singing" that he felt this might be "someone who could revolutionize the
country end of the business." He was equally impressed with yet another
young man who had shown up on the Sun doorstep in the wake of Presley's
success and continued to hang around until Sam gave him an audi1
8 0 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
tion. There was something about the quality o f this young appliance
salesman's voice - it was in a way akin to Ernest Tubb's in its homespun
honesty (he kept telling the boy not to try to sound like anyone else, not to
worry if his sound and his style were untutored, not even to rehearse too
much, "because I was interested in spontaneity, too"). He didn't release a
record on Johnny Cash until the following summer, but he was working
with him and Perkins and Charlie Feathers and a host of others all
through the winter and spring.
That was why Stan Kesler kept hanging around. He sensed that something
new was about to happen, and he wanted to be a part of it when it
did. When he heard that Sam was looking for material for the next Presley
session, he immediately went home and wrote a number called ''I'm Left,
You're Right, She's Gone" with fellow band member Bill Taylor (trumpet
player with the Snearly Ranch Boys) based on the melody of the Campbell's
Soup commercial. He borrowed Clyde Leoppard's tape recorder,
had Taylor demo the song, and sat around the studio chatting with Marion
until Sam came in and listened to it. As it turned out, Sam liked the
song, and Elvis must have a little bit, too, because it was the one number
that they concentrated on at the session the following week.
What was different about this session was that for the first time they
used a drummer. Sam had always said that he wanted to take the trio format
as far as he could - and in fact they started out this session as a
trio - but Sam felt like there was something missing, and he called up a
young musician who had come in with his high school band the previous
year to make an acetate of a couple of big band jazz numbers. Jimmie Lott
was a junior in high school at the time but unfazed by the action. "I had
bronchitis, but I loaded up my drums into my mom's car. Elvis was standing
in the doorway of the studio. He had long greasy ducktails, which was
not too cool with my [crowd]." They jumped into a Jimmie Rodgers
Snow number that Elvis wanted to cut, "How Do You Think I Feel," to
which Lott contributed a Latin beat, but they couldn't get it right and
soon went back to the Kesler-Taylor composition that Elvis, Scotty, and
Bill had been fooling around with all evening. They had run up more than
a dozen takes already, trying to transform a simple country tune into a
wrenchingly slow blues number patterned on the Delmore Brothers'
"Blues Stay Away from Me." Elvis was uncomfortable with the idea of
doing a straight-out country tune, and Sam could understand that, but
even as they came closer to what they were aiming for, Sam knew they
JANUARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 8 1
were just getting further apart: hell, they all knew it in some part of their
souls. The Campbell's Soup melody just wasn't altogether suited to a blues
treatment.
Once the drums were added, providing a solid, jangling background,
there wasn't so much weight on Elvis' vocals, and he got the pretty, almost
delicate tone that Sam had envisioned for the tune all along, break-
I
ing his voice in a manner halfway between traditional country style and
his newly patented hiccough, with Scotty supplying his smoothest Chet
Atkins licks on top of the blues variations that still lingered from earlier
versions It didn't really match some of the other stuff they'd gotten, but
it was just the kind of thing Sam felt they needed eWe didn't need that
Nashville country, but I wanted the simplicity of the melody line - you
know, we had to do a little bit of crawling around just to see where we
were before we got into the race"). At the end of the session, as Jimmie
Lott was packing up his drums, Sam asked him if he would be interested
in working some more with the group, but Jimmie, who would later play
in Warren Smith's band and record again in the Sun studio, demurred
without much hesitation. "I told him I had another year of school and
couldn't."
Some two weeks later, on March 23, they went up to New York with
Bob Neal. They flew because their booking schedule was so tight that
they didn't have time to drive or take the train (Billboard of April 2 reported
that the group was "set solid through April"). It was the first time that
Elvis or Bill had flown, and the first time any of the boys had visited New
York. They gawked at the skyscrapers and took a subway ride. Bob, who
had been to the city before, pointed out the sights to them while Bill kidded
around, crossed his eyes, and acted like a cheerful hick. When they
got to the studio, though, the response was decidedly cool, the lady conducting
the audition conveyed a "don't call us we'll call you" kind of attitude
, and they never even got to see Arthur Godfrey. It was very
disappointing to them all, not least to Bob Neal, who had been building
this up as an opportunity to break into the big time - television was a
national market, and Arthur Godfrey was the vehicle by which the Blackwood
Brothers had become nationally known. They had been saving up
for months for this trip, and now they might just as well have flushed
the money down the toilet. Bill Randle's friend Max Kendrick reported
back to Randle somewhat indignantly that this new kid just wasn't ready
for the big time - he showed up for the audition badly dressed and seemed
1 8 2,.., FORBIDDEN FRUIT
nervous and ill prepared - and Randle felt that Kendrick was a little distant
as a result for some months thereafter.
Elvis and Scotty and Bill had no time for reflection, however. They hit
the road again almost immediately. They were driving a 1954 pink-andwhite
Cadillac by now. Elvis had gotten a 1951 Cosmopolitan Lincoln with
only ten thousand miles on it at the beginning of the year, the first "new"
car he had ever owned. He had had a rack put on top for the bass, painted
"Elvis Presley - Sun Records" on the side, and was so proud of it that he
wouldn't allow anyone even to smoke inside the car. Bill had wrecked it in
March, driving it under a hay truck late one night in Arkansas, but Elvis had
been able to assuage his disappointment, with Bob Neal's help, by purchasing
the Cadillac.
They were constantly on the go. Sometimes it seemed as if they didn't
even have time to sleep. Houston, Dallas, Lubbock and all through West
Texas. Hayride shows in Galveston, Waco, and Baton Rouge. Hawkins,
Gilmer, and Tyler, Texas, all within calling distance of Tom Perryman's
Gladewater radio signal. All the little towns scattered throughout the
Mississippi and Arkansas Delta. Back to Cleveland for another date at
the Circle Theater. EI Dorado. Texarkana. The Hayride. "It was always
exciting," in Elvis' view. "We slept in the back of the car, and we'd do a
show and get offstage and get in the car and drive to the next town
and sometimes just get there in time to wash up [and] do the show."
Scotty and Bill were chasing the girls, and the girls were chasing Elvis -
and frequently catching up with him. Everywhere he went he created a
sensation. "He's the new rage," said a Louisiana radio executive in an
interview with the British musical press. "Sings hillbilly in r&b time.
Can you figure that out. He wears pink pants and a black coat... [and]
he's going terrific. If he doesn't suffer too much popularity, he'll be all
right."
"This cat came out," said future country singer Bob Luman, still an
eighteen-year-old high school student in Kilgore, Texas, "in red pants and
a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face
and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I'll bet, before he made a
move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I'd been
playing ten years, and I hadn't broken a total of two strings. So there he
was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn't done anything except break
the strings yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting
and running up to the stage, and then he started to move his hips
J A N UARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 8 3
real slow like he had a thing for his guitar.... For the next nine days he
played one-nighters around Kilgore, and after school every day me and
my girl would get in the car and go wherever he was playing that night.
That's the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell."
Not surprisingly, he was not entirely unaffected by all this adulation.
While everyone agreed that he continued to maintain a remarkably polite
and deferential manner and never failed to show his elders an uncommon
degree of respect, those meeting him for the first time encountered a
somewhat different figure than they would have met six months, or even
three months, before - more confident perhaps, understandably more
suspicious, but overall simply more himself. Sometimes this could lead to
sudden displays of temper, as at the Hayride, when in a famous local incident
he punched the doorkeeper, a teenager named Shorty, in the nose,
because Shorty either opened or closed the door on his fans. Everyone
was surprised by the incident, no one more so than Elvis himself, who immediately
apologized profusely and offered to pay all of the doctor's bills.
The Miller Sisters, the performing duo that Sam had been working with,
who met Elvis at a show in Saltillo, Mississippi, just down the road from
where he was born, found him stuck-up and conceited. "He was really
cocky," said one. "I remember Elvis asked me to hold his guitar, and I
said, 'Hold it yourself. I'm not your flunky!' " But, of course, that may
have just been his way with one woman.
"Elvis Presley continues to gather speed over the South," wrote Cecil
Holifield, operator of the Record Shops in Midland and Odessa, Texas, in
the June 4 edition of Billboard.
West Texas is his hottest territory to date, and he is the teenagers'
favorite wherever he appears. His original appearance in the area was
in January with Billy Walker... to more than 1600 paid admissions.
In February, with Hank Snow at Odessa... paid attendance hit over
4000. On April 1 we booked only Elvis and his boys, Bill and Scotty,
plus Floyd Cramer on piano and a local boy on drums for a rockin'
and rollin' dance for teenagers, and pulled 850 paid admissions....
Incidentally, our sales of Presley's four records have beat any individual
artist in our eight years in the record business.
With a new Jamboree tour coming up in May, headlined by Hank
Snow and covering the entire mid South, Elvis and Scotty and Bill were
1 8 4 c-., F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
not about to start looking back. They didn't have the time. Bob Neal was
excited and optimistic about all the connections Tom Parker was helping
them to make. He felt as if they were finally about to move up to another
league.
TH E T O U R B E G A N on May 1 in New Orleans, the day after Elvis'
fourth Sun single, "Baby, Let's Play House," was released. It was
billed as a three-week, twenty-city tour that would employ thirty-one different
artists, some of whom would pick up and leave the tour at various
points. Headliners were Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, and the Carter Sisters
with Mother Maybelle, and Martha Carson and Faron Young would
join the show in Florida. In a solution the Colonel devised to prevent the
kind of thing that had happened on the last tour, there would be a first
half of "younger talent" that included Jimmie Rodgers Snow, the Davis
Sisters, and the Wilburn Brothers, with "one of the newest though most
eXCiting personalities in the Hillbilly field... [whose] singing style is completely
different from any other singer in the field," Elvis Presley, appearing
just before the intermission.
There were near-riots almost everywhere they played. Johnny Rivers
saw the show in Baton Rouge and decided, "I wanna be like that guy,"
while in Mobile, Jimmie Rodgers Snow remembered Elvis being chased
across a football field. There were girls in every city, and after the show
Elvis never lacked for company, cruising around town in the pink and
white Cadillac he had just acquired to replace the Lincoln (once again he
had his name painted in black on the door). Jimmy Snow roomed with
him on this tour, "and he would run the women, he'd run two or three of
them in one night - whether or not he was actually making love to all
three, I don't know, because he was kind of private in that sense and if I
thought he was going to run some women in the room with him, I didn't
stay. But I just think he wanted them around, it was a sense of insecurity, I
guess, because I don't think he was a user. He just loved women, and I
think they knew that."
Every night he called his parents at their new home on Lamar just to
let them know how he was doing, how the show had gone, to find out
how they were. Many nights Dixie was there, and he liked that, both because
it saved him a call and because he knew that they were keeping an
eye on her. "He didn't want to relinquish that control, regardless of how
J A N UARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 8 5
long he was gone or what he was doing; [he wanted to knOW] that I was
still going to be sitting there. If I wasn't there, he would ask his parents,
'Was Dixie there?' Or: 'Have you heard from her? Has she been over? Did
she spend the night?' I think he expected his parents to kind of keep me
there while he was gone so I wouldn't do anything else - but it just got to
be harder and harder after a while. " He wanted to know how they liked
the new house - they were still renting, of course, but it was the first time
since they had moved to Memphis that they had had a real home of their
own. How was Daddy feeling? Was his back any better? No, he reassured
Gladys, she didn't have to worry, he was doing just fine - he knew it bothered
her the way the audiences did sometimes, but they weren't going to
hurt him any. Yes, they were taking good care of the new Caddy, wasn't it
the prettiest thing? No, they were being careful. He didn't know if he'd
even let Bill drive this one! And how was the pretty little pink and white
Crown Victoria he had bought for them? It was the first new car they had
ever owned. He tried to reassure her: he was safe, he was happy, he was
still hers. But Gladys was not to be reassured. Some part of her feared what
was about to happen. Some part of her feared what she saw was happening
already. "I know she worshiped him, and he did her," said Dixie, "to the
point where she would almost be jealous of anything else that took his
time. I think she really had trouble accepting him as his popularity grew. It
grew hard for her to let everybody have him. I had the same feelings. He
did not belong to [us] anymore. "
HE M E T M A E B O R E N A X T O N, publicist for the Florida leg o f the
tour, at the first Florida date, in Daytona Beach. A forty-year-old
English teacher at Paxon High School in Jacksonville, where her husband
was the football coach, Axton had gotten into country music through the
back door when she was asked by Life Today, a magazine for which she
did occasional freelance work, to write an article on "hillbilly" music.
Though she had been born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma
(her brother, David, later became a prominent U.S. senator from
Oklahoma), she claimed to have no idea what hillbilly music was. "We
listened to the opera, and my teacher taught me classical, and folk songs I
knew, but the term 'hillbilly' was foreign to me. " Her research took her
to Nashville, where she met Minnie Pearl, who introduced her as a country
songwriter to powerful song publishing executive Fred Rose. Taking
1 8 6 n.,. F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
Mae for what Minnie Pearl said she was, Rose told her he needed a novelty
song for a Dub Dickerson recording session that afternoon, and she
wrote one, if only to prove her newfound friend correct.
Soon she had gotten a number of her songs cut (Dub Dickerson recorded
more of their collaborations, as did Tommy Durden) while continuing
to write stories for fan club magazines. She hooked up with the
Colonel in 1953 on a Hank Snow tour and began doing advance press
work for him in the Jacksonville-Orlando-Daytona area. As a woman
who was both attractive and feisty, Mae claimed to be the only person
that she knew ever to get an apology out of the Colonel. Ordinarily, his
one response to any form of criticism was "The Colonel is the boss."
"You be the boss," she said angrily when he tried this line on her. "Be
the big wheel. But don't ever ask me to do another thing for you."
Which led to the apology. Despite this incident, or perhaps because of it,
she always got along well with the Colonel and for a time even served as
Hank Snow's personal publicist. She was energetic and resourceful and
proved an excellent local PR woman on a management team that left
nothing to chance.
They were scheduled to play Daytona Beach on May 7, and Mae met
them at the motel. "I had gotten up real early and gone and done an interview
about the show that night and about Elvis, and I came back
around eleven, and, you know, the back of the motel was facing the
ocean, the little rails were up there, the little iron rails. And I walked out
of my door - my room was right near Elvis' - and Elvis was leaning
over looking at the ocean. Of course there were a lot of people on the
beach, and I said, 'Hi, honey, how are you doing?' And he looked up and
said, 'Fine.' He said, 'Miz Axton, look at that ocean.' Of course I had
seen it a million times. He said, 'I can't believe that it's so big.' It just
overwhelmed him. He said, T d give anything in the world to find
enough money to bring my mother and daddy down here to see it.'
That just went through my heart. 'Cause I looked down here, and here
were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the
guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for
his mother and daddy."
In the interview he persisted in calling her Miz Axton, and she suggested
that he "just make it Mae. That makes it better.... Elvis," she said,
"you are sort of a bebop artist more than anything else, aren't you? Is that
what they call you?"
JANUARY-MAY 1955 c-.. 1 8 7
Elvis: Well, I never have given myself a name, but a lot of the disc
jockeys call me -bopping hillbilly and bebop, I don't know what
else....
Mae: I think that's very fine. And you've started touring the country,
and you've covered a lot of territory in the last two months, I believe.
Elvis: Yes, ma'am, I've covered a lot - mostly in West Texas is
where, that's where my records are hottest. Around in San Angelo
and Lubbock and Midland and Amarillo -
Mae: They tell me they almost mobbed you there, the teenagers, they
like you so much. But I happen to know you have toured all down in
the eastern part of the country, too. Down through Florida and
around and that the people went for you there about as well as out in
West Texas, isn't that right?
Elvis: Well, I wasn't very well known down here - you know, I'm
with a small company, and my records don't have the distribution
that they should have, but -
Mae:... You know, I watched you perfonn one time down in
Florida, and I noticed that the older people got as big a kick out of
you as the teenagers, I think that was an amazing thing.
Elvis: Well, I imagine it's just the way we, all three of us move on the
stage, you know, we act like we -
Mae: Yes, and we mustn't leave out Scotty and Bill. They really do a
terrific job of backing you up.
Elvis: They sure do. I really am lucky to have those two boys, 'cause
they really are good. Each one of them have an individual style of
their own.
Mae: You know, what I can't understand is how you keep that leg
shaking just at the right [general laughter] tempo all the time you're
singing.
Elvis: Well, it gets hard sometimes. I have to stop and rest it -but it
just automatically wiggles like that.
Mae: Is that it? Just automatically does it? You started back in high
school, didn't you?
1 8 8 F O RB I D D E N F R U I T
Elvis: Ah -
Mae: Singing around, public performances with school and things of
that sort?
Elvis: Well, no, I never did sing anywhere in public in my life till I
made this first record.
Mae: Is that right?
Elvis: Yes, ma'am.
Mae: And then you just went right on into their hearts, and you're
doing a wonderful job, and I want to congratulate you on that, and I
want to say, too, Elvis, it's been very nice having you in the studio -
Elvis: Well, thank you very much, Mae, and I'd like to personally
thank you for really promoting my records down here because you
really have done a wonderful job, and I really do appreciate it, because
if you don't have people backing you, people pushing you,
well, you might as well quit.
Later that night at the show Mae ran into one of her fonner students,
now a student nurse. Elvis was onstage, "and she was just right into it,
didn't know who he was, none of them did. But she was just ahhhh - all
of them were, even some of the old ones were doing like that. I looked at
the faces - they were loving it. And I said, 'Hey, honey, what is it about
this kid?' And she said, 'Awww, Miz Axton, he's just a great big beautiful
hunk offorbidden fruit.' "
They played Orlando that week, and local reporter Jean Yothers, still
evidently in somewhat of a daze several days later, wrote it up in the Orlando
Sentinel of May 16.
What hillbilly music does to the hillbilly music fan is absolutely
phenomenal. It transports him into a wild, emotional and audible
state of ecstasy. He never sits back sedately patting his palms politely
and uttering bravos of music appreciation as his long-hair counterpart.
He thunders his appreciation for the country-style music and
nasal-twanged singing he loves by whistling shrilly through teeth,
pounding the palms together with the whirling momentum of a
souped-up paddle wheel, stomping the floor and ejecting yip-yip
J A N U A RY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 8 9
noises like the barks of a hound dog when it finally runs down a particularly
elusive coon.
That's the way it was, friends, at the big Hank. Snow show and
all-star Grand Ole Opry Jamboree staged last week in municipal auditorium
to jam-packed houses both performances. It was as hot as blue
blazes within the tired sanctums of the barnish auditorium, but the
hillbilly fans turned out in droves and seemed oblivious to the heat.
... The whole shebang seemed like a cross between the enthusiasm
displayed at a wrestling match and old-fashioned camp meeting....
This was my first tangle with a hillbilly jamboree, a poignant contrast
to Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta, I must say. I was awed and
with all due respect to opera in Atlanta, I got a tremendous boot out
of this loud, uninhibited music that's sending the country crazy....
Ferron [Faron] Young was real sharp singing that ditty about living
fast, loving hard, dying young and leaving a beautiful memory,
but what really stole the show was this 20-year-old sensation, Elvis
Presley, a real sex box as far as the teenage girls are concerned. They
squealed themselves silly over this fellow in orange coat and sideburns
who "sent" them with his unique arrangement of Shake, Rattle
and Roll. And following the program, Elvis was surrounded by girlies
asking for autographs. He would give each a long, slow look with
drooped eyelids and comply. They ate it up. The crowd also ate up a
peppy and perspiring Miss Martha Carson calling the parquet-sitting
spectators "you folks a-sitten over there on the shelves" and the same
Miss Carson breaking two guitar strings and a pick with her strong
strumming of This Old House and Count Your Blessings. Fans were
forever rushing up near the stage snapping flashbulb pictures during
the program, and they all instinctively recognized a tune with recognizable
roars before the second plunk. of the guitar had been sounded.
It was amazing! Hillbilly music is here to stay, yo'all!
On the thirteenth they played Jacksonville. Before the show Mae took
Elvis and some of the other musicians out to dinner, and she tried to
wheedle him out of the frilly pink shirt he was wearing. "Skeeter Davis
was there, and June and Anita [Carter], and some of the boys with Elvis,
and 1 said, 'Elvis, that's vulgar. And it would make me such a pretty
blouse. ' And Skeeter said, 'I want it,' and June said, 'I want it. ' And he just
kind of grinned. And 1 said, 'Elvis, you ought to give it to us, one of us
1 9 0 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
anyway, because they are just going t o tear i t o ff you tonight.' Not really
thinking about it - knowing the people liked him but not really thinking
about it."
That night at the show, in front of fourteen thousand people, he announced
at the conclusion of his act: "Girls, I'll see you all backstage."
Almost immediately they were after him. The police got him into the
Gator Bowl's dugout locker room, where Mae and the Colonel were totaling
up the night's receipts. Most of the other acts were backstage, too,
Mae recalled, when the fans started pouring in through an overhead window
that had been inadvertently left open. "I heard feet like a thundering
herd, and the next thing I knew I heard this voice from the shower area. I
started running, and three or four policemen started running, too, and by
the time we got there several hundred must have crawled in - well,
maybe not that many, but a lot - and Elvis was on top of one of the
showers looking sheepish and scared, like 'What'd I do?' and his shirt was
shredded and his coat was tom to pieces. Somebody had even gotten his
belt and his socks and these cute little boots - they were not cowboy
boots, he was up there with nothing but his pants on and they were trying
to pull at them up on the shower. Of course the police started getting
them out, and I never will forget Faron Young - this one little girl had
kind of a little hump at the back, and he kicked at her, and these little
boots fell out."
The Colonel, said Mae, "and I don't mean it derogatorily, got dollar
marks in his eyes." It was Jacksonville, said Oscar Davis, that marked the
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