been coming by the studio for several
months now, trying to get somewhere with his group, the
Starlite Wranglers, trying to get a leg up in the business. The group,
which had existed in various configurations since Scotty's discharge from
the navy in early 1952, consisted of fellow guitarist Clyde Rush, steel guitarist
Millard Yow, and bass player Bill Black, all of whom worked at Firestone,
and a variety of interchangeable vocalists. Scotty, who worked as a
hatter at his brothers' dry cleaning establishment at 613 North McClean,
had recently brought in Doug Poindexter, a baker with a penchant for
Hank Williams tunes, as permanent lead singer, and he had had a big star
made up with Christmas lights that flashed on and off to advertise the
band's name on the bandstand. They had a few regular bookings through
the spring - they continued to play the same rough club out toward
Somerville where Scotty and Bill had backed up Dorsey Burnette - and
they played a couple of clubs around town. They landed a radio spot on
West Memphis station KWEM, and Scotty got them a regular booking at
the Bon Air, which had previously featured nothing but pop. The next
step, clearly, was to make a record.
That was what led the Starlite Wranglers to the Memphis Recording
Service. Doug Poindexter asked Bill Fitzgerald at Music Sales, the local independent
record distributor, how they "could get on MGM like Hank
Williams," and Fitzgerald, who distributed the Sun label among others,
suggested that they try Sam Phillips. It was Scotty, as manager of the band
and prime instigator of their upward professional mobility, who did this,
with some trepidation, one afternoon after he got off work.
He and Sam hit it off almost instantly. Sam saw in Scotty an ambitious
young man of twenty-two, not content with the limited vistas that lay
before him - he didn't know what he wanted exactly, but he wanted
8 9
9 0 '" " T H AT ' S A L L R I G H T "
something more than a lifetime of blocking hats or playing clubs and
eventually giving it up to go into some little retail business. Scotty was
looking for something difef rent, Sam sensed, and he was a good listener
besides. Soon the two of them got into the habit of meeting several days a
week at 2:00 in the afternoon when Scotty got off work - Scotty would
just stop by, and they would go next door to Miss Taylor's restaurant for a
cup of coffee and talk about the future. To Sam, who at thirty-one had
seen more than his share of ups and downs, it was an opportunity to expound
upon his ideas to an audience that was not only sympathetic:
Scotty clearly enjoyed plotting and scheming and dreaming about the
changes that were just around the comer. To Scotty, who had grown up
on a farm in Gadsden with the feeling that the world had passed him by
(his father and his three older brothers had had a band, but by the time
Scotty came along, fifteen years after the next-youngest brother, they had
given it up) and who had joined the navy at sixteen, this was heaven. He
was married for the second time, had two kids living out in Washington
with his first wife, and aspired to playing jazz, like Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow,
or country virtuosos Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. He was serious
but self-taught, he had quit in the middle of his second year of high
school, and here was somebody in Memphis telling him, with a conviction
that defied gainsaying, that there was a chance that something could
happen, that change was on the way. "Sam had an uncanny knack for
pulling things out of people that they didn't even know they had. He
knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it. I think that recording
all those black artists had to give him an insight; he just didn't know
where that insight would lead. Sam came from pretty much the same
background as the rest of us, basically. We were just looking for something,
we didn't know quite what it was, we would just sit there over coffee
and say to each other, 'What is it? What should we do? How can we
do it?' "
Eventually Scotty persuaded Sam to record the Wranglers, and on
May 25, 1954, they recorded two sides, which Scotty wrote (he gave half of
the credit for one song to Doug Poindexter because he was the vocalist
and a third of the other to his brother for writing the lead sheet). The record
was released at the beginning of June and never went anywhere - by
the end of summer it had sold approximately three hundred copies - but
Scotty continued to stop by the studio, knowing that the record wasn't his
ticket to the future, the Starlite Wranglers were just a hillbilly band, but
J U LY- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 9 1
feeling somehow that if he stuck close to Sam Phillips he would find out
what the future was.
Sometime around the middle of May he started hearing about a
young ballad singer with possibilities. There was something different
about his voice, Sam said; Sam was interested in trying him out on this
new song he had picked up on his latest trip to Nashville to record the
Prisonaires. At some point Marion mentioned his name, Elvis Presley to
Scotty it sounded like "a name out of science fiction" - but since Sam
kept talking about him, he asked Sam to dig up a telephone number and
address, maybe they could get together, maybe this kid really had something.
Somehow Sam never seemed to have the information on hand, he
always said he'd have Marion look it up the next day, and Scotty was
keenly disappointed on this Saturday afternoon to find out that the boy
had actually been in the studio just a week before and that they had
worked unsuccessfully on the Nashville song. "This particular day,"
Scotty said, "it was about five in the afternoon - Marion was having coffee
with us, and Sam said, 'Get his name and phone number out of the
file.' Then he turned to me and said, 'Why don't you give him a call and
get him to come over to your house and see what you think of him?' Bill
Black lived just three doors down from me on Belz that ran into Firestone
- I had actually moved just to be near Bill - and Sam said, 'You
and Bill can just give him a listen, kind of feel him out.' "
Scotty called Elvis that evening, right after supper. His mother answered
and said that Elvis was at the movies, at the Suzore NO. 2. Scotty
said that he "represented Sun Records," and Mrs. Presley said that she
would get him out of the movies. There was a call back within an hour;
Scotty explained who he was and what he wanted to do. The boy seemed
to take it all in stride - his voice sounded confident enough, but wary. "I
told him I was working with Sam Phillips and possibly would like to audition
him if he was interested, and he said he guessed so. So we made an
appointment for the next day at my house."
On Sunday, July 4, Elvis showed up at Scotty's house on Belz in his old
Lincoln. He was wearing a black shirt, pink pants with a black stripe,
white shoes, and a greasy ducktail, and asked "Is this the right place?"
when Scotty's wife, Bobbie, answered the door. Bobbie asked him to have
a seat and went to get Scotty. "I said, 'That boy is here.' He said, 'What
boyr I said, 'I can't remember his name, it's the one you're supposed to
see today.' Scotty asked me to go down to Bill's house and see if Bill
92 '" " T H A T ' S A L L RI G H T "
would come practice with them - Bill's bass was already in our apartment,
because Bill and Evelyn had two kids, and there was more room
there."
After a few minutes of awkward small talk, Bill showed up and they
got down to business. Elvis hunched over his guitar and mumbled something
about not really knowing what to play, then launched into disconnected
fragments, seemingly, of every song he knew. Scotty and Bill fell
in behind him on numbers like Billy Eckstine's "I Apologize"; the Ink
Spots' "If! Didn't Care"; "Tomorrow Night"; Eddy Arnold's latest hit, "I
Really Don't Want to Know"; Hank Snow's "I Don't Hurt Anymore";
and a Dean Martin-styled version of Jo Stafford's "You Belong to Me."
They were all ballads, all sung in a yearning, quavery tenor that didn't
seem ready to settle anywhere soon and accompanied by the most rudimentary
strummed guitar. At some point Bill flopped down on the sofa,
and there was some talk about how Elvis lived on Alabama, just across
from Bill's mother, and how Elvis knew Bill's brother Johnny. Bill, the
most affable man in the world and the clown of the Starlite Wranglers
("He never met a stranger," Scotty has said in seeking to describe him),
said he had heard from Johnny just the other day, Johnny had been in
Corpus Christi since he got laid off from Firestone. They talked a little
about the football games down at the Triangle, and Bill said it was funny
they had never formally met before, but, of course, he had left home
before the Presleys moved into the Courts, he had gone into the army at
eighteen, and when he got out in 1946 he was already married. There
were a lot of musicians in Memphis, and you couldn't know them all Elvis
didn't happen to know a guitar player named Luther Perkins who
lived just around the comer, did he? Elvis met all of Bill's attempts at conversation
with perfunctory nods and stammered little asides of agreement
that you could barely make out - he was polite enough, but it was almost
as if he was filled with a need to say something that couldn't find
proper expression, and he couldn't stop fidgeting. "He was as green as a
gourd," Scotty would recall, with amusement, as his reaction at the time.
When Bobbie came back with Evelyn and Bill's sister, Mary Ann, they
were still playing, but "all of a sudden there was a crowd, we probably
scared Elvis," said Bobbie. "It was almost all slow ballads. 'I Love You Because'
is the one that I remember." fventually Elvis left, trailing clouds of
oily smoke behind him in the humpbacked old Lincoln. "What'd you
think?" Scotty asked, hoping that Bill might have seen something in the
J U L Y-S E P T E M B E R 1 95 4 n.. 9 3
boy that he didn't. "Well, he didn't impress me too damn much," said
Bill. "Snotty-nosed kid coming in here with those wild clothes and everything."
But what about his singing? Scotty asked, almost desperately - he
wanted the kid to be good for reasons that he didn't even care to examine.
"Well, it was all right, nothing out of the ordinary - I mean, the cat can
sing...."
That was Scotty's opinion, too. It was all right, nothing special - he
couldn't see where the boy had added all that much to the songs that he
had sung; Scotty didn't think he was going to make the world forget
about Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. But he called Sam anyway, what else
was he going to do after making such a fuss about meeting the kid? What
did you think? Sam asked.
"I said, 'He didn't really knock me out.' I said, 'The boy's got a good
voice.' I told him a lot of the songs he sang. Sam said, 'Well, I think I'll call
him, get him to come down to the studio tomorrow, we'll just set up an
audition and see what he sounds like coming back off of tape.' I said,
'Shall we bring in the whole band?' And he said, 'Naw, just you and Bill
come over, just something for a little rhythm. No use making a big deal
about it.' "
The next night everybody showed up around TOO. There was some
desultory small talk, Bill and Scotty joked nervously among themselves,
and Sam tried to make the boy feel at ease, carefully observing the way in
which he both withheld himself and tried to thrust himself into the conversation
at the same time. He reminded Sam so much of some of the
blues singers he had recorded, simultaneously proud and needy. At last,
after a few minutes of aimless chatter and letting them all get a little bit
used to being in the studio, Sam turned to the boy and said, "Well, what
do you want to sing?" This occasioned even more self-conscious confusion
as the three musicians tried to come up with something that they all
knew and could play - all the way through - but after a number of false
starts, they finally settled on "Harbor Lights," which had been a big hit
for Bing Crosby in 1950, and worked it through to the end, then tried Leon
Payne's "I Love You Because," a beautiful country ballad that had been a
number-one country hit for its author in 1949 and a number-two hit for
Ernest Tubb on the hillbilly charts the same year. They tried up to a
dozen takes, running through the song again and again - sometimes the
boy led off with several bars of whistling, sometimes he simply launched
into the verse. The recitation altered slightly each time that he repeated it,
9 4 '" " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
but each time he flung himself into it, seemingly trying to make it new.
Sometimes he simply blurted out the words, sometimes his singing voice
shifted to a thin, pinched, almost nasal tone before returning to the high,
keening tenor in which he sang the rest of the song - it was as if, Sam
thought, he wanted to put everything he had ever known or heard into
one song. And Scotty's guitar part was too damn complicated, he was trying
too damn hard to sound like Chet Atkins, but there was that strange
sense of inconsolable desire in the voice, there was emotion being communicated.
Sam sat in the control room, tapping his fingers absentmindedly on
the console. All his attention was focused on the studio, on the interaction
of the musicians, the sound they were getting, the feeling that was behind
the sound. Every so often he would come out and change a mike placement
slightly, talk with the boy a little, not just to bullshit with him but to
make him feel at home, to try to make him feel really at home. It was
always a question of how long you could go on like this, you wanted the
artist to get familiar with the studio, but being in the studio could take on
a kind of mind-numbing quality of its own, it could smooth over the
rough edges, you could take refuge in the little space that you had created
for yourself and banish the very element of spontaneity you were seeking
to achieve.
For Elvis it seemed like it had been going on for hours, and he began
to get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen. When Mr. Phillips
had called, he had taken the news calmly to begin with, he had tried
to banish all thoughts of results or consequences, but now it seemed as if
he could think of nothing else. He was getting more and more frustrated,
he flung himself desperately into each new version of "I Love You Because,"
trying to make it live, trying to make it new, but he saw his
chances slipping away as they returned to the beginning of the song over
and over again with numbing familiarity....
Finally they decided to take a break - it was late, and everybody had
to work the next day. Maybe they ought to just give it up for the night,
come back on Tuesday and try it again. Scotty and Bill were sipping
Cokes, not saying much of anything, Mr. Phillips was doing something in
the control room, and, as Elvis explained it afterward, "this song popped
into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around
with [it]." It was a song that he told Johnny Black he had written when he
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 95 4 '" 9 5
sang i t in the Courts, and Johnny believed him. The song was "That's All
Right [Mama]," an old blues number by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
"All of a sudden," said Scotty, "Elvis just started singing this song,
jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and
he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I
think, had the door to the control booth open - I don't know, he was either
editing some tape, or doing something - and he stuck his head out
and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know: 'Well,
back up: he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again: "
SA M R E C O G N I Z E D I T right away. He was amazed that the boy even
knew Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - nothing in any of the songs he had
tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at
all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly
embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, "This is where the
soul of man never dies." And the way the boy performed it, it came across
with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of cleareyed,
unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded
- it was "different," it was itself.
They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the
laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut "I Love You Because."
Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes "
Simplify, simplify!" was the watchword. "If we wanted Chet Atkins,"
said Sam good-humoredly, "we w<jluld have brought him up from Nashville
and gotten him in the damn studio!" He was delighted with the
rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat
and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass
player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, "Bill was one of the worst
bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!"
And yet that wasn't it either - it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and
there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, "but
sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him."
They worked on it over and over, refining the song, but the center
never changed. It always opened with the ringing sound of Elvis' rhythm
guitar, up till this moment almost a handicap to be gotten over. Then
there was Elvis' vocal, loose and free and full of confidence, holding it together.
And Scotty and Bill just fell in with an easy, swinging gait that was
the very epitome of what Sam had dreamt of but never fully imagined.
The first time Sam played it back for them, "we couldn't believe it was
us," said Bill. "It just sounded sort of raw and ragged," said Scotty. "We
thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so completely different.
But it just really flipped Sam - he felt it really had something. We
just sort of shook our heads and said, 'Well, that's fine, but good God,
they'll run us out of town!' " And Elvis? Elvis flung himself into the recording
process. You only have to listen to the tape to hear the confidence
grow. By the last take (only two false starts and one complete alternate
take remain), there is a different singer in the studio than the one who
started out the evening - nothing had been said, nothing had been articulated,
but everything had changed.
Sam Phillips sat in the studio after the session was over and everyone
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