1 5 9
160 c,., FORBIDDEN FRUIT
ous summer with "Looking Back t o See," were comparative veterans of
the Hayride, and had an audience that turned out for them every time.
Jim Ed was a big, good-looking guy, just a year older than Elvis and not
above preening himself for the girls; his sister, Maxine, was attractive and
outgoing, and they never failed to reach a good portion of the crowd.
Tom Perryman remembered one show he put on in Gilmer, Texas, near
Gladewater, when the Browns actually came out on top. "They did a lot
of their harmony gospel songs, and they had their big record, and there
was a lot of older family people there. That was the only time I ever saw
anybody steal the show from Elvis. Of course it was a big thrill for the
Browns." Most of the time, though, they didn't seem to know what had
hit them. It wasn't that they were any less popular or that the fans didn't
flock around them when they came out after the performance to sign
autographs and sell their records; it was just that when that boy was onstage,
it was like nothing that had ever been before. Whether people liked
it or not, they didn't seem able to think of anything else, and it prevented
them from focusing on just about anything that followed.
In Corinth, Mississippi, the show was sponsored by the local Jaycees
Club and scheduled to take place at the courthouse, and local OJ / singer
Buddy Bain was on the bill. Buddy, who was thirty-one and had had his
chance in Nashville, where he had deejayed on WSM after a five-year stint
in Knoxville with Chet Atkins, didn't particularly like the new style. He
was a traditional country singer himself, who had grown up admiring
Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers, but he had met Sam Phillips at WLAY
in Muscle Shoals, and he knew the Presleys from the Tupelo area, where
he had grown up and where his sisters Mary and Marie had worked with
Gladys in the sewing room at Reed Manufacturing Company. So when
Sam brought not only the first record but the boy himself down to radio
station WCMA in Corinth one sweltering day the previous summer,
Buddy played it ("Well, I played 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'; 'That's All
Right' was a little too much for me") and interviewed Elvis himself for
about ten minutes on the air.
By the time he returned to Corinth, in January, Elvis was something
of a local phenomenon, and Buddy was featured on the bill, along with his
singing partner, fifteen-year-old Kay Crotts from Michie, Tennessee,
whom he would marry three years later. Buddy had been plugging the
Browns' appearance all week because he had kind of a crush on Maxine
("We had hit it off real good. She wrote to me, and I wrote to her, and I
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 6 1
thought something might really come of it until 1 found out later that she
had actually done so many disc jockeys that way, you know, to get them
to play her record"), and he was skeptical of the new performer's attraction
because he had heard that Bob Neal had paid half a dozen local girls
fifty cents apiece to scream, but he was quickly won over.
"You know, they came to make fun of him, but they ended up backstage
practically trying to tear him apart. He was the show, even then - it
wasn't like anything you ever heard. But there was one little thing that
happened before the show I'll never forget. They got in in the middle of
the afternoon, and we had a little two-story house in Corinth, my mother
and I, and we had a girl that would come in and cook for us because my
mother was in a wheelchair. Well, 1 invited Elvis and Maxine and Jim Ed
over to the house. And before we had supper, we gave Jim Ed and Maxine
my bedroom to lie down in and take a nap. And Elvis said, T d like to lie
down, too. The living room sofa's fine for me.' So he lay down on this
long red plastic sofa that we had, with his feet over the end, he just went
right out. And when 1 woke him up for supper, the little girl that worked
for us, Martha Morris, had filled that table full of food, but all he would
eat was some com bread, and he asked if we didn't have any buttermilk.
Well, 1 chased down to the store for it, and he just crumbled up that com
bread in the buttermilk and ate a whole lot of it and said, 'This is delicious.
Just what 1 want.' After supper was over, my mother was sitting by
the window, looking out like she always did, and Elvis went over and
said, 'Mrs. Bain, 1 really enjoyed the meal.' And he kissed her on the
cheek, which my mama wasn't used to because I didn't even kiss her, 1
just said, 'Thank you, Mama.' She was a stem woman. When he went out
of the room for a minute, she said, 'Who was that slobbering all over me?'
1 said, 'Mama, that was Elvis Presley.' She said, 'I wondered who that
was.'
"Then we all sat down and looked at my scrapbooks. 1 had lots of pictures
from my early career, in Nashville and Raleigh, North Carolina, and
the famous Renfro Valley Bam Dance, and he said to me, 'I hope someday
1 can be as famous as you are. 1 sure would like to get to Nashville
someday.' And you know what 1 said to him? 1 remember it as well as if it
were yesterday. 1 said, 'Elvis, if you'll learn you some good country songs,
you just might get on the Grand Ole Opry.' Of course he was very polite
and thanked me, and then we went to the show."
Backstage at the show Elvis took advantage of his newfound friend1
6 2 '" FORBIDDEN FRUIT
ship t o harmonize with Buddy's singing partner on a Blackwood Brothers
song. "We were going to sing a gospel song on our show entitled 'I'm
Feeling Mighty Fine.' We all had little practice sessions before going out
onstage, and Kay and I were singing over in a comer, and Elvis walked
over and said, 'Buddy, scoot on over, you can't sing that song. Let me sing
it with Kay.' So he and Kay sang it, and he did his version much different
from the way I did mine. 'Cause I did mine just plain, and he did his,
'Well-uh, uh-uh' - you know, like he did. Well, Kay didn't really like it,
at least she said she didn't, but I was real jealous of the way they sung it,
and he just kept singing it over and over again, there's no telling how
many times they sung that chorus, he just didn't know when to stop. But
once he got onstage, it was all over." And after the show was done, the
mild-mannered boy asked Buddy to point him toward the best-looking
girl in the crowd and joked that he would find out if she was wearing falsies
or not.
I
T WAS ALL LIKE A DREAM from which he was afraid he might one
day awaken. It seemed sometimes like it was happening to someone
else, and when he spoke of it, it was often with a quality of wonderment
likely to strike doubt not so much in his listener's mind as in his own.
When he returned home for the show at Ellis, there was a full, fourcolumn
spread in the Memphis Press-Scimitar by Miss Keisker's friend Mr.
Johnson, an affable, easygoing fellow in a battered newspaperman's hat,
who spent as much time with Mr. Phillips as he did with the somewhat
tongue-tied subject of his story. "Suddenly Singing Elvis Presley Zooms
into Recording Stardom," read the headline, with the explanatory introductory
phrase, "Thru the Patience of Sam Phillips," running above. The
article was accompanied by a photograph of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill in the
studio, and underneath the photograph it said, "A white man's voice singing
negro rhythms with a rural flavor [has] changed life overnight for
Elvis Presley." The body of the text mapped out in plain, accurate, and
generally admiring terms the story of his meteoric rise: growing up in
Tupelo, moving to Memphis, lugging his guitar every day to Humes. It
described how Sam Phillips had discovered his talent, how Dewey Phillips
had revealed it to the world, how Elvis had been invited to appear on the
Grand Ole Opry, "hillbilly heaven," within a month of the debut of his
first record and was today a star of the Louisiana Hayride. The article
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 6 3
made note, too, o f the phenomenon that had helped give rise t o the
young man's success and of Sam Phillips' contribution to it. "That's All
Right," Johnson noted, was "in the R&B idiom of negro field jazz, 'Blue
Moon' more in the country field, but there was a curious blending of the
two different musics in both." The last section of the story, headlined "In
a Class Alone," stressed the unclassifiability of Elvis' talent and the likelihood
of a glowing future for this good-looking young star with the "slumbrous"
eyes who, with his new manager, Bob Neal, had recently opened
up an office downtown under the title of Elvis Presley Enterprises. "Spin
'em again, boys," wrote Bob Johnson, announcing in bold type everything
that Elvis himself had been afraid to even whisper to his friends: the
celebrity, the dramatic impact of his success, its scale, the almost unmentionable
thrill that went with it.
There were two shows, at 3:00 and 8:00 P. M. The ad in the paper
placed him fourth on a "Five Star" bill, with Faron Young and Ferlin Huskey
headlining and "Beautiful Gospel Singer" Martha Carson making her
Memphis debut, but it was clear from all the attention he was getting that
a good deal was expected of him. The first show went fine. He sang his
new songs, "Milkcow Blues Boogie" and "You're a Heartbreaker," as
well as "That's All Right" and "Good Rockin' Tonight," and he told Ronnie
Smith backstage how much fun he was having on the road. He was
fascinated, too, with the performance of Martha Carson, a spectacular
redhead who looked like a movie star and sang and moved like Sister
Rosetta Tharpe when she performed her trademark hit, "Satisfied,!' and a
host of traditional "colored" spirituals. She broke several strings, danced
ecstatically at the end of a long guitar cord, and in general created the
kind of smoldering intensity and infectious enthusiasm that he sought to
achieve in his own performance. He asked Miss Carson afterward if she
knew a particular Statesmen number, and he made it clear that "he knew
the words to every song that I had ever had out." He told her that he
would like to record her song, "Satisfied," someday and that he hoped
that they would be billed together again sometime soon. "He was very
complimentary and very interested in what I did. I could feel this was sincere,
it was from the heart - it wasn't just someone saying this, he just
really idolized me, and I could feel it."
In between shows he and Scotty went across the street to a meeting
Bob had set up with Colonel Parker. The Colonel had finally added him
to Hank Snow's upcoming southwestern tour, which was to start a week
1 6 4 FORBIDDEN FRUIT
from Monday, and Bob said he thought it would b e a good idea if they all got
together and talked a little bit about the future. In addition to Bob and
Colonel Parker, Sam Phillips would also be attending, along with the
Colonel's front man, Oscar Davis (whom Elvis had met in connection with
the Eddy Arnold show three months before), and Tom Diskin, Parker's associate
in Jamboree Attractions, the booking agency in which he and Snow
were partners. Ironically, Scotty had contacted Diskin in December, at the
Chicago office listed in Billboard, to see if the agency might be interested in
booking Elvis. He had gotten his reply only three weeks earlier, a stock letter
of rejection which apparently failed to make any connection between the
blind inquiry and the new act in whom the Colonel was already taking an
interest on the basis of a very encouraging report from Texarkana OJ Uncle
Dudley about the New Boston date. In fact, Diskin joined the Colonel on a
quick visit to Shreveport to watch the boy on the Hayride on January 15, just
two days after the letter was mailed. Scotty had heard that the Colonel was
in the audience and even thought he might have spotted him standing
toward the back of the auditorium. But Parker hadn't come around to see
them afterward, and though he spent much of January in touch with Neal
about the tour, he had had no direct contact with the musicians until now.
The meeting at Palumbo's did not get off to an auspicious start. The
tension in the air was already marked when Elvis and Scotty walked in.
Colonel Parker was sitting there with a big cigar, his jaw thrust out, and a
pugnacious expression on his face, as Diskin, his young lieutenant, tried to
explain to Mr. Phillips that the Colonel didn't really mean anything against
the Sun label in particular, that he was just trying to point out the shortcomings
that would attach to any small record label, which necessarily
lacked the kind of distribution that a major company like RCA, with which
the Colonel had been associated for many years through both Eddy Arnold
and Hank Snow, could offer. Oscar Davis, sharp as ever with a fresh flower
in his buttonhole and his cigarette holder cocked elegantly, just so, was
plainly unhappy with his crude associate. And Sam was seething. What did
Tom Parker mean - he wasn't going to call that damn mountebank by
some phony title -by saying that Elvis was going to get nowhere on Sun?
This was a helluva way to start a business conference. His own deep-set
eyes bored in on the Colonel, but Parker's gaze never wavered, and both
men sat locked in silent combat until finally Bob Neal broke the tension
and suggested they discuss some of the specifics of the upcoming tour.
This could be a very fine opportunity for them all, Oscar Davis said
JANUARY-MAY I955 '" I65
with genuine feeling: i t would give Sam a chance t o get his records into
new territories, it would offer young Elvis here an opportunity to expand
his audience, and if things worked out it could cement a long-standing relationship
- Davis undoubtedly hesitated on the word partnership - between
Colonel Parker and our good friend Bob Neal and allow it to develop
in exciting new directions. The Colonel only glowered, and Oscar
was confounded as to just what he could be up to. As for Elvis, Bob had
explained to him the Colonel's far-flung connections, not just in the world
of country music, but in Hollywood as well. Mr. Phillips had only reinforced
what Bob had said. From what he understood, Sam declared
before actually meeting him, there wasn't a better promoter in the business
than Tom Parker, and right now they could certainly use all the help they
could get. But what, Elvis might well have been led to wonder at this
point, was Colonel Parker's compelling attraction?
T
HOMAS A. PARKER on first impression was a heavyset, crude, and
blustering man with a brilliant mind and a guttural accent, which he
claimed to have acquired in West Virginia, where, he said, he had been
born forty-five years before. Orphaned as a child (the exact age varied
from one telling to the next), he had run away and joined the circus, in
this case the Great Parker Pony Circus, which he said was owned by an
uncle. From there he had drifted into the carny life, eventually ending up
in Tampa, where the Royal American show wintered and where, after
half a dozen years "in the life," he had married an older divorcee named
Marie Mott in I935 and settled down. He pursued a number of civilian
ventures, eventually becoming field agent (this could be translated as
"Chief Dogcatcher," and often was in later years by the Colonel) for the
Tampa Humane Society, a privately endowed animal shelter, where he
and his family were given a free apartment above the pound. On his own
he enterprisingly founded a pet cemetery that offered "Perpetual Care for
Deceased Pets" while also promoting and working closely with country
singers Gene Austin and Roy Acuff and film star Tom Mix on their Florida
tours. Acuff, then known as the King of the Hillbillies, tried to persuade
him to move to Nashville, and Parker seemed ready to entertain the idea
if Acuff would consider leaving the Opry and giving Parker a free managerial
hand. Acuff declined, and perhaps because Tom Parker was not quite
ready to give up all his carny ties, this was the point at which they reached
1 6 6 c,.,. F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
a parting of the ways. It wasn't until a few years later, in 1944, when he
met twenty-six-year-old Eddy Arnold headlining an Opry tent show tour,
that he finally made his move.
Arnold, who had just left Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys and
signed with RCA Records, was a big, handsome, square-jawed baritone
with a full-throated melodic style altogether different from the conventional
Nashville approach. Parker must have sensed in him the potential
that he was looking for, because he went into show business now with the
same creative, full-bore intensity that had always marked him in the carny
world. According to Oscar Davis, who first met Parker in Florida while
Davis was managing Ernest Tubb, there had never been another manager
of this sort before. In his attention to every aspect of his client's career, in
his devotion to mapping out a program and to carrying it out in the most
meticulous detail, in his use of radio for " exploitation" and his belief that
his word was his bond, that a contract, once agreed upon, was a sacred
commitment on both sides, Tom Parker "as a manager was tops, the greatest
in the world. He was an uncanny businessman, very astute, he adjusted
the cost so there was never a time when a promoter made more money
than he did. If I were to select anyone in the amusement field - and I've
been through it from 1912 on up - I would select him; I don't think anyone
has beaten him on a deal. He'll read you very quickly. Working with the
carnivals taught him that everything wasn't the way that it looks on the
surface, that everyone has their weaknesses. Tom was a strong man. He'd
lay the law down, and you went that way or you didn't play."
To Biff Collie, the Houston OJ, the difference between the Colonel
and Oscar - Davis' chronic impecuniousness aside - was that the Colonel
"always thought far beyond where he was," while to Gabe Tucker,
who met Parker when Gabe was playing bass for Eddy Arnold and who
worked with him on and off for almost thirty years, "his operation was
completely different" because of his attention to detail. "Most managers
back then would just call up [the local promoter] and say, 'Okay, can you
book a tour down there?' And the manager would never leave his office.
But he didn't work that way. He'd go out before, check out the place,
he'd ask how many seats in the auditorium - not to be smart, but because
we knowed percentagewise, if we had a five-thousand-seat auditorium,
we knew how many [Eddy Arnold] songbooks to take in and how
many we was going to sell. His theory was altogether different than most
of them that come to Nashville. He was a carny."
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 c-.... 1 6 7
Once he got together with Eddy Arnold h e concentrated his focus exclusively
on his single client. He moved up to Nashville and virtually
moved in with Arnold and his wife, Sally. "When Tom's your manager,
he's all you," wrote Arnold in his 1969 autobiography, It's a Long Way from
Chester County. "He lives and breathes his artist. I once said to him...
'Tom, why don't you get yourself a hobby - play golf, go boating, or
something?' He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'You're my
hobby.' " One of the keys to Parker's success, as Arnold saw it, was his
apparent crudity. "Earthy, I guess a lot of people might describe him; uneducated
maybe. A lot of times people think they're dealing with a rube.
'Oh, I can take him,' they decide. They don't take him. He's ahead of ' em
before they even sit down across a table... he fools ' em. They think, because
his English might be faulty (he might say a word wrong here and
there), 'Oh, I'll handle him.' They walk right into his web!"
Arnold had three number-one hits in 1947 and the following year was
persuaded by Parker to reluctantly quit the Opry: there were just too
many other opportunities. In October 1948 Parker used his carnival connections
to get himself an honorary colonel's commission from Louisiana
governor and noted country singer Jimmie Davis, the listed composer of
"You Are My Sunshine." From now on, he told Gabe Tucker, who accompanied
him to the investiture, "see to it... that everyone addresses
me as the Colonel." Within a year or two after that he had gotten Arnold
into the movies, hooked Eddy up with William Morris, the leading Hollywood
talent agency, gotten him on Milton Berle's top-rated television
show, and even booked him into Las Vegas. It was a far cry from what
any previous country music manager had envisioned for his talent
(though a few might have dreamt of it, none achieved it), but eventually
the exclusivity of his focus got him into trouble.
In 1953, in an episode that has been widely reported but never fully
explained, Eddy Arnold fired him. According to Elvis biographer Jerry
Hopkins, who got the story from Oscar Davis, "It was an argument in Las
Vegas that made the relationship collapse. Parker had been laying out a
two-page newspaper advertisement as a surprise to Eddy... and when
Eddy walked into the Colonel's room unexpectedly, Parker quickly hid
the lay-out, Eddy accused him of doing something behind his back, one
thing led to another, and pretty soon Eddy was without a manager,
Parker was without a star." It may have had something to do with a
weekly television show, too, in which Arnold was persuaded, against the
1 6 8 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
Colonel's always sober fiscal advice, to invest a great deal of his own
money, and it was undoubtedly true, as Gabe noted, that Arnold and
Parker "were dissipating much of their energy ironing out the difference
in their personalities and private lives." They went on working together
in a booking arrangement that was part of an amicable separation agreement,
and they never ceased to be personally cordial, but it must have
come as a terrible blow to Parker to be abandoned so abruptly by his protege,
in a manner that left him unavoidably exposed in the glare of the
show biz spotlight.
Within a year he had rebounded, after initially making his office in the
lobby of Nashville radio station WSM, where with Oscar Davis and other
independent operators he used the lobby phone to book his acts. "When
the phone rang," according to Billboard editor Bill Williams, "by agreement
whoever was closest answered it by the number... and between
them they lined up more clients and did more business than the Opry's
Service Bureau, which was directly across the hall, while WSM blithely
picked up the tab - for years!" By the spring of 1954, though, he was
working extensively with Hank Snow, whose "I Don't Hurt Anymore"
was the sensation of the first six months of the year. In its November 6
issue Billboard announced that Colonel Tom Parker of Jamboree Attractions
had "inked a pact with Hank Snow to handle the latter exclusively
on personals. After the first of the year... he'll take over management of
Hank Snow Enterprises, which includes radio, TV, film and recording
commitments." He was back in the big time.
And yet, oddly enough, he remained something of an enigma, an unpredictable
quantity, certainly, for someone in so visible a position who
did not exactly eschew the public eye. Something about his background
simply didn't make sense. "No one knows very much about his boyhood,"
said Oscar Davis, who doubted the story about the Great Parker
Pony Circus when he spoke to Jerry Hopkins in 1970. "I never knew if he
had brothers or sisters; he's a bit of a mystery." From time to time he
would explode in a fit of temper, or perhaps just an outburst of exuberant
good humor, in a language that none of his associates recognized or understood.
They wondered if he was speaking German, but he always
stipulated that it was Dutch, with a twinkle in his eye that left them in
little doubt that he was pulling their leg.
He kept nearly everyone, even his closest associates, at arm's length.
"You have one fault," he told his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott. "You make
J A N UARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 n.> 1 6 9
too many friends." His cold eyes belied his occasional warmheartedness;
his absolute honesty in business affairs conflicted with the opportunism
that always drove him to come out on top not just in formal dealings but
in day-to-day affairs as well (he would spend a hundred dollars, it was
said, to beat you out of a dollar). "He got a helluva kick," Chet Atkins
declared, "out of getting someone to pick up the check. Or out of just
beating you in a deal - any kind of a deal." He was capable of real generosity,
but more than anything else he loved the game. As Gabe Tucker
observed, he lived in a world of mirrors - he never really left the carnival
world, in which "they speak a different language. All of them is just like
the Colonel; they'll cut your throat just to watch you bleed. But they've
got their own laws, it's a game with them, to outsmart you, you're always
the pigeon to them." In Gabe's view, and in Oscar Davis', too, everyone
else in the Colonel's estimation was a little bit of a fool.
IT W A S L I T T L E W O N D E R, then, that Sam Phillips should take so instant,
and visceral, a dislike to the man sitting opposite him in the little
restaurant on Poplar. On the other hand, Tom Parker was one of the few
people in the business able to provide a match for Sam. These were two
very strong, independent men with two very different visions of life.
Sam's embraced the sweep of history; it very consciously conjured up the
agrarian hero as the focus of the democratic dream. The Colonel's vision,
on the other hand, denied history; it centered on the here and now, focusing
on survival by wit and instinct in a universe that was indifferent at
best. There was room enough for sentiment in the Colonel's view but little
for philosophy; Sam was perhaps less inclined to the sentimental gesture
but more to the humanitarian impulse. They didn't like each other,
clearly, but their needs suited each other, at least for the time being.
And Sam's need for Parker and Jamboree Attractions was, if anything,
greater than Parker's need for any untested twenty-year-old. Parker was
right in terms of the blunt challenge he had thrown out: Elvis Presley
could get only so far with Sun Records. Sun Records could get only so far
without a considerable infusion of cash to cover the signing and promotion
of new talent, increased pressing costs, expanded distribution, and
the wherewithal to provide some kind of breathing space. Bob Neal had
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