had gone home. It was not unusual for him to hang around until two or
three in the morning, sometimes recording, sometimes just thinking
about what was going to become of his business and his family in these
perilous times, sometimes mulling over his vision of the future. He knew
that something was in the wind. He knew from his experience recording
blues, and from his fascination with black culture, that there was something
intrinsic to the music that could translate, that did translate. "It got
so you could sell a half million copies of a rhythm and blues record," Sam
told a Memphis reporter in 1959, reminiscing about his overnight success.
"These records appealed to white youngsters just as Uncle Silas [Payne's]
songs and stories used to appeal to me.... But there was something in
many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music. The Southern
ones especially felt a resistance that even they probably didn't quite understand.
They liked the music, but they weren't sure whether they ought
to like it or not. So I got to thinking how many records you could sell if
you could find white performers who could play and sing in this same exciting,
alive way."
The next night everyone came to the studio, but nothing much happened.
They tried a number of different songs - they even gave the
Rodgers and Hart standard "Blue Moon" (a 1949 hit for Billy Eckstine) a
passing try - but nothing really clicked, and both that evening and the
next were spent in more or less getting to know one another musically.
Nonetheless, Sam had little doubt of what had transpired in the studio
that first night. There was always the question of whether or not it was a
J U L Y-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 97
fluke; as far as that went, only time would tell. But Sam Phillips was never
one to hold back, when he believed in something he just plunged ahead.
And so, on Wednesday night, after calling an early halt to the proceedings,
he telephoned Dewey Phillips down at the new WHBQ studio in the
Hotel Chisca. "Get yourself a wheelbarrow full of goober dust," Dewey
was very likely announcing when Sam made the call, "and roll it in the
door [of whatever sponsor Dewey happened to be representing], and tell
'em Phillips sent you. And call Sam!"
DE W E Y P H I L L I P S in 1954 was very nearly at the apogee of his renown
and glory. From a fifteen-minute unpaid spot that he had
talked his way into while managing the record department at W. T.
Grant's, he had graduated to a 9:00-to-midnight slot six nights a week. According
to the Memphis papers he would get as many as three thousand
letters a week and forty to fifty telegrams a night, a measure not just of his
audience but of the fervor of that audience. When, a year or two later, he
asked his listeners to blow their horns at 10:00 in the evening, the whole
city, it was said, erupted with a single sound, and when the police chief,
who was also listening, called to remind Dewey of Memphis' antinoise
ordinance and begged him not to do it again, Dewey announced on the
air, "Well, good people, Chief MacDonald just called me, and he
said we can't do that anymore. Now I was going to have you do it at
eleven o'clock, but the chief told me we couldn't do it, so whatever
you do at eleven o'clock, don't blow your horns." The results were predictable.
One night an assistant started a fire in the wastebasket and convinced
Dewey that the hotel was on fire, but Dewey, a hero of the Battle of Hurtgen
Forest, kept right on broadcasting, directing the fire department
down to the station and staying on the air until the hoax was discovered.
He broadcast in stereo before stereo was invented, playing the same record
on two turntables which never started or ended together, creating a
phased effect that pleased Dewey unless it got so far out of line that he
took the needle off both records with a scrawk and announced that he
was just going to have to start all over and try it again.
WDIA OJ and r&b singer Rufus Thomas referred to Dewey as "a man
who just happened to be white," and he never lost his Negro audience,
even after the white teenage audience that Sam sensed out there made
9 8 n.,. " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
itself known. He went everywhere in Memphis, paraded proudly down
Beale Street, greeted the same people who, the Commercial Appeal reported
in 1950, had flocked to Grant's "just to see the man 'what gets hisself
so messed up.' " He had several chances to go national but passed
them up - or allowed them to pass him up - by remaining himself.
There were two kinds of people in Memphis, the Press-Scimitar declared in
1956, "those who are amused and fascinated by Dewey, and those who,
when they accidentally tune in, jump as tho stung by a wasp and hurriedly
switch to something nice and cultural, like Guy Lombardo." "He
was a genius," said Sam Phillips, "and I don't call many people geniuses."
DE W E Y S T O P P E D B Y the recording studio after his show. It was well
after midnight, but that was as good a time as any for Dewey.
"Dewey [was] completely unpredictable," wrote Press-Scimitar reporter
Bob Johnson, his (and Sam's) friend, in various celebrations of his spirit
over the years. "He would call at three or four A. M. and insist I listen to
something over the phone. I tried to tell him it was no time to be phoning
anyone, but Dewey had no sense of time. Sometimes I wonder if there is a
real Dewey, or ifhe's just something that happens as he goes along." Ifhe
was a personality that just unfolded, though, it was because he cared so
much about what he was doing. Whatever Dewey did, everyone agreed,
was from the heart. Ordinarily, when he stopped by the studio, all he
could talk about at first was the show. "Oh God, he loved his show," Sam
Phillips said. "He wasn't just playing records and cutting the monitor
down. He was enjoying everything he said, every record that he played,
every response that he got from his listeners. Dewey could get more excited
than anyone you ever saw." And he loved to argue with Sam. To
Marion Keisker, Sam and Dewey were so close that she couldn't stand to
be in the same room with the two of them - and it wasn't just that she
saw Dewey as a bad influence (though she did). She was also, she admitted,
jealous; she saw Dewey as a threat. "Dewey loved to argue with Sam,
just for the sake of arguing," recalled the singer Dickey Lee. "Talking
about how Sam can intimidate people, one night Sam was off on one of
his tirades, and right in the middle Dewey had a rubber band and snapped
it at Sam and hit him in the head. He thought it was the funniest thing.
Sam would get so mad at Dewey, but he loved him. Dewey always referred
to Sam as his half brother, even though they weren't related at all."
J U L Y-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 9 9
This particular night, though, there wasn't any arguing. Sam had
something he wanted to play for Dewey, he said right off, and he was uncharacteristically
nervous about it. Sam Phillips didn't like to ask a favor
of anyone - and he didn't really consider that he was asking a favor
now -but he was asking Dewey to listen to something, he was asking
him to consider something that had never previously existed on this
earth; this wasn't just a matter of sitting around and bullshitting and letting
Dewey absorb whatever happened to come his way. "But, you know
it was a funny thing," said Sam. "There was an element of Dewey that
was conservative, too. When he picked a damn record, he didn't want to
be wrong. 'Cause he had that thing going, 'How much bullshit have you
got in you, man, and when are you gonna deliver?' It so happened, by
God, that people believed Dewey, and he delivered. 'Cause when he went
on the air [he didn't have any scientific method], he just blabbed it right
out, 'It's gonna be a hit, it's gonna be a hit, it's the biggest thing you ever
heard. I'll tell you what, man, it's gonna knock you out.' And, you know,
as much as he respected me and loved me, Dewey had some real hangups
about what could be done locally - it was like if somebody was five
hundred or a thousand miles away there was more intrigue about them.
So it was an elongated education process, really, he wanted to make you
prove it to him unequivocally. And he was so into the finished product he
didn't care how it came about, it was just, what did you deliver for him to
make his show great? I think he was just beginning to feel that by God,
there was a legitimate record crusader in this town."
Dewey opened a Falstaff and sprinkled some salt in it, then sat back
and listened intently as Sam played the tape of the single song over and
over. Dewey knew the song, of course; he had played the Arthur "Big
Boy" Crudup version many times on his own show. It was the sound that
puzzled him. For once there was not much conversation as the two men
listened, each wondering what exactly the other thought. "He was reticent,
and I was glad that he was," said Sam. "If he hadn't been reticent, it
would have scared me to death, ifhe had said, 'Hey, man, this is a hit, it's
a hit,' I would have thought Dewey was just trying to make me feel good.
What I was thinking was, where you going to go with this, it's not black,
it's not white, it's not pop, it's not country, and I think Dewey was the
same way. He was fascinated by it - there was no question about that I
mean, he loved the damn record, but it was a question of where do we
go from here?"
1 0 0 '" " T HA T ' S A L L R I G H T "
They stayed up listening and talking in comparatively muted tones
until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, when both men finally returned home to
their respective families and beds. Then, what to Sam's surprise, the
phone rang early the next morning, and it was Dewey. "I didn't sleep well
last night, man," Dewey announced. Sam said, "Man, you should have
slept pretty good, with all that Jack Daniel's and beer in you." No, Dewey
said, he hadn't been able to sleep, because he kept thinking about that record,
he wanted it for his show tonight, in fact he wanted two copies, and
he said, "We ain't letting anybody know." His reticence, Sam said, was
over on that day.
Sam cut the acetates that afternoon and brought them down to the
station. He called Elvis after work to tell him that Dewey would most
likely be playing the record on his show that night. Elvis' response was
not uncharacteristic. "He fixed the radio and told us to leave it on that
station," said Gladys, "and then he went to the movies. I guess he was
just too nervous to listen." "I thought people would laugh at me," Elvis
told C. Robert Jennings of the Saturday Evening Post in 1965. "Some did,
and some are still laughing, I guess."
Vernon and Gladys did listen. They sat glued to the radio with Vernon's
mother, Minnie, and the rest of the relatives listening in their
nearby homes, until at last, at 9:30 or 10:00, Dewey announced that he had
a new record, it wasn't even a record, actually, it was a dub of a new record
that Sam was going to be putting out next week, and it was going to
be a hit, dee-gaw, ain't that right, Myrtle ("Moo," went the cow), and he
slapped the acetate - the acetates - on the turntables.
The response was instantaneous. Forty-seven phone calls, it was said,
came in right away, along with fourteen telegrams - or was it 114 phone
calls and forty-seven telegrams? - he played the record seven times in a
row, eleven times, seven times over the course of the rest of the program.
In retrospect it doesn't really matter; it seemed as if all of Memphis was
listening as Dewey kept up his nonstop patter, egging his radio audience
on, encouraging them to join him in the discovery of a new voice, proclaiming
to the world that Daddy-O-Dewey played the hits, that we way
uptown, about as far uptown as you can get, did anybody want to buy a
fur-lined duck? And if that one didn't flat git it for you, you can go to....
And tell ' em Phillips sent you!
For Gladys the biggest shock was "hearing them say his name over
the radio just before they put on that record. That shook me so it stayed
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 1 0 1
with me right through the whole song - Elvis Presley -just my son's
name. I couldn't rightly hear the record the first time round. " She didn't
have time to think about it for long anyway, because almost immediately
the phone rang. It was Dewey for Elvis. When she told him Elvis was at
the movies, he said, "Mrs. Presley, you just get that cotton-picking son of
yours down here to the station. I played that record of his, and them birdbrain
phones haven't stopped ringing since." Gladys went down one aisle
of the Suzore No. 2, and Vernon went down the other - or at least so the
story goes - and within minutes Elvis was at the station.
"I was scared to death," Elvis said. "I was shaking all over, I just
couldn't believe it, but Dewey kept telling me to cool it, [this] was really
happening. "
"Sit down, I'm gone interview you" were his first words to the frightened
nineteen-year-old, Dewey told writer Stanley Booth in 1967. "He
said, 'Mr. Phillips, I don't know nothing about being interviewed.' 'Just
don't say nothing dirty,' I told him. He sat down, and I said I'd let him
know when we were ready to start. I had a couple of records cued up, and
while they played we talked. I asked him where he went to high school,
and he said, 'Humes.' I wanted to get that out, because a lot of people
listening had thought he was colored. Finally I said, 'All right, Elvis, thank
you very much.' 'Aren't you gone interview me?' he asked. 'I already
have,' I said. 'The mike's been open the whole time.' He broke out in a
cold sweat."
It was Thursday, July 8. Elvis escaped out in the hot night air. He
walked back up Main to Third Street and then over to Alabama. Dewey
wound up his show and called his wife, Dot. How'd she like it? he asked.
"I told him I loved it," Dot told the Trenton (Tennessee) Herald Gazette in
1978, ten years after Dewey's death. "He went on to say that he believed
Elvis had a hit.... Dewey cherished that moment with Elvis. He would
tell it time and time again."
Sam Phillips was at the studio that night. He didn't see Elvis, and he
didn't see Dewey until after the show, but he knew what had happened,
he knew that the reaction had come, the phone lines had lit up without
anyone thinking about what the singer looked like, "they didn't give a
fuck about classifYing him, in Memphis, Tennessee, they liked what they
heard." He knew, too, that now the real work would begin.
* * *
1 0 2 '" " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
TH E N E W S T R A V E L E D like wildfire. Billie Chiles, a classmate of Elvis'
at Humes who had never been exactly entranced by his music, was at
a sock hop at the Holy Rosary Catholic Church. "Sometime during the
evening a couple went outside to the parking lot," Billie told former PressScimitar
reporter Bill Burk thirty-five years later, "and turned their [car]
radio on.... They came running downstairs yelling, 'Come up here
quick! You ain't going to believe what Dewey Phillips is playing on the
radio!' " Another classmate, George Klein, who had been president of the
class of 1953, stopped by Dewey's radio show that Saturday night. He had
just completed his freshman year at Memphis State, where he was majoring
in communications, and had served as a gofer for Dewey, "kind of a
baby-sitter," the previous summer, and in fact for much of the past school
year. For this summer he had gotten a job working at KOSE, in Osceola,
Arkansas, hitchhiking the fifty miles home after his Saturday shift to spend
Sunday with his mother and his Memphis friends. This particular Saturday
night he stopped by the station, as he generally did, just as Dewey
was about to go on the air, and Dewey greeted him, as he generally did,
with, " 'Hey mother, when'd you get in?'
"Then he said, 'Guess what? Come here.' And he took a record and
put his hand over the label and put it on the turntable. He played the record
and said, 'Guess who that is.' I said, 'Shit, Dewey, I don't knOW. Who
is it?' He said, 'You know this guy, you went to school with the boy,' and I
knew then it had to be Elvis. 'Sam brought the record by the other night,'
he said, 'and I played the sonofabitch fourteen times, and we got about
five hundred phone calls. It's gonna be a hit!' "
With all the excitement, Sam Phillips realized, now they were really
going to have to come up with something else in a hurry; they needed a
second side just to be able to put a record out. He felt that nothing they
had recorded to date was suitable, so they went back into the studio on
Friday night, and sometime in the next couple of days they came up with
something equally improbable, equally "different," and equally exciting.
"Blue Moon of Kentucky" had been a hit for Bill Monroe in 1946, well
before the term 'bluegrass" came into popular usage. In Monroe's version
it was a beautiful waltz familiar to anyone who listened to the Grand
Ole Opry and revered by every hillbilly musician who had ever picked up
a stringed instrument. "We spent three or four nights trying to get a back
side," Scotty said, "something that would be in the same kind of vein.
We'd gone through this song and that song, just running through them -
J U L Y-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '"" 1 0 3
I don't think any o f them were ever put o n tape - and then Bill jumped
up and started clowning, beating on his bass and singing 'Blue Moon of
Kentucky: in a high falsetto voice, more or less mimicking Bill Monroe.
And Elvis started banging on the guitar, playing rhythm and singing, and I
joined in and it just gelled.
"It's funny how they both come about by accident. There was nothing
like a direction, there was just a certain... feel. You know, Elvis
wasn't considered a real good rhythm player on guitar, but you listen to
That's All Right, Mama: he starts with the rhythm, just the open
rhythm, and then the slap [bass] starts - he had a feel for rhythm on the
stuff that we did that's very hard for anybody to do the same way."
"Blue Moon of Kentucky" evolved from a slow, bluesy version in 4 / 4
time with tentative instrumentation and a rather ornate vocal into a highspirited
declaration of exuberant self-discovery, driven by Elvis' ringing
rhythm guitar and a propulsive mix of Scotty's chording riffs and singlestring
filigree. For the first time Sam made extensive use of what he had
come to call slapback, a kind of homemade echo device that was created
by running the original recording signal through a second Ampex machine
and thereby achieving an almost sibilant phased effect. This undoubtedly
added not only to the presence but to the excitement of the
recording, and, of course, echo had the capacity of covering up a multitude
of sins, but what held it all together most of all was Sam's belief in
the uniqueness of what they were doing. What kept the musicians from
ever giving up was Sam's lulling faith: "All right, boys, we just about on it
now," you can almost hear him saying. "Do it again. Just do it one more
time for me." When he felt like he had reached the limit of his creativity,
Carl Perkins said of recording for Sam just a year or two later, Sam would
coax him to "walk out on a limb, I'd try things I knew I couldn't do, and
I'd get in a corner trying to do it and then have to work my way out of it.
I'd say, 'Mr. Phillips, that's terrible.' He said, 'That's original.' I said, 'But
it's just a big original mistake.' And he said, 'That's what Sun Records is.
That's what we are.' "
"That's fine now" you can actually hear Sam say, at the end of one
early take of "Blue Moon of Kentucky." He speaks in a soothing, almost
crooning voice, the voice of reason, the voice of confident imperturbability.
"Hell, that's different," he says to the three musicians awaiting his
verdict. "That's a pop song now, nearly about." And Elvis, Scotty, and
Bill all burst out in nervous, self-reassuring laughter.
104 " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
Almost as soon as the song was cut, Sam got two-sided dubs not just
to Dewey, who had had an exclusive now for a couple of days, but to Bob
Neal, the early-morning OJ and host of the High Noon Round-Up at
WMPS, Dick Stuart at the West Memphis station, KWEM, and Sleepy
Eyed John, a country jock at WHHM, who also led a big western-style
swing band and booked the Eagle's Nest out at the Clearpool complex on
Lamar. All three got on the record right away, playing the second side
mainly, but Sleepy EyedJohn evidently showed some business interest in
the young singer, which disturbed Sam. "Sleepy Eyed John hated what
we were doing at 706, he made no bones about it. I continued to carry
records to him because he played them, but I think he played them because
he thought by picking them apart he could make people see that
this was not really music." Sleepy Eyed John was a "businessman," not
the lowest form of life in Sam's eyes, because Sam considered himself a
businessman, but if you were a businessman exclusively, solely interested
in making money, you were worth little more than a bucketful of warm
spit. To forestall Sleepy Eye, Sam suggested to Scotty that he become the
manager of record, just as he was already manager of the Starlite Wranglers.
"He was exactly what we needed. Scotty had the demeanor and the
manner - he wasn't going to give Elvis any unnecessary problems about
'You do this' and 'You do that: and you could trust him all the way. We
didn't need some hotshot manager - hell, Scotty just wanted to help
keep the vehicle together."
On Monday, July 12, just a week after they had first met, Scotty became
the official manager. "Whereas, W.S. Moore, III, is a band leader
and a booking agent," the agreement read, "and Elvis Presley, a minor,
age 19 years, is a singer of reputation and renown, and possesses bright
promises of large success...." Scotty got 10 percent off the top, and then
at Sam's suggestion the group would divide any income with a 50-25-25
split. The original idea was that Elvis would become part of the Wranglers
show, a kind of added attraction, which would make "two acts in
one," Scotty said, and in fact that was the way it was set up for the following
Saturday at the Bon Air, the Wranglers' regular weekend gig. The record
was manufactured that week at Buster Williams' Plastic Products on
Chelsea Avenue, in Memphis, and by the time that it was officially released
as Sun record number 209 on Monday, July 19, six thousand local
orders had already come in. Ed Leek, a Humes classmate who was premed
at Memphis State, described going down to the plant and watching
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 0 5
the first records come o ff the press with Elvis, who was "like a little kid at
Christmas." Others were hearing the record for the first time. Jack Clement,
who was singing with Sleepy Eyed John's band occasionally and
studying English and journalism at Memphis State, turned on the radio
one morning and heard "Blue Moon of Kentucky" - "it was just what r d
been wanting to hear. It was real. I loved the simplicity of it, and so did
everybody I know that heard it. There were some people I know that
quarreled with the look, but everybody loved the way that it sounded. All it
took was one play."
Meanwhile, Dixie was still down in Florida with no idea what was
going on. There was only the mysterious telegram that she got at her
cousin's house eWe were on the move all the time, so we didn't talk to
each other on the phone") - " H U R R Y H O M E. M Y R E C O R D I S D O I N G
G R E A T, " it read. " I thought, 'What!' And I thought, this can't be for real.
But I knew it was. "
ON S A T U R D A Y, J U LY 1 7, Sam Phillips carried Elvis out t o the Bon
Air Club, at Summer and Mendenhall, to execute the first part of
the plan that he and Scotty had devised. Dewey mentioned on the air that
night that he might stop by after his show, and perhaps that added to the
crowd, but it was a normal Saturday-night crowd, "pure redneck," according
to Sam, loud, hard-drinking, a little rowdy, in love with their hillbilly
music, out for a good time. Elvis and Sam sat at a little table while
the band finished its set, and Elvis got more and more nervous. "This was
Elvis' first appearance, period, and he was absolutely mortified. Now
look, this was a small club, and it was all rednecks - and I don't mean any
bad connotation by that - but you had better be careful lookig like Elvis
did in a redneck joint and not singing hillbilly songs and you want to live.
You got a bunch of people drinking, and then you try to come on with
some music, untried, unproved, you're unknown. I swear, he just came
off real good."
He sang his two songs - they were the only songs the trio really
knew - and Scotty and Bill hung around for a few minutes, but then it
was time for the Wranglers to go back up on the bandstand, and Elvis and
Sam left. At that point all of the confidence that he had generated onstage
seemed to deflate. "He said, 'Mr. Phillips, I just feel like... I failed.' I said,
'Elvis, are you kidding? You were really good.' I didn't say great, I said,
1 0 6 c,.,. " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
'The only thing that could have been better would have been if you had
enjoyed it onstage.' You see, I was honest with him, I didn't feed him a
line of bulls hit, and he couldn't shoot any holes in that."
As for the Wranglers, there was friction, Scotty said, right from the
start. To begin with, they hadn't realized they wouldn't all be backing
Elvis up, though, of course, that wouldn't have worked, Scotty knew, because
they hadn't backed him on the record. Then, too, there seemed to
be a resentment based not just on the reception that the kid got, which
was nothing out of the ordinary, but on the way he looked, the way he
dressed, his whole demeanor - which was. To Sam it was a revelation.
He hadn't looked at Elvis Presley as a "physical specimen. I wasn't thinking,
'Is he going to look good onstage, is he going to be a great performer?'
I was just looking for something that nobody could categorize."
That was what Sam saw at the club that night, and it was what the Wranglers
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