none of whom had ever attended, let alone played, a show at the Opry
before. They wandered around the dilapidated old building, erected as a
tabernacle in 1886 and still retaining the old wooden pews for seats, in
something of a daze. They were both overwhelmed at the sense of history
contained in the room - the music they had been listening to all their
lives emanated from this cramped little stage - and somewhat disillusioned,
too, that the Grand Ole Opry was not, well, grander. Backstage
the other musicians mingled freely, exchanging small talk and greetings,
tuning up, donning makeup and costumes, without any of the formality
or protocol that you might have expected from stars but with all of the
remoteness, whether real or perceived, of big leaguers sniffing at bushers
just up from the minors. Twenty-one-year-old bass player Buddy Killen,
who had just started as chief and only song plugger for Tree Music, the
publishing house that WSM program director Jack Stapp had set up in
1951, came up to the obviously out-of-place young singer and introduced
himself. "[Elvis] said, 'They're going to hate me.' I said, 'They're not
going to hate you. You're going to be fine.' He said, 'If they'd just let me
leave, I'd go right now.' " Marty Robbins saw evidence of the same insecurity,
but when Elvis spotted Chet Atkins backstage, he introduced
himself and then, knowing Scotty's admiration for Atkins' playing, pulled
Scotty over, too, saying, "My guitar player wants to meet you." Atkins
noted with asperity that the kid appeared to be wearing eye makeup.
Probably of all the Opry legends the one they were most leery of running
into was Bill Monroe. Many in the country field continued to view
the Sun version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" as a desecration, and even
Sam had heard that Monroe was going to take their head off for their untrammeled
interpretation of his stately lament ('I'd heard he was going to
break my jaw!"). But when they met Monroe, conservatively dressed in
dark suit and tie and trademark white hat and at forty-three already an
elder statesman possessed of a dignity that permitted neither bullshit nor
informality, he came right out and complimented them. As a matter of
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 2 9
fact, he told them, he had cut a new version o f the song for Decca, due
out next week, that followed their pattern.
There were two additional surprises. Marion Keisker, left behind in
Memphis to keep the studio doors open, abandoned her post and caught a
bus to Nashville, where she thought at first she would just stay out in the
audience so as not to spook them but before long found her way backstage
and joined the little group. Then Bill peeked out at the audience
and, much to his surprise, discovered his wife, Evelyn, and Scotty's wife,
Bobbie, in the front row. "I think he was kind of glad to see us," said Bobbie,
" 'cause they were wanting to come back to Memphis that night, and
Sam was going to stay over in Nashville. You see, they had told Evelyn
and me, 'Yall can't go. We're all going in one car, and there's no room for
you.' Well, I accepted that, but then around noon, a couple of hours after
they left, Evelyn came over to the house and said, 'Let's go to Nashville.' I
said, 'Oh, I don't know about that, we might get in trouble,' but, you
know, we really were like Lucy and Ethel, so then I said, 'What the heck!'
and we drove over. Bill stuck his head out the stage door and saw us, but
when Scotty saw me backstage, it was like he'd seen a ghost! "
At 10:15 Grant Turner announced the Hank Snow segment of the
show, sponsored by Royal Crown Cola, and Snow, whose son, Jimmie
Rodgers Snow, had just approached Elvis admiringly, got lost in his introduction
of a young man from Memphis who has just made a hit record,
let's give him a nice round of applause, to the point that he forgot the
young singer's name. Elvis bounced out the same way that he always did,
as if he had just fallen off a fast-moving train, and did his one number.
Scotty and Bill were more nervous than he was - to them, it seemed,
there was nowhere to go but down from here, and they could sense from
the polite, but somewhat tepid, reception that this was exactly where they
were going. Afterward they were like a boxing management team trying
to rationalize defeat. Everyone was nice to them as they gawked and huddled
- they'd gotten a good reception, Bobbie and Evelyn insisted, and
Bill introduced himself to everyone, laughing and cracking jokes, while
Scotty stood off to one side a little stiffly, waiting to be introduced. Before
leaving, Sam conferred briefly with Mr. Denny, who confirmed that Elvis
Presley just did not fit the Opry mold, but, he told Sam, " 'This boy is not
bad.' He didn't give me any great accolades, he just grabbed me by my
skinny arm and said, 'This boy is not bad.' Well, people put down Jim
I 3 0 '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
Denny, nobody much liked Jim, he was a damn tough man, but he did me
afavor. "
They left not long afterward and wandered down the hill to 417 Broadway,
the location of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where they were
scheduled to play the famous Midnight Jamboree (the Jamboree went on
the air live from the record store at the conclusion of the Opry broadcast).
Their first impression of the shop was how small it was, but maybe that
was just because of how crammed it was with record bins and all the people
who had already arrived for the start of the broadcast. Someone introduced
Elvis to Ernest Tubb, and Tubb, the most gracious and courteous
of entertainers, listened patiently as the nineteen-year-old poured out his
love for Tubb's music and told him that it was his real ambition to sing
country music. "He said, 'They tell me if I'm going to make any money,
though, I've got to sing [this other kind of music]. What should I do?' I
said, 'Elvis, you ever have any money?' He said, 'No, sir.' I said, 'Well,
you just go ahead and do what they tell you to do. Make your money.
Then you can do what you want to do.' "
Scotty and Bill headed back to Memphis with their errant wives after
the broadcast. They felt simultaneously elated and depressed (they had
made it to the big time, even if they were now in all likelihood on the
road to oblivion), but for Sam Phillips the evening was an unmitigated triumph.
To play the Opry - and then to get approval, however grudging,
from Jim Denny and Bill Monroe! Even the criticism would not hurt. It
could be used, Sam was firmly convinced, to further the boy's appeal - if
he could just turn around some of this damn rejection he was getting, if
he could just straighten out some of the wrongheaded thinking he was
encountering, the blind could be made to see, the lame could be made to
walk. "I needed the attention that I got from the people that hated what I
was doing, that acted like: 'Here is somebody trying to thrust junk on us
and classify it as our music. ' Well, fuck them, let them do the classifying. I
just had to peak that damn pyramid, or else the damn sonofabitch would
have fallen down." And with Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips was sure he had
the means to peak the pyramid.
E
LvIS PRESLEY'S second Sun single was released on the Monday
before his Opry appearance. It was, if anything, an even bolder declaration
of intent than the first, especially the strident blues number "Good
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 3 1
Rockin' Tonight," which rocked more confidently than anything they
could have imagined in those first, uncertain days in the studio. Maybe
Sam still couldn't diagram the path, but, he felt, they were finally beginning
to find their way to "that damn row that hadn't been plowed."
They had seized every opportunity they could to get into the studio
all through August, but Sam was on the road so much, and the band was
working so many weekends (while still holding down full-time jobs), that
this was easier said than accomplished. On August 19 they spent hours
doing take after take of "Blue Moon," in an eerie, clippity-clop version
that resembled a cross between Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call" and
some of the falsetto flights of the r&b "bird" groups (the Orioles, the Ravens,
the Larks). After it was all over, Sam wasn't satisfied that they had
anything worth releasing, but he never uttered a word of demurral for
fear of discouraging the unfettered freshness and enthusiasm of the
singer. "The sessions would go on and on," said Marion Keisker, "each
record was sweated out. Sam showed patience beyond belief- in a personality
that's not really given to patience."
The problem did not appear to have so much to do with time, in any
case, as with confidence and direction. They had captured the ring once,
seemingly by accident, but now no one appeared to have a clear vision of
how to capture it again, and Sam was reluctant to impose his own. "I had
a mental picture, as sure as God is on His throne I had a mental picture of
what I wanted to hear, certainly not note for note, but I knew the essence
of what we were trying to do. But I also knew that the worst thing I could
do was to be impatient, to try to force the issue - sometimes you can
make a suggestion just [to change] one bar and you kill the whole song.
And sometimes you can be too cocky around people who are insecure
and just intimidate them. I mean, as far as actually saying, 'Hey, man,
don't be scared: I've never told anybody in my life not to be scared of the
microphone - don't go calling attention to the thing you know they are
already scared of. I was never a real forward person, because I didn't give
a damn about jumping out in front to be seen, but I tried to envelop them
in my feelings of security."
Over the course of the next few weeks they made several attempts at
"Satisfied," Martha Carson's rousing spiritual hit from 1951, and "Tomorrow
Night," the Lonnie Johnson blues ballad which Elvis had crooned so
often to Dixie. They made any number of false starts on other tunes, all of
them erased because tape was expensive, after all, and they just weren't
1 3 2 GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
going anywhere. The slow numbers, Sam said, "would hang you out to
dry," but he was determined to give Elvis' creative imagination free play.
He was equally determined, said Marion, not to release anything even a
jot below the standard they had already set; he wanted to be sure he had
done all that he could to make every record as good as it was "humanly
possible to make it." From Sam's point of view: "I wanted simplicity,
where we could look at what we were hearing mentally and say, 'Man,
this guy has just got it.' But I wanted some biting bullshit, too. Everything
had to be a stinger. To me every one of those sessions was like I was filming
Gone With the Wind. "
Finally, starting on September 10, they hit a streak - once again it
seemed almost as if they had stumbled onto it by accident, but when they
did it was, as Sam Phillips said, as if it had been waiting for them all along.
They cut 'Just Because," a rollicking, honky-tonk blues which the Shelton
Brothers had originally recorded as the Lone Star Cowboys in 1933.
The great good humor and burbling effervescence of the new trio version
can be traced in equal parts to the singer's confident exploitation of his
gospel-learned technique (here for the first time we hear the characteristic
Presley drop to a slurred lower register), Bill Black's almost comically
thumping bass, and Scotty's increasingly rhythm-driven guitar. "It was almost
a total rhythm thing," Scotty said. "With only the three of us we
had to make every note count." Although Sam never released this cut or
the next one either, a weepy version of Jimmy Wakely's 1941 'TIl Never
Let You Go (Little Darlin')" with a tagged-on, double-time ending, both
are characterized by the kind of playfulness and adventurousness of spirit
that Sam was looking for, the fresh, almost "impudent" attitude that he
was seeking to unlock.
With "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine," an even more unlikely
transformation took place. Originally written for the Disney animated feature
Cinderella by Mack David, brother of the celebrated pop composer Hal
David (Mack himself wrote such well-known songs as "Bippidi Bobbidi
Boo" and "La Vie en Rose"), the song didn't make the film score's final
cut, but it was popularized in 1950 by Patti Page and by Dean Martin in
conjunction with Paul Weston and His Dixie Eight. The rhythmic approach
couldn't have been more different, but it was Martin's version on
which Elvis' is clearly based; for all the energy that Elvis, Scotty, and Bill
impart to the song, and for all the high spirits of Elvis' vocalizing, it is Martin's
lazily insouciant spirit that comes through. It's as if Dennis the MenO
C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 3 3
ace met the drawling English character actor George Sanders. "That's
what he heard in Dean," said Sam, who was well aware of Martin's influence,
"that little bit of mischievousness that he had in his soul when he cut
up a little bit - [that' s why] he loved Dean Martin's singing."
With the last song of the session, Wynonie Harris' r&b classic "Good
Roclon' Tonight," everything finally fell into place. By this time everyone
may have been getting a little testy, and no one was really sure whether
they had anything or not, but as Scotty said, "Sam had an uncanny knack
for pulling stuff out of you. Once you got a direction, he'd work you so
hard you'd work your butt off, he'd make you so mad you'd want to kill
him, but he wouldn't let go until he got that little something extra sometimes
you didn't even know you had." He would insist that they play
nothing but rhythm, he would have them change keys just when they finally
got used to the one they were in, and he called for tempos so slow
sometimes that everyone was ready to scream. "A lot of times it was a
tempo that I absolutely knew they weren't going to like, but we were in a
situation where we just weren't getting anywhere, and when they came
back [to the original tempo], it was like they'd hit a home run."
To Marion Keisker it was like a puzzle to which only Sam had the key.
"I still remember the times when everyone would be so tired, and then
some little funny thing would set us off - I'd see Elvis literally rolling
around on the floor, and Bill Black just stretched out with his old brokendown
bass fiddle, just laughing and goofing off. It was a great spirit of - I
don't know, everyone was trying very hard, but everyone was trying to
hang very loose through the whole thing. [Sorp.etimes] if Elvis would do
something absolutely extraordinary and somebody would hit a clinker or
something would go wrong before the tape was completed, Sam would
say, 'Well, let's go back, and you hold on to what you did there. I want
that.' And Elvis would say, 'What did I do? What did I do?' Because it was
all so instinctive that he simply didn't know."
Sam's one organizing principle was that it had to be fun. "I could tolerate
anything, we could have tensions as long as I knew that we all had
confidence in what we were trying to do, and I could get everybody
relaxed to the point where they could hear and react to something without
that threshold of apprehension where you almost get to a point where
you can't do anything right. Every time we did a number I wanted to
make sure to the best of my ability that everybody enjoyed it. "
In the case of this final number, that sense o f enjoyment comes
1 3 4 '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
through from the very first note, as Elvis' voice takes on a burr of aggression
that is missing from the previous recordings, the band for the first
time becomes the fused rhythm instrument that Sam had been seeking all
along, and there is a sense of driving, high-flying good times almost in
defiance of societal norms. "Have you heard the news?" is the opening
declaration, drawn out and dramatic. "There's good rocking tonight."
The other dramatic element to declare itself was the quality that Sam
thought he had sensed in Elvis from the start, that strange, unexpected
impulse that had led the boy to launch himself into "That's All Right,
Mama" in the first place - it seemed to come out of nowhere, and yet,
Sam felt, he heard something of the same feeling in the sentimental ballads,
too. He equated the insecurity that came through so unmistakably in
the boy's stance and demeanor with the sense of inferiority - social, psychological,
perceptual - that was projected by the great Negro talents he
had sought out and recorded. Sam couldn't be sure, he thought he sensed
in Elvis a kindred spirit, someone who shared with him a secret, almost
subversive attraction not just to black music but to black culture, to an
inchoate striving, a belief in the equality of man. This was something that
Sam felt could never be articulated; each man was doomed to stumble in
his own darkness, if only because the stakes were so high.
"I had to keep my nose clean. They could have said, 'This goddam
rebel down here is gonna tum his back on us. Why should we give this
nigger-loving sonofabitch a break?' It took some subtle thinking on my
part - I'm telling you [some] resolute facts here. But I had the ability to
be patient. I was able to hold on almost with a religious fervor, but definitely
subdued - I wasn't looking for no tall stumps to preach from. And
I sensed in him the same kind of empathy. I don't think he was aware of
my motivation for doing what I was trying to do - not consciously anyway
-but intuitively he felt it. I never discussed it - I don't think it
would have been very wise to talk about it, for me to say, 'Hey, man,
we're going against -: Or, 'We're trying to put pop music down and
bring in black -. ' The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to
be one of the biggest things that ever could have happened to us, though.
It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music -but we
hit things a little bit, don't you think? I went out into this no-man's-land,
and I knocked the shit out of the color line."
Sam knew that he had found a kindred spirit in other ways as well.
Over the course of the next month, as he worked at trying to set up the
O C T O B E R-D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 3 5
Opry appearance, a s h e took around an acetate o f the new single and encountered
the same resistance in Nashville from old friends like WLAC
OJ Gene Nobles and one-stop record distributors Randy Wood and Ernie
Young, all strictly rhythm and blues men, he nevertheless knew that his
instincts had not been wrong. Getting to know the boy a little better, getting
him to open up a little more, having the chance to talk to him not just
about music but about life and love and women, he sensed a potential
that even he had not fully anticipated. "I was amazed. Here I am twelve
years older than him, I'm thirty-one and he's nineteen, and I've been exposed
to all kinds of music and lived through the damn Depression, and
yet he had the most intuitive ability to hear songs without ever having to
classify them, or himself, of anyone I've ever known outside of Jerry Lee
Lewis and myself. It seemed like he had a photographic memory for every
damn song he ever heard - and he was one of the most introspective
human beings that I've ever met. You see, Elvis Presley knew what it was
like to be poor, but that damn sure didn't make him prejudiced. He didn 't
draw any lines. And like [Billboard editor] Paul Ackerman said, you have to
be an awful smart person or dumb as hell (and you know he wasn't dumb)
to put out that kind of thinking."
Elvis Presley, our homegrown hillbilly singer, is continuing his
swift, steady stride toward national prominence in the rural rhythm
field. Latest honor to come his way is as guest performer with the
Louisiana Hayride, to be broadcast Saturday night over KWKH,
Shreveport. Louisiana Hayride is about the second or third most popular
hillbilly program on the air. The tops is Nashville's Grand Ole
Opry, which never takes anyone but long-established stars in the
country music field. But Presley has already appeared on the Grand
Ole Opry - on October 2 - and neither customers nor fellow performers
wanted him to quit. It is unprecedented for Grand Ole Opry
to take a performer on the basis of a single record, which is what Presley
had until two weeks ago.
- Memphis Commercial Appeal, October 14, 1954
SA M C A L L E D P A P P Y C O V I N G T O N, the talent booker for the Hayride,
on the Monday after the Opry appearance. They settled on a date less
1 3 6 GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
than two weeks away, both because that suited Sam's purposes and because
Tillman Franks, who had made the contact for Pappy in the first
place, had a chance to book his act, Jimmy and Johnny, into the Eddy
County Bam Dance in Carlsbad, New Mexico, if he could find a replacement
for them on the Hayride. Jimmy and Johnny had the number-three
hillbilly hit in the country on Chicago's Chess Records, and Tillman had
been offered $500 by Carlsbad promoter Ray Schaffer (as opposed to $24
apiece, Hayride scale). As a result Tillman approached Hayride director
Horace Logan about this singer he had heard on T. Tommy Cutrer's program
on KCI]. Tillman had thought the singer was black, and so had Horace,
the flamboyant, pistol-toting MC of the Hayride, when Tillman
played the record for him. But T. Tommy, who was playing the record
only as a favor to Sam Phillips after Sam came through town a couple of
months before (the two men knew each other from T.'s brief stint with
WREC just after the war), quickly disabused Horace and Tillman of the
notion: after all, hadn't Slim Whitman and Billy Walker shared the same
stage with the boy in Memphis? And Tillman, a pepper pot of a man possessed
of the greatest enthusiasm and love for the music (he had already
managed, and lost, Webb Pierce and Bill Carlisle, helped guide Slim Whitman's
career, and would go on to manage Johnny Horton while continuing
to play bass on the Hayride), got Pappy Covington to take it from
there.
The Hayride was a little over six years old at this point. It had been
predated by a similar program, the KWKH Saturday Night Roundup,
before the war and, as the Commercial Appeal stated, was probably the second
most popular hillbilly program on the air, with a 50,OOO-watt clearchannel
signal that rivaled the Opry's, reaching up to twenty-eight states,
and a CBS hookup that enabled it to reach 198 stations for an hour the
third Saturday of every month. The hallmark of the Hayride was innovation,
and it was as the Opry's brash younger cousin that the Hayride really
made its mark. Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Faron Young,
the Carlisles, David Houston, Jim Reeves, all debuted on the Hayride
before eventually lighting out for Nashville, and under the leadership of
Horace Logan it continued to be a haven for new talent, fast-paced variety,
and new directions. The Hayride audiences in the thirty-eighthundred-
seat Municipal Auditorium showed the same kind of enthusiasm
as the performers, and Logan placed microphones out among the crowd
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 c,.,. 137
to register their reaction, whether to something that was going out over
the air or to longtime announcer Ray Bartlett (who broadcast during the
day as rhythm and blues OJ Groovey Boy) doing unrestrained somersaults
and back flips onstage. Shreveport was a lively music town, just on
the cusp of oil affluence and with the kind of unassuming racial mix (nothing
like desegregation, of course, but with two populations living cheek
by jowl, locked in an inescapable cultural alliance) that gave Memphis its
own musical flavor. The Hayride had everything, in fact, except an aggressive
booking agency to support its acts (Pappy Covington had the job
only because he had a lease on the building) and record companies to sign
them. This was the principal reason for the one-way migration to Nashville,
but in the fall of 1954 it looked as if the supply of new talent might be
inexhaustible, and the Hayride had grown accustomed to thumbing its
nose at the Opry, which Horace Logan referred to frequently on the air as
"the Tennessee branch of the Hayride."
Sam, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill set out for Shreveport, a good seven- or
eight-hour ride from Memphis, not long after the boys got off work at
their regular Friday-night gig at the Eagle's Nest. They missed the turnoff
at Greenville, Mississippi, because Bill had everybody laughing so hard at
one of his jokes, and then Scotty almost hit a team of mules as they struggled
to make up the time. When they finally got to Shreveport, they
checked into the Captain Shreve Hotel downtown - they got a big double
room and a smaller adjoining room - and then they had to wait forever
while Elvis combed his hair. Sam took the boys around to meet
Pappy, who made them feel "like four hundred million dollars, just this
kindly, fatherly old man who made you feel like you were the greatest
thing that could ever walk into his office. I thought that was the best thing
that could happen for these young men and even myself." From there he
and Elvis went and paid their respects to T. Tommy, who had until recently
been laid up from an automobile accident in which he had lost a
leg, though he continued to broadcast from his bed at home. Elvis was
wearing a typical black and pink outfit and, according to T. Tommy, "his
hair was long and greasy and he didn't look clean. My wife commented
afterwards, she said, 'That boy needs to wash his neck: " T. Tommy, a
highly astute, charming, and capable man who kept up a little band of his
own at the time and went on to become a Tennessee state senator and a
top Teamster official, still had doubts about how far this boy was going to
1 3 8 '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
go, and Elvis scarcely opened his mouth the whole time, but Sam was
such a believer, and T. Tommy was nothing if not a pragmatist, so he
figured, Well, let's just see where it goes.
From there Sam made the rest of his rounds. He stopped by Stan's
Record Shop at 728 Texas Street, just around the comer from the auditorium,
where they chatted with Stan Lewis, a prematurely white-haired
twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the music business who had started out
supplying five jukeboxes from the back of his parents' Italian grocery
store, then purchased the little record shop that had been his supplier as a
full-time business for his wife and himself. Stan's older brother, Ace, was
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