Dewey didn’t seem to care about black music or white music—he liked music that was honest and energetic; unpolished stuff that grabbed and shook you in some indefinable way. And he wasn’t sending that music out to white people or black people—he was always calling us “good people.” Dewey didn’t make a listener think about the world this music was pulled from—a hard, tense world of separate drinking fountains and lunch counters, streets that couldn’t be crossed, and a whole tangled mix of official laws and accepted habits that kept people fearful and apart. Listening to Dewey, you didn’t hear black and white. You just heard excitement. Good music for us good people.
That music was intoxicating stuff to a kid like me. All the other grown-ups around town seemed so steadily in control. People went to work. Kids went to school. Families went to church. The days moved along at the same slow, predictable rhythm. A holiday or a community event might break things up a little, but, to me anyway, there was always something a little sad even about the supposed good times.
At twelve, I didn’t have any real overview of the world beyond my few blocks of North Memphis, just a vague, achy feeling that sometimes the grown-up world didn’t make a lot of sense, and I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to fit into it. And while I didn’t know it that summer, I wasn’t the only kid starting to sense that joyless sameness around us, and, as it turned out, there were more than a few of us who desperately wanted to believe that there was something else out there—something that moved a little faster and wilder. When we found Dewey, we felt like we’d found somebody who understood what we were after. Some of us even took the bolder step of walking down to Home of the Blues, a record store on Beale Street—downtown Memphis’s historic strip of neon-lit shops, jazz joints, and nightclubs for an all-black clientele—to buy the music we heard Dewey play. Or we’d head over to Poplar Tunes, a record shop at the edge of the white part of North Memphis, to get the songs we wanted. I didn’t even have a record player, but I’d gone out and bought a few 78s, feeling like a secret agent on an extremely perilous mission. I was earning pocket change that summer delivering circulars for a little market down the street from my dad’s house, and just about every cent I earned eventually got spent at Home of the Blues or Poplar Tunes.
Shortly after I started listening to Dewey Phillips, and right after I’d bought my own first few records, I learned that the music he played could have a very frightening effect on people. I’d become friendly with a couple of boys on the Holy Names football team, a pair of brothers named Doolittle, and was impressed to hear that they had their own record player. Their mother was a nice lady who was very involved with the school’s PTA, and who was always willing to carpool us football players around between games and practices. One day, after a practice, the Doolittle boys asked me if I’d like to spend a weekend at their house. The way I lived, I was excited about spending a weekend with anybody outside of the family loop. I said a quick yes, and went home to pack up. There wasn’t much to pack, but, thinking about a weekend of unlimited access to the Doolittle boys’ turntable, I made sure to bring my stack of four or five precious 78s.
Mrs. Doolittle came by to pick me up, and before long I was settling in over at the Doolittle home. In the boys’ bedroom, I showed them my records and asked if they wanted to hear some music. They did. I think I may have had the McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely” and maybe “Till I Waltz Again with You” by Teresa Brewer—both acts were pre-Dewey favorites of mine. But I also had a couple of things I’d bought down on Beale Street: songs by LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown, and, most prized of all, my copy of “Sixty Minute Man.”
If we’d stuck with the McGuire Sisters, things might have turned out differently, but I put “Sixty Minute Man” on the record player and turned it up about as loud as it would go (which on the players back then was not all that loud). The Doolittle boys started smiling and nodding along, and I was feeling pretty big—those trips to Beale Street had paid off.
I’ll rock’em, roll’em all night long, I’m a sixty minute man.
This time, though, the sixty-minute man lasted only about thirty seconds. Mrs. Doolittle stormed into the room, went straight for the record player, dragged the needle off the disc and picked the record up.
She wheeled around and I saw a fury in this lady’s eyes unlike anything I’d ever seen before. The nice, sweet, carpooling PTA mom was replaced by a woman almost trembling with rage. In a voice harder and harsher than anything I’d ever heard come out of Mrs. Doolittle, she said, “You’re not going to play that nigger music in my house.”
Then, with a bit of effort, she cracked the record she was holding in half, and proceeded to pick up the rest of the collection and break those, too. Even the McGuire Sisters.
“Pack your things back up,” said Mrs. Doolittle.
Within minutes, I was sitting back at home, with no more special weekend plans, no chance for a pair of new friends, and no more record collection. From then on, I realized that music had a great, deep, and sometimes unpredictable power. And I realized that the R & B records I was beginning to love so much weren’t just songs—they were something bigger. They were statements. Statements of what, I wasn’t quite sure yet. But as soon as I could save up enough money—mowing lawns, delivering circulars for the local market—I was heading down to Beale Street to buy more records.
I never did get invited back to the Doolittle house.
In that summer of 1954, I’d been living at my father’s place for about a month or so when, one weeknight in early July, Daddy headed out with Uncle Joe, and I had the house to myself again. The thunder rumbled outside a couple of times—I couldn’t tell if it was getting closer or not. A little after nine I folded myself up on the big bed and clicked on the Silvertone’s volume knob. I put my head back on my pillow and listened as Roy “Good Rockin’” Brown’s “Hurry Hurry Baby” came to an end.
“Ahh, that’s a good old one—take it from your Daddy-O Dewey,” said the DJ. There were some sounds of fumbling and crashing, like Dewey had banged into his microphone. “Shoo—somebody give me a hand with this pea-pickin’ thing.”
My mind started to drift a bit, and I was vaguely aware of Dewey doing one of his improvised ads for Champagne Velvet Beer and then playing a couple more songs. I may have been thinking about how I was going to fill the long stretch of summer days ahead of me. Then, something caught my ear.
“Look out, good people,” Dewey said. “I got something here that’s so good, when I heard this one I almost swallowed my gold tooth. We got a new record here that ain’t even dry yet, and this little number is sung by a fine young man who just one year ago received his dee-ploma from Humes High School right up there in North Memphis…how ’bout that?”
My head shot up off the pillow. Humes High School was just blocks away from my Mamaw and Papaw’s house. From the back of the Holy Names elementary school playground you could look right through a vacant lot to the grounds of Humes. My mother and my Aunt Jinky had gone to Humes. My cousin Teddy had just finished his freshman year there. I had it in my head that one day I’d be one of those grown-up-looking kids over at Humes.
Before that moment, to me, the music you heard on the radio didn’t seem connected to the real world around us—it existed only as stuff that came out of your radio speaker or that you could buy in the record stores. Once in a while Dewey might mention that a particular musician was from Memphis, but Memphis was a huge place in my mind. I guess I had some idea that there were musicians in Memphis, but I really had no idea where those people lived and less idea how they wrote their songs, made their records, and got them to people like Dewey. It was a mystery I really hadn’t had much reason to ponder. You simply turned a radio on and you heard music.
But now Dewey was saying that a boy who had to live just blocks away from me had actually made his own record. Dewey intro’d the song, saying he himself had heard it for the first time just the day before, courtesy of Mr. Sam Phillips—no relation, I’d learn—over at
Memphis Recording Service. It was a cover of an old Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup tune. I didn’t catch the name of the boy from Humes at first; it was something kind of old-fashioned.
The record started playing, and the boy from Humes High started singing. He sounded great. The music was simple, just a couple guitars and a plunking bass, but it sounded unlike anything else I’d ever heard. The rhythm was easygoing and driving at the same time—not quite blues, not quite country. The boy from Humes High had a voice that was strong but gentle, too. Right away, he was soaring up to sweet high notes, sounding like it didn’t take him any effort at all to get there.
That’s all right now Mama, anyway you do…
He sounded tough at times, and sang with unbelievable confidence, but there was also a little tremble in his voice that kind of pulled you in. The way he sang, you could feel both a little smile and an ache. Whatever secret world of excitement was out there beneath the boring surface of grown-up, day-to-day life, it sounded like this guy from Humes High had found it.
The song was over too fast, and the voice was gone. The voice of a boy from Humes High.
Elvis Presley. That’s what Dewey said the singer’s name was. I was wide awake now. And I wanted to hear that song again. Dewey must have known there would be some other listeners feeling the way I did, because after a station break Dewey played the song again. And again. And again. Dewey did that sometimes when he really liked a record, and he clearly liked this one. I think I got to hear that brand-new song six or seven times. And it sounded just as fine every time Dewey played it.
That’s all right, that’s all right…
Already, I liked it even better than “Sixty Minute Man.”
But the new record turned out to be only half the thrill of that night’s show. After some more fumbling with the mikes, Dewey let us know that the boy from Humes High was sitting right there next to him, “right here in the magazine level of the beeeyoootiful Chisca Hotel” (for some reason “mezzanine” was always “magazine” to Dewey). The boy’s song was getting such an enthusiastic response from around town that Dewey had called to get him down to the studio. His mom and dad had gone out looking for him, had finally found him hunched down in a seat in the back of the Suzore #2 movie theater, and had brought him straight over to the Chisca to go live on the air with Dewey.
I’d be lying if I said I remembered exactly what was said that night by this new singer. But I do remember that hearing Elvis Presley talk had me just as excited as hearing him sing. His speaking voice was kind of high and soft, like his singing voice, but, in conversation, he wasn’t so smooth—you could hear that he was nervous. He was perfectly polite with Dewey, calling him “Sir,” and thanking him for playing the record. He sounded like a nice guy, even a little shy maybe, but always cool. He even sounded good when he stuttered and stammered his way through most of his answers. Kind of made me want to stammer, too.
Dewey thanked him for being there, played “That’s All Right” one more time, and then worked his way toward his sign-off. I finally clicked off the Silvertone and lay back down. Maybe Dewey would play the song again tomorrow night. I hoped so, because I wanted to hear it again. And I wanted to hear Elvis Presley talk some more.
Most of all, I wanted to meet this boy from Humes High.
I’d had the importance of prayer pretty well drummed into me in my years at Holy Names, but as far as I could tell, it hadn’t done me any good. At first I figured maybe I was just praying wrong, then I figured maybe I wasn’t important enough to have my prayers heard. Finally, somewhere around third or fourth grade, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that the whole system was just another thing the grown-ups said was good for you that didn’t really have any discernible upside. Like eating your vegetables.
This night, though, I decided to give it another shot. I didn’t kneel by the bed. I didn’t fold my hands or squinch up my eyes. I just lay in bed and stared up at the ceiling. I thought about that boy from Humes High. As much as I’d heard the song that night, I couldn’t quite hum the melody he’d sung—it was already slipping away. But the feeling that song gave me didn’t go away. It took me a while to figure out what that feeling was, because it was a feeling I wasn’t used to.
It was hope.
So I threw together a bit of improvised prayer, just for the heck of it. Staring up at the ceiling, hands at my side, I prayed: Look, the neighborhood’s not that big. Just let me meet this guy. Please.
I already knew that hope was a dangerous thing in North Memphis—it usually just led to more disappointment than if you went through life without it. And I didn’t expect that my prayer now—simple as it was—had any better chance of being answered than any previous prayer. But on this sticky summer night, when the sound of the pipes and the floorboards and the thunder had been drowned out by one strong voice from Humes High, it didn’t seem like a little hope and a little prayer could hurt.
The breeze had died off in Guthrie Park, and the afternoon air started to feel a little hotter and heavier. We broke from the huddle and got set for the play. As I toed up to the line of scrimmage, I felt pumped and couldn’t wait for that ball to come my way. Maybe I should have been nervous playing with older kids, but I knew what I was doing playing football. If I’d come across these guys singing or playing guitars and been asked to join in, I wouldn’t have been able to step up. But running a slant and catching a pass—I felt like all those long, hard practices in full pads at Holy Names had prepared me for this particular moment.
“Hike!” shouted Elvis Presley.
I took off down the sideline, a little above half-speed, and when I saw Red begin to turn I ran as hard as I could up and across the field. Elvis pumped the ball to Red, and when the guys in the backfield stepped toward him, I flew right past them. The quarterback broke to his right and threw.
He had an awkward kind of sidearm style, but the ball came my way hard and fast—a spiraled bullet aimed just ahead of where I was running. I got my hands up and out and reeled it in, feeling like there was nothing more natural in the world than to receive a perfect pass from a quarterback who’d had his record played on the radio. There wasn’t a chance the defenders could catch me, but I kept up the run full speed to the end zone.
When I got back to my teammates, I felt the urge to smile—but smiling seemed like something a little kid would do. I kept my game face on.
“Nice hands, little man,” said Red. He gave me a congratulatory shove.
“He’s got something,” said the quarterback. “We got a game going.”
I caught a lot more passes on the Guthrie field that Sunday. Made a couple of interceptions, too. And got knocked on my ass at least a dozen times. I don’t know how long we played, but I would have kept going all night.
I didn’t have to ask Red—and I didn’t hear anybody else say his name, but I knew that in some unfigurable way, my little North Memphis radio prayer had been answered. I’d met the guy from Humes High. I wasn’t sure if I should thank God or Dewey Phillips, but here I was in Guthrie Park with Elvis Presley.
Outside of listeners to Red, Hot & Blue, that name wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody in North Memphis on this particular Sunday. Elvis Presley, on that day, was still a nineteen-year-old truck driver for the Crown Electric Company—a year out of high school and less than a week into a recording career that carried no guarantee of turning into steady work. There wasn’t anything about him you could point to that day that really made him look like a star. His hair, though impressively combed, was an average-looking sandy brown—not the dyed, jet black that would become so familiar later on. In most ways he was just another poor North Memphis kid from the government projects over at Lauderdale Courts.
But even as he scrapped and blocked and fell and played just as hard as the rest of us, there was something else there. He didn’t so much stand out as stand apart. He wasn’t just another older kid, not just another tough guy. And not your typical full-of-himself quarterback. It was l
ike he was already the star of his own movie, but he wasn’t playing it up.
There was only one way in which Elvis’s cool looked a little more like comedy. He had grit and determination, and could throw a ball, but he was not a natural athlete—not the way Red was. This became very clear whenever Elvis broke into an open-field run. Those loose legs of his seemed to shoot out in every direction at once, like Crazy Legs Hirsch, and it seemed to take him an extra effort just to keep himself moving forward.
It occurred to me toward the end of the game that Red and Elvis and the three other older guys didn’t really talk to each other like they were any kind of familiar, best buddies—they were just getting to know each other that day, too. I don’t think anybody said anything about Elvis having been on the radio, but I’d guess that was the icebreaker that had pulled these guys together. I’d later learn that Elvis had been something of a misfit and an outsider during his high school days, and now, with the cachet of a song that had been played on Dewey Phillips’s show, he’d finally found some guys to hang out with. Elvis’s musical talents would eventually bring him just about everything he wanted in his life, but on that weekend all he wanted was to play football with a bunch of guys, and having his first record out helped make that happen. In fact, I happened to show up at Guthrie Park on probably the last weekend of Elvis Presley’s life in which he would have any trouble finding a sixth man for a three-on-three football game.
Me and a Guy Named Elvis Page 3