Elvis would just ad-lib something and they would move on to the next
number. Scotty and Bill took an active role in Elvis' education. "They
taught him how to stand," said Bill's wife, Evelyn. "They coached him on
how to hold his guitar and to do all this stuff in front of the mike. He had
to learn all that." "It was kind of like we adopted him," said Bobbie
Moore. "We had to make sure that he got to the dates, we had to make
sure that he got home, we had to make sure that he didn't get into trouble.
He was just a kid - he was nice, but he could be kind of a brat, too!"
With Elvis everything always had to be funny, Bobbie said, he was always
acting up, whereas Scotty, who enjoyed a good joke, too, believed
there was a time and a place for everything. One time Scotty and Bill were
loading up after their second or third Saturday at the Bon Air while Elvis
and Bobbie stood by the car. "Scotty came out, and he put his amplifier in
the trunk, and Elvis said, 'I'm trying to get a date with your wife.' Scotty
didn't say a word, but I thought, 'Oh-oh, you shouldn't have said that' because
he wasn't, really. Scotty didn't say a word. He went ahead and
got in the driver's seat. I said, 'We better get in the car before he leaves.' I
knew he didn't take that as a joke."
One night Elvis stayed over after the show. Bobbie wasn't expecting
him to, "but then Scotty said, 'You got some linen for the couch?' so I
made up a bed. Elvis was never tired, he could stay up all night after a
show, and he was always pacing. He wasn't shy! He wouldn't think anything
of walking around, poking his head in the bedroom, every time he'd
come over he'd look in the refrigerator, walk around, go look out the
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 1 7
door. He just couldn't b e still. The time he stayed over, the next morning
Scotty says, 'Elvis likes his eggs cooked hard as a rock.' So I fried his eggs
as hard as I could, 'cause I like mine done, too. He sat there, and he said,
'Can you cook it a little more?' Well, I cooked it until you couldn't get
that egg any harder, and he ate a bunch of toast and bacon but only a couple
of bites of that egg. That was the first time I ever remember him
spending the night away from home. His mother always waited up for
him - she said she couldn't go to sleep until Elvis got home - so maybe
he called her to tell her he was spending the night."
Scotty took his duties as manager seriously. He and Sam agreed that it
made no sense to put Elvis into some of the rough j oints that Scotty and
Bill had been playing, so he went looking for schoolhouses to book and
local Elks Club and Lions Club events within a seventy-five-mile radius of
Memphis that might be looking for a singer. He tried his hometown of
Gadsden and got turned down by his old principal, who didn't think
they'd make enough money to pay the light bill, but he got some dates
over in Mississippi and Arkansas starting in September. In the meantime
they played out at the Kennedy Veterans Hospital one Saturday afternoon
and in the basement rec room of St. Mary's, across from the Courts,
where they gained additional exposure if not pay. At Kennedy they played
for the paraplegic and quadriplegic ward under the auspices of the B'nai
B'rith, and even there they made quite an impact, according to Monte
Weiner, a classmate of Elvis' at Humes, whose mother booked the shows.
"My mother brought a group out once a month, and she knew of Elvis
through me, though I didn't really know him in school. He did it for several
months in a row, the first time was right after the record came out,
and they'd bring people on stretchers and wheelchairs down to the little
room where he was going to perform. I remember they rolled the beds
out into the middle of the floor, and I watched their faces while he and his
group were performing, doing something completely different from anything
I had ever heard before. The patients couldn't move at all, but their
facial expressions - it was like they were trying to clap by their facial expressions.
It was a really remarkable thing, that's all I can tell you."
JU S T O N E W E E K after Overton Park they started playing as the intermission
act out at the Eagle's Nest on their own - without the Starlite
Wranglers, who had not taken the success of Scotty's new discovery very
l I S c-.. " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
well at all. In fact the Overton Park appearance seems to have marked the
end of the group, although they did not formally break up for another
couple of months. Dixie sometimes baby-sat for Evelyn so that she could
go out to the show, and the five of them - the Blacks, the Moores, and
Elvis - would go out to eat afterward at Earl's Drive-in downtown. Elvis
never had any money in his pocket, Bobbie said; since they had joined the
union, they no longer got paid on the job but had to go down to the union
hall on Monday to collect, so the "girls" generally ended up paying.
"Elvis would ask Scotty, 'Can I have another hamburger or a milk shake?'
And Scotty would say, 'You'll have to ask her,' " said Bobbie. " 'She's got
the money.' " "I found out he didn't like ketchup," said Evelyn. " 'Cause
if! put ketchup on my french fries, he wouldn't eat them. It got to where I
put ketchup on them every time - otherwise he'd eat every one!"
It wasn't too long before the intermission shows at the Eagle's Nest
became a kind of underground sensation. It was Sleepy Eyed John who
booked the club, and Sleepy EyedJohn whose band continued to play the
main dance sets, but from the start Elvis was clearly an attraction. "Elvis
Presley Tonight," the little newspaper squib announced. "See and hear
Elvis singing 'That's All Right' and 'Blue Moon of Kentucky,' Admission
$1.20 (Including Tax)." Sometimes it was "Ladies' Nite, Too (Ladies.50),"
and many of the ads cheerfully admonished, "Don't Wear a Tie Unless
Your Wife Makes You," but as the momentum built over the course of
the month, with perhaps half a dozen different appearances, in addition to
one or two at other clubs around town, you didn't need any gimmicks to
build attendance. At first Vernon had wanted to take a sock at Sleepy
Eyed John because of some of the sarcastic things Sleepy Eye had said
about his son's record on the air. He was going to go up to the station, he
told Sam Phillips, and take care of him. "I said, 'Now wait a minute, Mr.
Presley, that's not the way it works. The worst thing you can do is go
over there. All he wants to do is to create some noise. Let's kill the sonofabitch
with kindness.' " Vernon was dubious, but he allowed himself to be
dissuaded, and when he and Gladys went out to the club, he was glad that
he had. Other members of the family came out on occasion: Gladys' sister
Lillian and her husband, who remained pessimistic about the boy's prospects;
Vernon's brother, Vester, and his wife, Clettes, another of Gladys'
sisters, who took a couple of snapshots of a very young, very blond, and
somewhat uncomfortable-looking Elvis Presley standing in front of the
Eagle's Nest sign.
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 1 9
James and Gladys Tipler came out to the Eagle's Nest, too. They continued
to feel great pride in their employee and even brought some of
their big construction clients. "He wanted us to come out and see him so.
he would feel he had some friends in the audience," Mrs. Tipler said. "He
had quite a bit of trouble with stage fright." Sometimes he wore his bolero
jacket, sometimes he wore a striped sports jacket with a velvet collar
that he had recently bought at Lansky's, occasionally he favored western
clothes. His favorite colors were pink and black. "I remember the first
check he gave me," said Guy Lansky, who had known him from the time
he first pressed his face to the Beale Street clothing store window. "It was
hard to take. I think it was five hundred dollars from Sam Phillips, and he
asked me to cash it for him, and he bought some clothes and some jewelry
- I had a little jewelry store on the side. And I was still skeptical of
him because of his appearance, I remember running to the bank to see if it
was good. Years later, after he got Graceland, I used to take my kids out
there, and I remember he showed me that sports coat that he had bought
years before - boy, he loved that coat, it was still in his closet."
He seemed to gain more and more of a sense of himself, greater and
greater self-assurance onstage and off. "His movement was a natural
thing," said Scotty, "but he was also very conscious of what got a reaction.
He'd do something one time and then he would expand on it real
quick." According to Reggie Young, who was seventeen at the time and
would join Eddie Bond's band, the Stompers, the following year, all the
teenagers who were out at the swimming pool that gave the Clearpool
complex its name (the Eagle's Nest was over the changing room) would
rush in as soon as they heard Elvis, Scotty, and Bill start to play. Then all
the kids went back outside when Sleepy Eyed John's band took the stage
again, fifteen minutes later. "Sleepy Eyed John was all into Ray Price's big
western swing band at that time," said his sometime lead vocalist and
MC, Jack Clement, who went on to become Sam Phillips' right-hand man
at Sun and one of the most brilliantly idiosyncratic producers and confabulators
that Nashville ever produced. "Eight or nine pieces, three fiddles,
all that kind of stuff - that's where Sleepy Eye thought music was
going. Of course nobody agreed with him, and Elvis would come on and
do the floor show, just the three of them. He seemed to be handling it all
very well, you know, in a young-gentleman fashion, he was kind of reserved
but not really shy - that was his demeanor. I was going with my
fiancee, Doris, we got married in December, and Doris would come to
1 2 0 '" " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
the dance and sit at a table and when I was up there singing Elvis would
be over there trying to get Doris to go out with him. Doris was a very
pretty girl - I didn't mind ifhe flirted with Doris, I liked him. I would get
up there and do my set, and then I'd bring him on and he would really cut
up."
Marion Keisker saw Elvis frequently all through August. He would
stop by the studio from time to time to find out how his record was doing
or just to hang around and chat. He remained grateful to Marion, as he
would be all his life, for helping him "get his first break," and she in turn
saw in him an almost magical quality that both protected him and in turn
brought out the best in others. "My total image of Elvis was as a child. His
attitude towards people was the equivalent of tipping your hat as you
walk down the street - 'Good evening, ma'am, good evening, sir' -but
not showing off. He never said a wrong thing from the very first night he
appeared on the Dewey Phillips show - he was like a mirror in a way:
whatever you were looking for, you were going to find in him. It was not
in him to lie or say anything malicious. He had all the intricacy of the very
simple."
As for Sam, increasingly he saw in the boy something to mirror his
own self-image, the kind of person whose "insecurity drove him, and yet
he was an extremely patient person for achieving a kind of success [that
his contemporaries could only dream of], he was absolutely, unequivocally
going to sing. He was not an eloquent person, but many times without
a direct statement he was eloquent in starting something that told you
exactly what he was thinking." A person still subject to mood swings
("Sam was a driven man," said Marion) yet one who always maintained
the appearance of calm and self-assurance, Sam saw in Elvis the very person
that he was but rarely showed. Where Elvis appeared unsure, tonguetied,
incapable of expressing himself, Sam saw in him the same sort of
burning ambition, he was only lacking the ability to verbalize it.
Sam had always seen it as his mission to "open up an area of freedom
within the artist himself, to help him to express what he believed his message
to be," and here he had found his perfect Trilby. To Sam the person
who presented himself had never played anywhere before he entered the
Sun studio, "he didn't play with bands, he didn't go to this little club and
pick and grin. All he did was set with the guitar on the side of his bed at
home. I don't think he even played on the front porch." This was what
Elvis conveyed, without words, and in a way it was true. When Elvis was
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 95 4 '" 1 2 1
with Scotty, when Elvis was in the Sun studio, it was as ifhe were reborn.
To Sam, as much as to Marion, he was the personification of an ideal,
the embodiment of a vision that Sam had carried with him from the farm
in Florence - he represented the innocence that had made the country
great in combination with "the elements of the soil, the sky, the water,
even the wind, the quiet nights, people living on plantations, never out of
debt, hoping to eat, lights up the river - that's what they used to call
Memphis. That was where it all came together. And Elvis Presley may not
have been able to verbalize all that - but he damn sure wasn't dumb, and
he damn sure was intuitive, and he damn sure had an appreciation for the
total spirituality of the human existence, even if he would never have
thought of the term. That was what he cared about."
That was Elvis' mark - he conveyed his spirituality without being
able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated
lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in
his simplicity.
ON A U G U S T 2 8 the record entered the Billboard regional charts. It
showed up at number three on the C&W Territorial Best Sellers for
the week of August 18, behind Hank Snow's "I Don't Hurt Anymore" and
a Kitty Wells-Red Foley duet, but it was "Blue Moon of Kentucky" that
was the hit. On the strength of these credentials, and on the basis of the
record's striking local success, Sam Phillips approached Jim Denny, manager
of the Grand Ole Opry, with the idea that the Opry could at least
offer the boy a little exposure. After all, Sam adjured Denny, whom he
knew from the year he had spent in Nashville, it was no longer the old
mule-and-wagon days, wasn't it time to allow something new to breathe?
Sam wasn't saying the boy was necessarily going to set the world on fire,
but give youth a chance, damnit. Jim Denny listened; he was a hard man,
Sam knew - he was not about to win any popularity contests - but he
was a fair man, too. He had heard the record, he told Sam, it wasn't really
to his taste, but if Sam could give him a little time, well, maybe if the band
was in the area at some point he could fit them in. Sam hung up the
phone - he was well enough pleased. He could wait as long as he had to.
At least Denny hadn't said no.
Others were noticing the waves the new record was making. In Nashville,
Bill Monroe, far from being offended at the "sacrilege" which had
1 2 2 " THAT ' S A L L R I G H T "
been committed on his song, approached Carter Stanley, another prominent
bluegrass musician, after the Opry one Saturday night. "He said, 'I
want you to hear something,' and he had never said anything like that to
me before." He played Stanley the "new" version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky."
"I laughed a little bit and looked around, and everybody else was
laughing except Bill. He said, 'You better do that record [at Stanley's scheduled
recording session] tomorrow if you want to sell some records.'... He
said, 'I'm going to do it [at his own recording session] next Sunday.' '' And
Monroe helped supervise Stanley's session on Sunday, August 29, then
recut "Blue Moon of Kentucky" himself in 4/4 time, as he had said he
would, the following week.
The major record labels, too, couldn't help but notice what was going
on. Jim Denny, in addition to his duties as general manager of the Opry,
was also proprietor of Cedarwood Publishing, which in turn was tied in
with Decca Records, and Decca's Paul Cohen pricked up his ears at this
new phenomenon. Sam's friend Randy Wood, who operated a big one-step
and mail-order record business in Gallatin, Tennessee, and had enjoyed a
good deal of success with his own Dot Record Company, expressed mild
interest as well. Meanwhile, RCA Records in New York had come to be
aware of this rising new star, and this upstart new label, not simply because
of the write-ups in Billboard and Cash Box but because of the reports they
were getting from their own agents in the field. 'l of our distributors
were aware of Sam Phillips," said Chick Crumpacker, who had become
national country and western promotion manager working under a&r
(artist and repertoire) director Steve Sholes in April. "There was all this talk
about what this insurgent Sun Records was doing, quite a bit of it pejorative.
Also, we would get these reports from the field, from Sam Esgro, who
was based in Memphis, and Brad McCuen, who had the RCA field from the
middle of Tennessee into Virginia and the Carolinas."
McCuen, a thirty-three-year-old transplanted New Yorker, who filed a
report to Steve Sholes that summer, vividly recalled his first encounter with
Elvis Presley. "My bell-cow area was East Tennessee. If a record made it in
the tri-city area of Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol on down through to
Knoxville, it would go national, so I was just very conscious of that area.
One of our best record dealers was Sam Morrison in Knoxville, right on
Market Square. He was one of the first southern record dealers that I knew
to do the New York City trick of putting a loudspeaker out over his doorsill
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 23
and playing the music for the market crowd, who had come in to sell their
produce. This one particular time Sam grabbed me and said, 'There's something
very interesting happening here, it's really weird,' and he went and got
Elvis' record, which was just out, and put 'That's All Right' on the player.
'What do you think?' he said. 'I can't get enough of it. I'm selling at least a
box a day.' I was amazed, but I said, 'It's just a normal rhythm and blues
record, isn't it?' He said, 'No, it isn't, it's selling to a country audience.'
"Well, at just that point an old country man in his fifties came in, I say
jokingly he had more hair growing out of his ears and nose than he did on
his head, and he said in an easy Tennessee drawl, "By granny, I want that
record.' I couldn't figure it out, because here was an obvious country fan.
Then Sam turned the record over and played 'Blue Moon of Kentucky,' and
I figured, 'Well, he probably wants it for that.' But that wasn't it - it was
really 'That's All Right.' So I bought two copies of the record and sent one
to Steve Sholes, and Steve said, 'You've got to be kidding! ' But I told him
that Sam Morrison must have gone through about five thousand, and it was
selling in Kingsport and the tri-cities area. And Sam Esgro and I kept sending
him reports."
O
N S E P T E M B E R 8 the Memphis Press-Scimitar announced "Fun on a
Grand Scale" at the opening of the new Lamar-Airways Shopping
Center. The festivities over the next few days would include Indian ceremonies,
"Scottish, hillbilly and Indian music groups, radio, television and
recording personalities," a twenty-eight-foot "robot" Indian, lavish prizes,
and the presence of "a number of celebrities... including Mayor Tobey."
Also included was the "newest Memphis hit in the recording business...
Elvis Presley of 'That's All Right, Mama' and 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'
fame," who would be appearing along with Sleepy EyedJohn's Eagle's Nest
band on a flatbed truck in front of Katz Drug Store on opening night,
Thursday, between 9:00 and 10: 00. "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was number
one on the Memphis c&w chart at this point, with "That's All Right" showing
up at number seven.
The parking lot was jammed when Elvis arrived with Dixie, and
George Klein, who was back at Memphis State for the fall semester, was
broadcasting from inside the giant wooden Indian. Scotty and Bill were
already present, and Sleepy Eye was all set up onstage, but the crowd
1 2 4 " T HAT ' S A L L R I G H T "
seemed restive. It was made up almost exclusively of teenagers - there
were lots of them, more than could ever have fit into the Eagle's Nest and
if they didn't equal the size of the Overton Park audience, this time it
was obvious who they were there for.
George emerged from the Indian to come up and introduce the band,
and Elvis lit up to see his old Humes classmate, the president of the senior
class and editor of the yearbook, especially when George said he had been
playing the record over the air in Osceola all summer. They caught up
with each other very briefly - Elvis hadn't seen George to talk to since
graduation, fifteen months before - but it was perfectly evident how
their situations had changed. They spoke of friends in common, and then
it was time to go onstage. George gave them the big buildup, he mentioned
that he had gone to school with this rising young star, he conveyed
a sense of significance and respect in his trained announcer's voice that
Sleepy Eye would never have suggested, but there was no preparation for
the sound that greeted them, for the whoosh of anticipation, the screams,
and the mass intake of breath as Elvis Presley bounded to the microphone.
Dixie hadn't really seen him perform since Overton Park - and
here they were not far from the Rainbow skating rink, where she had first
met her "secret love."
Scotty knew that day. "This was the first we could see what was happening.
'Cause it was a whole parking lot full of kids, and they just went
crazy. " They liked Bill's clowning, and Elvis' gyrations had advanced way
beyond Overton even at this point, but it was the beat that really got to
them, and it was the kids' response that drove the music to another level.
It was so out of control it was almost frightening.
After the show Elvis hung around a little - there were a bunch of
people that he knew in the crowd, and they all wanted to talk to him,
some of them even wanted his autograph. Looking at him, watching him
open up to people in the way she had always known he could, Dixie
thought maybe this was as far as he would go, this was success on the
highest level that a normal person could ever hope for. George was genuinely
excited. He had to go back to making announcements and deejaying
inside the Indian, but they really ought to get together sometime, he said.
There were some guys in the audience, too, who were muttering under
their breath that they didn't see what the big fuss was all about, this guy
was weird in his black pants with the pink stripe, his greasy hair and pimply
face - it looked almost like he was wearing makeup. In Florida, Lee
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 2 5
Denson heard from his brothers and sisters about the splash that Elvis was
making around town, and he couldn't believe it. Here was a kid barely
able to form a chord when Lee tried to teach him in the Courts just a couple
of years earlier - of all of them he was the least likely to succeed. Lee
was playing a regular gig while also working as a bellhop in Key West.
Ernest Hemingway, the writer, had declared him to be his favorite singer
one night at Sloppy Joe's, and here Elvis Presley was stirring up all this
fuss. "The difference between me and him," said Lee, "was I went for it. I
drove for it. New York, Hollywood - I went everywhere for it. And he
fell into the shithole and came up with the gold watch and chain."
T O P: E LV I S, B I L L, S C O T T Y, A N D S A M P H I L L I P S, 195 4.
(C O U RT E S Y O F G A R Y H A R D Y, S U N S T U D I O)
B O TT O M: W I T H B O B N E A L, 195 5. (C O U R T E S Y O F G E R RIJ F F)
G O O D ROC KI N ' T O N IGHT
IT W A S A T W O - H U N D R E D - M I L E R I D E to Nashville, but the four of
them were comfortable enough in Sam Phillips' four-door black 1951
Cadillac, with Bill's bass strapped to the roof. It was Saturday, October
2. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had played their regular Friday-night gig
at the Eagle's Nest; their record "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was near the
top of the charts in Memphis and just beginning to break in Nashville and
New Orleans; and they had every reason to feel that they had reached the
pinnacle of their musical career - because tonight they were going to play
the Opry.
Jim Denny had finally succumbed to Sam's argument that there was
no need to think about putting the boy on as a regular, he didn't have to
think of this as a normal "tryout," just give the boy a chance. Denny seemed
no more convinced than he had been in the first place - perhaps he was
just worn down by Sam's persistence - but he agreed to give the young
man a one-time spot on Hank Snow's segment of the show. He could perform
a single song with his band, the country number "Blue Moon of
Kentucky." If it was worth it to Sam and the boys to drive over just for
that, well, then, Denny was willing to give them the shot.
In the meantime Sam had also heard from the Louisiana Hayride, the
Opry's more innovative rival in Shreveport, which, unlike the Opry, actually
wanted this new act. The Hayride, which Denny referred to derisively
as the Opry's farm club because so many of its big acts eventually defected
to Nashville, had discovered Hank Williams in 1948 and broken
such stars as Slim Whitman, Webb Pierce, and, most recently, Jim Reeves
and Faron Young. But Sam put them off because, he explained to Hayride
booking agent Pappy Covington, he wanted to play the Opry first. As
soon as the boys had fulfilled this prior comInitment, he told Pappy,
stretching the truth a little, Elvis could appear on the Hayride. There was
no doubt in his mind, he said, that Elvis could make a hit with the Hayride
audience, and they could set it up for just a week or two after the
1 27
1 2 8 '" G O O D R O C KIN ' T O N I G H T
Opry appearance, but he had committed himself to Jim Denny that the
boy would appear on the Opry first. He was walking a thin line, he knew.
He didn't for a minute want to lose the Hayride, but he wasn't going to
give up the opportunity to see a new, untried artist get his national debut
on the hallowed Grand Ole Opry.
Ryman Auditorium was like a tattered shrine to the three musicians,
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