the drummer in T. Tommy's band, alternating with their first cousin,
D. J. Fontana, who played with Hoot and Curley on the Hayride as well,
and Stan had known Sam Phillips ever since Sam first went into the business.
As the principal one-stop and independent distributor in the area, he
was without question interested in this new artist - but not too interested,
because not only was the artist unknown, the genre was untried.
Still, Stan had been instrumental in placing Jimmy and Johnny with Chess,
previously a blues label almost exclusively, and he was now reaping the
benefits of their success. He was always open to new talent, he told Sam;
what was good for one was good for all.
Elvis meanwhile drifted over to the auditorium. It was bigger than the
Opry, with spacious dressing rooms for the stars and a large common
dressing room on the second floor. The folding chairs on the floor could
be taken up for dances or basketball exhibitions, and the bakony curved
around on either side of the stage, giving the room a natural echo. He
walked out on the stage with his eyes fixed on the floor, looked up once
briefly as if measuring the crowd, and then walked back to the hotel. The
Negro shacks in the Bottoms, just a few blocks from the grand auditorium
entrance, were not much different than the ramshackle structures of
Shake Rag, in Tupelo, or the primitive shotguns of South Memphis;
Shreveport's bustling downtown just a couple of blocks away was busy
and full of life, and when he ran into Scotty and Bill in the hotel coffee
shop, Bill already had his eye on a pretty waitress....
When he arrived back at the auditorium that night, it was completely
different, transformed by the presence not just of an audience and musicians
in colorful western outfits but by the almost palpable anticipation
that something was going to happen. He was wearing a pink jacket, white
pants, a black shirt, a brightly colored clip-on bow tie, and the kind of
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 3 9
two-tone shoes that were known a s corespondent shoes, because they
were the kind that a snappy salesman or a corespondent in a divorce case
might be expected to wear. Scotty and Bill were wearing matching western
shirts with decorative bibs and dark ties. Bill's battered bass looked as
if it were held together with baling wire, Elvis cradled his child-size guitar,
and only Scotty's handsome Gibson ES 295 lent a touch of professional
class to the trio. But everyone was taken with the boy. Tillman Franks,
who had dispatched Jimmy and Johnny to Carlsbad but remained behind
to play bass in the house band, was almost bouncing with anticipation.
Pappy Covington greeted Sam and the boys warmly, as if he hadn't seen
them in months. Even Horace Logan, renowned not just for his impresario's
instincts but for his frosty air of self-congratulation, seemed to take
to the boy -there was something about him that brought out almost a
protective quality, even in seasoned professionals.
Sam left to take his seat in the audience. Although he had put up a
brave front all day, he really didn't know how it was going to come out,
and he felt like he should do his best to at least try to cue up a sympathetic
response from the crowd. He had to admit that he was worried; the boy
looked as if he was scared to death, and even though you could rationalize
that they were all experienced veterans by now - all those nights at the
Eagle's Nest, the triumph at Overton Park, and of course their Opry appearance
- in another way everyone knew that this could be the end of
the line.
Horace Logan was out onstage. "Is there anyone from Mississippi?
Anyone from Arkansas? Let's hear it from the folks from Oklahoma. Now
who here's from Louisiana? Now how many of y'all are from the great
state of Texas?" A mighty roar went up as the Western Union clock on
the wall registered 8:00 P. M. precisely and the band struck up the familiar
Hayride theme, based on the old Negro "minstrel" song, "Raise a Ruckus
Tonight." "Come along, everybody come along," the audience all joined
in, "while the moon is shining bright / We're going to have a wonderful
time / At the Louisiana Hayride tonight."
A tall, skinny singer from Shreveport with a television show in
Monroe sidled up to the new sensation -he was barely twenty himself
and had been knocked out by Elvis Presley ever since hearing the first record
at Jiffy Fowler's Twin City Amusements, a jukebox operation in West
Monroe. "I said, 'Hello, Elvis, my name is Merle Kilgore.' He turned
around and said, 'Oh, you worked with Hank Williams.' I said, 'Yeah.' He
I 4 0 GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
said, 'You wrote "More and More" [a number-one hit for Webb Pierce in
the fall of I954] l' I said, 'Yeah: He said, 'I want to meet Tibby Edwards: It
was the first thing he said to me. Tibby recorded for Mercury, and he was
a star. I said, 'He's my buddy, we room together here in Shreveport: And
I went and got Tibby and introduced him to Elvis. That's how we got to
be friends."
J
UST A FEW WEEKS AGO," intoned announcer Frank Page's impressively
measured radio voice, "a young man from Memphis, Tennessee,
recorded a song on the Sun label, and in just a matter of a few weeks that
record has skyrocketed right up the charts. It's really doing good all over
the country. He's only nineteen years old. He has a new, distinctive style.
Elvis Presley. Let's give him a nice hand... Elvis, how are you this evening?"
"Just fine, how are you, sir?"
"You all geared up with your band -"
''I'm all geared up!"
"To let us hear your songs?"
"Well, I'd like to say how happy we are to be out here. It's a real
honor for us to hav - get a chance to appear on the Louisiana Hayride.
And we're going to do a song for you - You got anything else to say,
"No, I'm ready."
"We're gonna do a song for you we got on the Sun record, it goes
something like this..." And with that he launched into the first side of his
first Sun single.
The cheers that went up from the audience were encouraged by
Frank Page and Horace Logan as they stood to the side of the Lucky
Strike backdrop. The microphones hanging out over the floor were
turned up when Scotty took a somewhat uncertain solo, and the audience
politely responded. Elvis was visibly nervous, his knees were practically
knocking together, and the jackknife action of his legs was about all, Sam
Phillips was convinced, that was preventing him from blowing his brains
out. The reaction was not all that different from the one he had gotten on
the Opry - he was so ill at ease it was hard for the audience to really like
him, even though it was clear to Sam that they might want to do just that,
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 c,., 1 4 1
that they were ready, like Memphis audiences, t o respond t o the boy's
charm.
In between shows he went backstage to talk to Elvis. Merle Kilgore
noticed them off in a comer huddled together as Sam exhorted Elvis to
just relax: the people were there to see him, just let them see what you
got, put on your kind of show, if it didn't work, well, the hell with it, at
least we can say we tried. Elvis, Merle noted, looked like he was scared
stiff, but then Sam Phillips went to take his seat among the audience, after
a little while the trio came out to do their two numbers, and this time it
was entirely different. Much of the younger audience from the first show
had stayed for the second, Tillman Franks observed, and now they were
ready for what the new singer had to offer. For Sam it was a moment
never to be forgotten.
"There was a college up in Texarkana where Elvis' records had gotten
hot, and some of the young people from that college had turned up. Well,
when he got through that first number, they were on their feet - and not
just them either. Some big fat lady - I mean, it took an effort for her to
get up, and she got up and didn't stop talking, right in the middle of the
next number, she didn't know who I was, she just said, 'Man, have you
ever heard anything that good?' And, honestly, the tonal impact couldn't
have competed with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, or the Carlisles, who
had been on the week before - I mean, they were pros. But Elvis had this
factor of communication, I think the audience saw in him the desire to
please, he had that little innocence about him, and yet he had something
about him that was almost impudent in a way, that was his crutch. He
certainly didn't mean to be impudent, but he had enough of that along
with what he could convey that was just beautiful and lovely - and I'm
not talking about his physical beauty, because he didn't look that pretty
then or that good-looking, by conventional standards he should have
been thrown off that stage. But I calculated that stuff in my mind: are they
going to resent him with his long sideburns - that could be a plus or a
minus. But when he came through like he did, it was neither. He stood on
his own. "
He did the same two numbers that he had for the first show - there
were no encores, because Mr. Logan was very strict about encores, you
didn't take one unless there was a genuine eruption of the sort that overwhelmed
Hank Williams when he sang "Lovesick Blues" seven times in a
1 4 2 c-.. GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
row and could have kept going all night. For Elvis and Scotty and Bill it
wasn't anything like that, but all three grew visibly more confident, and
Elvis, for all the terror that had just engulfed him, responded warmly to
the crowd's enthusiasm for him. Some of the Hayride veterans, like
twenty-seven-year-oldJimmy "C" Newman, who had just had his first big
hit on Randy Wood's Dot label with "Cry, Cry Darling," regarded the
proceedings with a certain amount of suspicion. ''I'd never seen anything
like it before. Here comes this guy, I guess you could almost call him an
amateur, rings of dirt on his neck, but he had it all right from the start. He
didn't work into it, he just knew what he was going to do. We'd just stand
in the wings and shake our heads. 'It can't be, it can't last, it's got to be a
fad.' "
"I think he scared them a little [in the first show]," said Merle Kilgore.
"He was really on the toes of his feet singing. I think they thought he was
going to jump off the stage. But when he came back out, he destroyed
them - by now they knew he wasn't going to jump off the stage and beat
them, and they absolutely exploded."
"What he did," said Jimmy "C" Newman, "was he changed it all
around. After that we had to go to Texas to work, there wasn't any work
anywhere else, because all they wanted was someone to imitate Elvis, to
jump up and down on the stage and make a fool of themselves. It was
embarrassing to me to see it - Elvis could do it, but few others could."
I
N THE OCTOBER 16 issue of Billboard, the same date as the first Hayride
appearance, there was a small item in Bill Sachs' "Folk Talent and
Tunes" announcing that "Bob Neal of WMPS, Memphis, is planning fall
tours with Elvis Presley, the Louvin Brothers, and J.E. and Maxine
Brown. " Neal, who had not had a great deal of personal contact with
Elvis since the Overton Park show, in July, had been out to see the trio
several times at the Eagle's Nest and was impressed with their potential.
Though he had never been involved in management, he had been booking
shows in and around Memphis for the last five years, doing local promotion
for Opry and Hayride packages and promoting little shows of his
own in Arkansas and Mississippi, anywhere, in fact, within the twohundred-
mile radius of the WMPS broadcast signal. He publicized the
shows, of course, on his own popular early-morning program, which was
on from 5:00 to 8:00, as well as the High Noon Round- Up, featuring the
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 43
Blackwood Brothers, Eddie Hill, and other hillbilly entertainment, which
Elvis had frequently attended. Neal called Sam Phillips and asked if the
group had any representation. Sam said not really - Scotty was handling
management for the time being, just taking care of things more or less on
an interim basis - and the two men agreed that maybe it would be worth
having Bob try some bookings, seeing how it worked out. Bob spoke to
Elvis, and the boy seemed agreeable, though he certainly didn't have
much to say. And Scotty didn't appear to have any objections; from all
that Neal could see, he simply wanted to go back to being a musician. So
Bob went ahead and set up some civic club and schoolhouse bookings for
November and early December - in towns like Bruce and Iuka, Mississippi;
Helena and Leechville, Arkansas - places to which he had brought
his shows many times in the past, where folks knew him and enjoyed his
ukelele playing and laughed in recognition of his comfortable, carefully
honed cornpone humor.
On October 20 the Press-Scimitar proudly announced under the headline
"Elvis Presley Clicks": "Elvis Presley, Memphis' swift-rising young
hillbilly singing star, is now a regular member of the Louisiana Hayride
Show.... The Hayride specializes in picking promising young rural
rhythm talent - and it took just one guest appearance last Saturday for
the young Memphian to become a regular." The announcement was
somewhat premature (Sam was still working out an arrangement with
Pappy Covington and Horace Logan), but Elvis promptly quit his job, and
Scotty and Bill quit theirs, too. They did so with the bravest of intentions,
but with not a little trepidation, either. "I hated to let him go," said Mr.
Tipler, who with his wife continued to go out to the Eagle's Nest, "[but] I
could see that he was going places. I just told him, 'I understand that you
can't work and stay out all night, too.' I've always been one that if somebody
can benefit their self, make more of themselves, I don't never ask
them to stay." Vernon, according to Elvis, took a somewhat less sanguine
view. "My daddy had seen a lot of people who played guitars and stuff
and didn't work, so he said: 'You should make up your mind either about
being an electrician or playing a guitar. I never saw a guitar player that
was worth a damn.' "
He missed the Hayride for the next two weeks. There had been nothing
finalized by the twenty-third, and they were booked at the Eagle's
Nest the following weekend, so they hung around Memphis, practiced at
Scotty's house, and basked in all the attention that was coming their way.
1 4 4 GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
They felt like great things were about t o happen, if they could just get back
to Shreveport. Tillman Franks had promised them work, Pappy Covington
had assured them that he could get them gigs through the little booking
agency that he operated out of the Hayride offices - they were just itching
to get on with their new life. But in the meantime the kids would all be
out at Clearpool the weekend of October 29-30 - they were playing both
Friday and Saturday nights - and it would serve as something of a Memphis
send-off.
That Friday night Bob Neal brought a visitor out to the club. Oscar
Davis, known as the Baron of the Box Office, was a flamboyant fifty-yearold
veteran of the vaudeville, carnival, and country circuits. With his
jaunty boutonniere and elegant cigarette holder, his drawling Boston
accent and his habit of fixing his listener in his gaze and focusing all of his
considerable charm upon him or her, he could boast truthfully that he had
spent more money than many millionaires had ever made, which was one
reason that he was perennially broke. A true bon vivant, he lived up to the
advertising slogan he used for every show that he promoted: DON'T YOU
DARE MISS IT!
That was how h e happened to b e in Memphis at this particular juncture.
Oscar had worked promotions on his own for years, he had managed
and been associated with stars from Hank Williams to Roy Acuff to Ernest
Tubb and Minnie Pearl, and he had established a model for the modern
country music promoter, but because of his impecunious ways, he occasionally
found himself in the employ of one or another of his proteges. On
this trip to Memphis he had been doing advance work for "Colonel" Tom
Parker, whom Bob Neal had originally met some years before in connection
with an Eddy Arnold show at Russwood Park that Neal had emceed.
The Colonel had since split with Arnold, whom he had guided to unsurpassed
heights in the country music field, over "personal differences" and a
question of artistic direction. Parker had put Eddy Arnold in pictures; he
had hooked him up with Abe Lastfogel, president of the William Morris
Agency, and booked him into Las Vegas; he had carefully supervised every
last detail of Arnold's career. But Arnold wanted to go into television,
and he wanted to spend his own, and the Colonel's, money. The result
was that in August 1953 Arnold fired his manager out of the blue, a bitter
blow to Tom Parker's pride but one that he was well on his way to overcoming
with his recent signing of country's new number-one star, Hank
Snow, to a limited partnership agreement. Part of the terms of his
O C T O B E R- D E C E M B E R I 9 5 4 '" I 4 5
severance with Arnold were that h e would continue t o book Arnold o n a
regional basis, and to that end he had set up a ten-day tour of the mid
South in the fall of I954. Memphis was the fifth date on that tour.
In the course of his Memphis travels, Oscar stopped by the WMPS studio
to cut some spots for the show that afternoon and, as was his wont,
asked Bob Neal what was going on around town. Neal, who had his finger
in a number of pies, gave him a rapid rundown and then happened to
mention this young singer, Elvis Presley, with whom he had an upcoming
tour. Oscar had heard of Elvis, there was quite a stir about the boy, and he
wondered if there might not be a chance to see the kid - maybe he or
Tom could do something for him. As a matter of fact, said Neal, the boy
happened to be playing out at the Eagle's Nest that night: why didn't they
just drive out together and catch the show?
Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were thrilled to meet this larger-than-life character
with his stories of the big time, the glamorous world that they could
only read about in fan magazines like Country Song Roundup and Country
& Western Jamboree. Davis cut quite a figure in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere
of the club, and when he invited Elvis to stop by the show at
Ellis Auditorium on Sunday - he would be back in town by then after
traveling to Nashville the next day and advancing the upcoming Monday
and Tuesday shows there - Elvis jumped at the chance. Maybe, Mr.
Davis suggested, he would even be able to introduce Elvis to Eddy Arnold,
who was always interested in new talent.
That Sunday at 6:00 P. M. Elvis walked up the familiar steps of the entrance
to Ellis Auditorium. The show included Minnie Pearl, guitar virtuoso
Hank Garland, local hillbilly star Eddie Hill, and the singing group
the Jordanaires, not to mention Robert Powers, the World's Smallest Hillbilly
Singer. The man at the box office recognized him immediately and
gave him the tickets that had been left in his name, and he attracted a
good deal of attention himself sitting up front in his pink shirt and black
pants and sharp white shoes. Eddy sang "Don't Rob Another Man's Castle,"
''I'll Hold You in My Heart," "Any Time," and "I Really Don't Want
to Know" (his latest number-one hit), all in that effortlessly flowing voice,
with the smooth quartet backing of the Jordanaires.
After the show was over, Bob Neal found Elvis and took him backstage,
where he wandered around the unfamiliar setting in a kind of daze.
Oscar Davis came over and seemed genuinely pleased to see him; he introduced
him to Eddy and to Hoyt Hawkins of the Jordanaires. He had
1 4 6 GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
really enjoyed the group's singing, Elvis mumbled with his eyes on the
floor. Well, they had enjoyed his singing, too, Hoyt said. They had heard
his record on the radio when they were out in California with Eddy. He
sounded like a quartet singer to them. Elvis blushed and fidgeted with his
hands. If he ever got to the point where he had the kind of success that
Eddy Arnold had, he said, he would like to get a group like the Jordanaires
to sing with him; if he ever achieved that kind of success he would like
them to sing behind him on record - did Hoyt think that was possible?
Hoyt said he was sure that it was; they did lots of background work in
Nashville, it was more and more popular nowadays - they'd love to
work with him someday. Oscar seemed anxious for them to go. There
was a little coffee shop across the street, maybe he and Elvis and Bob Neal
could go over there and have a Coke or a cup of coffee. A heavyset man in
a rumpled, ready-made suit with a cigar stuck in his mouth eyed them
briefly from across the room, then turned his attention elsewhere. Who
was that? Elvis asked Oscar as they exited the backstage area. That, said
Oscar, with a respectful but somewhat impatient gesture, was Colonel
Parker.
T
HE FOLLOWING SATURDAY NIGHT he signed a standard union contract
with the Hayride for a period of one year. He would receive $18
per appearance as leader; Scotty and Bill would get $12 apiece. And they
were permitted to miss five dates a year for outside bookings, though Mr.
Logan assured him that informal arrangements could be made if other circumstances
arose. Vernon and Gladys accompanied him to Shreveport to
sign the contract, and they all stayed at the Captain Shreve Hotel.
That same week, with "Good Rockin' Tonight" number three on the
Memphis charts and the first single still showing up on territorial charts
throughout the South, Billboard ran a review of the new single, once again
in the "Spotlight" section. "Elvis Presley," it said, "proves again that he is
a sock new singer with his performances on these two oldies. His style is
both country and r.&b. and he can appeal to pop." Sam Phillips was delighted.
It wasn't simply that this gave him further ammunition in his crusade
- it was becoming increasingly clear that there was a groundswell
building which distributors and jukebox operators and one-stops could ignore
only at their peril. Bill Haley had a couple of records out there that
proved the same damn point, and every day Sam was seeing new eviOCTOBER-
DECEMBER 1 9 5 4 '" 1 4 7
dence of it in the country boys who were showing u p o n his doorstep because
they were hearing something in the music that, without being able
to put a tag on it, they had recognized all along. And Sam knew that a day
was coming, he knew as sure as he was born that a day was coming when
this music would prevail, he didn't need any damn industry backslapping
to convince him of it - but this was Billboard, after all, this was Paul Ackerman,
a man whom he had yet to meet but for whom he had the deepest
respect, and he was hearing the same thing in the music that Sam Phillips
was.
Gladys dutifully pasted the review in the scrapbook she was keeping-
she couldn't believe how rapidly it was filling up. She and Dixie
talked excitedly about his new "career." They chewed over every scrap of
information that either of them could come up with, it didn't seem possible
somehow that all of this could be happening, and happening so fast -
you should have seen the young people in Shreveport, she told Dixie excitedly,
they practically went crazy over him, he had to come back and do
an encore both shows. And the hotel was so nice, too....
D
IXIE WAS WORRIED about Elvis. When he was gone, she worried
about him, she prayed for his success and she prayed that the success
wouldn't change him. When he was at home, she worried that things
were in fact changing, that where just three months ago the main thing
on both their minds was marriage and whether they would have the
strength to wait, now it seemed his mind was always somewhere else. She
wondered if it was on someone else, but she didn't think so, she was sure
not, it was just that he was always so distracted, and everywhere he went
he was recognized, some of the girls were almost shameless the way they
called attention to themselves, and he really didn't seem to mind. They
stopped by the Chisca to visit with Dewey while he did his radio show,
and Elvis went down there sometimes by himself. She didn't know what
exactly they did afterward: sometimes they played pool, sometimes they
just watched movies in Dewey's garage, and she knew that they went
down on Beale, because he told her about meeting B. B. King and about
some of the colorful clubs and club owners that he had run into. He
seemed really excited about it - he had seen a nattily dressed Lowell Fulson
at the Club Handy, and he sang her some of Fulson's brand-new number,
"Reconsider Baby," which she might have heard if there was still
I 4 8 '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
time t o listen t o records a t Charlie's; he described how Calvin Newborn
did the splits while he was playing the guitar at the Flamingo Lounge.
The pure enthusiasm, the wide-eyed fascination, the hunger for new experience,
were all very much part of the boy she knew, but there was
something different about him, too, she knew it and Mrs. Presley did also,
but neither one of them wanted to confess it to the other, so they skirted
the issue and merely expressed their concern that the boys would drive
carefully.
Toward the end of football season Elvis drove by Humes just as the
football team was heading out to Bartlett to play a game. One of the star
players, Red West, who had been on the team as a freshman when Elvis
had tried out junior year, spotted him just as the team was getting on the
bus and called out to him. "Congratulations," he said when Elvis got out
of his old Lincoln coupe and ambled over. He invited Elvis to come watch
the game, so Elvis followed the bus out to Bartlett and, when the game
was over, asked Red if he wouldn't like to come out to a show he was
doing that weekend, and for the rest of the school year Red accompanied
him off and on to shows that were booked on the weekends.
He liked having Red around, it made him feel more comfortable, and
Red got along okay with Scotty and Bill, but still he felt strange in Memphis,
he felt almost as if people were making more of him than he deserved,
as if he were onstage all the time and never quite at ease, never
able to be entirely himself. He was becoming a hometown celebrity of
sorts and didn't know how to act. On November 8 they played out at
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