Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  At some point the gray skies got dark enough that the guys just stopped playing. A couple of them gave me a nod, and a “Good game.” Elvis and Red started to shuffle toward the community center.

  I was wondering whether I should seize the moment and blurt out “I like your song,” when Elvis turned back to the rest of us and said, “We’ll meet again here next Sunday.”

  The guys nodded and mumbled, “Yes.” I nodded, too.

  A couple of days ago I’d been a lonely kid without much more than a radio to get me through the summer. Now I was standing here in Guthrie Park, feeling like I’d become part of something exciting. There’d be another game next Sunday, and there wasn’t any question that I would be there.

  I’d be ready to play football on Elvis Presley’s team.

  2

  I WAS THE ONE

  Music has always had a magic for me. One of my very earliest memories is of the sound of the radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, coming over the set at Mamaw’s house. When I was probably just three or four, it occurred to me that in between the talking parts of the show, the people on the radio were doing something very unusual with their voices. When I asked Mamaw what it was, she told me, “That’s singing, Jerry—the people are singing.” From my small perspective, the talking didn’t make much sense, but that singing stuff was clear and powerful.

  I saw that music had a certain power over the adults around me, too. Before I was staying alone at my dad’s house, he’d sometimes just take me with him when he went out at night, a deal that saved him the hassle of finding another place to drop me off, and gave me a peek at that secret world of grown-ups having fun. One of my dad’s favorite spots was up at the top of the Peabody Hotel, where there was a large ballroom with panoramic views of Memphis and the Mississippi River. The bands up there played the kind of swinging, jitterbug dance music my dad loved, and occasionally a top national act like Harry James or Tommy Dorsey would have an engagement there. The walls of the ballroom were black, with tiny lights set up in the ceiling, so you could almost believe you were at a party up in the stars somewhere. I remember sitting happily under tables in that ballroom, sipping away at endless sodas and watching the adults shimmy and shake around the room’s sunken dance floor with a kind of smile and a kind of twinkle in their eyes that you just didn’t see anywhere else.

  I loved the sense of peace and calm I got from the music that played during the daily Mass at Holy Names. Of course, I was only Catholic until the the last school bell rang—when I went home to Mamaw, I was part of a Baptist home (I spent three years at a Catholic school being the non-Catholic kid, and I couldn’t wait until I finally took enough catechism classes to take first communion with my classmates). As far as my Baptist upbringing went, there wasn’t a lot of churchgoing, but Mamaw and some of the other people on my mom’s side of the family would sometimes take me to weekend revivals—many of them under a pitched tent on the same field in Guthrie Park where I would eventually play horseshoes and football. At a time before television was widespread, and when there were nowhere near the kind of leisure-time activities available today, a revival wasn’t just more church—it was grand spectacle and high-energy entertainment. I remember how the soul-stirring music that played under those tents could get a crowd of adults up off its feet, clapping and shouting together, and sometimes that crowd would get so worked up that the smiles and twinkles in the eyes you’d see around you under the tent weren’t really all that different from the ones you’d see at the top of the Peabody.

  Of course, over at the Doolittles’ house, I’d learned that there was some music that elicited a much different reaction, hardly smiles and twinkles. I think the Doolittle episode must have been in the back of my mind when I first heard Elvis’s record, because by then I knew that if you found something good, you were better off keeping it a secret.

  So, I didn’t tell anybody about the record I’d heard by a guy from Humes High, or that I’d met the guy himself over at Guthrie Park. Not my dad, not Uncle John, not even Wayne Martin. Keeping it all to myself seemed like the best way to keep it special. I figured I’d managed to get lucky with one little prayer—I didn’t want to do anything or say anything that might jinx my chances of playing ball again with Red West and Elvis Presley. Also, Elvis himself hadn’t made a big deal out of his record—in fact he hadn’t said a word about it. If he was going to keep cool and quiet about it, I’d do the same. I’d only spent half of one afternoon catching his passes, but I guess I already felt some sense of loyalty to this new quarterback of mine.

  I kept listening, though. Dewey Phillips played “That’s All Right,” at least once every night on Red, Hot & Blue, and the more I heard the song, the more I kept running through the last few moments on that football field: Elvis himself had said he wanted to play again, hadn’t he? He meant there at Guthrie, same time, next Sunday—wasn’t that right? And—the biggest question of all—he meant for me to be part of the game again, didn’t he?

  By the Saturday after that first game, I guess I was worked up enough that, despite my desire not to jinx anything, I had to tell somebody. I needed a witness. And somewhere that day I crossed paths with Frankie Grisanti, a kid from the Holy Names football team who was a year behind me in school. Frankie was a short, stocky kid, but he was fast and tough as a player, and the few times we talked I’d found him easy enough to get along with. I was more interested in hanging out with older kids than younger ones, but Frankie had a special connection—his brother, Ronnie, a few years older than me, was Holy Names’s dependable brick wall of a center.

  I didn’t tell Frankie about hearing the song and didn’t go into much about meeting Elvis. I just told him that I’d had the chance to play football with older kids from Humes and had had a great time. The older guys had said they were going to play again tomorrow at Guthrie, and if Frankie came along with me, maybe he could play, too. It sounded good to Frankie. He said he’d come by my house and we’d go to the park together.

  Frankie showed up right on time early Sunday afternoon and we headed down Decatur Street toward Guthrie. When we got to the park I saw a couple of the older kids from the week before on the field (after all these years, I’m still not sure exactly who was at those first games—I knew Red, but after seeing Elvis, I didn’t care who else was there). I walked up toward them and got a couple of nods, relieved to see that at least these guys remembered me. We stood around for a while until we heard some laughs coming from across the field, over by the community center. I turned, and, sure enough, there he was, walking next to Red, looking just as cool as the last time. I was going to have to use a lot more Brylcreem to get ducktails like that.

  It was when I took a closer look behind Elvis and Red that my spirits sank. There were maybe six or seven older guys ready to play this time. All the guys they needed to play an evenly matched game. Damn. I was going to be knocked off this guy’s team after just one game.

  Red was starting to explain some Guthrie ground rules to the newer guys when Elvis noticed Frankie and me standing there. He took a couple of lazy steps in our direction, checking his grip on the ball he was holding. He pointed the ball at Frankie.

  “Hey, Penrod, go out for a pass.”

  Frankie took off like a spooked bulldog, pumping his hams faster than I’d ever seen, and Elvis reared back and threw one of his bullets. I hoped that Frankie would do the Holy Names squad proud and hang on to it. Sure enough, he did—though the force of the ball seemed to actually pick him up in the air and move him a little farther down the field.

  “That a way, Penrod,” called Elvis. He started to turn away. I figured I better speak to him before the older guys gathered around again and I lost the chance.

  “Why’d you call him Penrod?” I asked.

  “Aww—just a name I saw in this book I’m reading,” he said.

  He was a year out of school and still reading books, which seemed strange to me. In North Memphis, reading anything other than postcards and the
Bible was maybe even more radical than listening to Dewey Phillips. Not only was the guy cool—he was a reader.

  “You going to run those nice posts again?” Elvis was looking down the field, but he was talking to me.

  “Sure. I’ll run anything you want me to,” I said.

  Maybe I was hoping for a slap on the back. But he just turned to walk away, calling out to one of the older guys across the field.

  I could see that Elvis Presley wasn’t the kind of guy you got to know real well real fast. I wasn’t either. But I had plenty of time.

  We ended up playing six-on-six, with both Frankie and me in the game. I’m sure that most of the older guys would have been just as happy not to have younger kids in the game. But somehow Elvis, without ever making much of an issue out of it, kept us included. He was going to be quarterback again, he wanted me to be one of his receivers, and that meant the other team got Frankie to line up against me. He kind of acted like that was just the way it was supposed to be, and nobody else there seemed to have any interest in disagreeing with him. I know that Elvis could just as easily have told us to get lost, but it seemed clear that, even though he looked and moved like a rebel, and even though he kept himself just a little apart, a little distant—he didn’t have the kind of mean streak I’d seen in other older kids, especially older kids from the projects.

  From what I knew of Red West, he would have had no problem telling us to get lost, and quick. But Elvis wanted us around. So we were in.

  Again, it was a great game. Elvis was a little more serious than he had been the week before, running the huddles like a military man. But whenever we pulled off one of his plays, he lit up with a big smile. And those smiles meant a lot, because you didn’t see too many of them. There were a few other occasions when he’d let his serious game face slip; if anybody took a particularly awkward fall, got knocked on their ass with a brutal block, or otherwise ended up sprawled in some embarrassing position on the field, Elvis just about doubled over with a rush of laughter. It felt great to laugh along with him.

  We played that second game at Guthrie, and then a third the next Sunday, and it seemed that the games on that field were going to be a regular part of every weekend. And it seemed that Elvis Presley was going to be a regular part of radio programming. “That’s All Right” kept getting played on Dewey’s show, and other shows started picking it up, too. It was even being played on WDIA. Pretty soon the record itself was out as a single, and the flip side, a revved-up cover of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” started getting radio play, too. Up in Poplar Tunes there was a great big hand-painted sign proudly advertising the fact that they had in stock plenty of records by the new local sensation, Elvis “The Cat” Presley (“available in 45 or 78”).

  It was also pretty clear that I wasn’t the only one excited about the sound and the person of Elvis Presley—at each game that summer, there were a few more guys showing up to play, and increasingly there were groups of people just showing up to watch.

  I was hearing Elvis’s songs on the radio, but he and his band—guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black—were starting to make a name for themselves as a live act, too. On July 30, 1954, Elvis played his first major concert in Memphis at the Overton Park bandshell, being added as a featured attraction to a lineup of country artists that was headlined by Slim Whitman. By the end of the summer the trio had a regular Friday-night gig at a little dance club called the Eagle’s Nest. In the fall, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were stepping up to some big-deal gigs like the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, and by the end of the year they were playing shows as far away as Texas. The trio also stayed busy working with Sam Phillips over at Memphis Recording Service on Union Street, and the records that followed their debut—“Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Milkcow Blues Boogie”—proved that the excitement of “That’s All Right” was no fluke.

  His career was starting to take off, but if Elvis was in North Memphis on a Sunday, he’d pull together another football game. And a Sunday didn’t go by that summer that I wasn’t hanging around the park, waiting to see if he would show up. I kept thinking the games were getting big enough that they wouldn’t want a kid out there, but I always made the cut. Elvis would see me hanging around and maybe toss me the ball while he was warming up, or somehow make it clear that he wanted me to play—though, again, not much was ever said.

  Into the fall of 1954 we were usually playing six-on-six, and though the teams were generally set, sometimes the rosters got mixed up just to keep things interesting. I remember it felt a little awkward the first time I was on a team playing against Elvis. And since I was well acquainted with his play-calling style, I found myself in the odd position of intercepting Elvis Presley. It felt wrong—but really, really good.

  At one of those fall games, I received the first open acknowledgment that I was officially a part of Elvis’s team. The games were attracting big enough crowds that Elvis thought it would be a good idea for the players to wear jerseys. I showed up at the park one day to find one of the older guys handing out some green, sleeveless pullovers—the kind you might wear over a T-shirt in gym class. I thought this might be the moment I’d be pushed out—nobody would have to say anything, I just wouldn’t get a jersey.

  Elvis made sure I got one. Didn’t say “Welcome to the team,” or “Here’s for all your great catches.” Just tossed a jersey at me and said, “It’s a large—try not to trip over it.”

  I’d heard that he lived with his mom and dad over on Alabama Street by the Lauderdale Courts, but to me he had a presence that didn’t quite fit the streets I was used to. I couldn’t imagine Elvis having a job, or taking out the trash, or answering to a mom and dad. It seemed to me that he stepped right out of the radio and into Guthrie Park. But he was a real North Memphis guy, and one day in early 1955 I spotted him on my very block of Breedlove Street.

  Across the street from my daddy’s house and a couple of houses over, there was a girl a couple years older than me named Meredith Glass. She listened to Dewey, too, and had a record player, and a couple of times Wayne Martin and I had gone over there to listen to music with her (I remember being very impressed that she had her own copy of “Sixty Minute Man”). Meredith went to Humes High, and somewhere along the way had become Red West’s girlfriend.

  I was sitting in the front room at Breedlove not doing much of anything, when I happened to notice a beat-up, black, forties-model car pull up to Meredith’s house—a car I immediately recognized as the one Elvis and Red West came to the games in. Sure enough, both of them got out of that car and headed right into Meredith’s house. I wanted nothing more than to bolt out the door, dash across the street, and be a part of whatever the older kids were doing over there. But there was no way I was going to make that bold a move. On the field, I could prove myself as a player. Knocking on Meredith’s door, I’d just be the little kid from down the street. I waited in the front room and, after a while, Red and Elvis came back out—it looked like they had borrowed a stack of records from Meredith. They drove off, and Breedlove went back to being the same boring old street.

  But it was nice to know that Elvis really was out there, living his life in my part of the city. Maybe nobody else on the block cared but me and Meredith, but Elvis was a part of our neighborhood. That was pretty cool.

  With “That’s All Right” climbing up the charts, and all sorts of press surrounding his live appearances, Elvis Presley was on the rise. But it would be a mistake to think that everybody that heard him or saw him in those early days liked him.

  Mrs. Doolittle wasn’t the only person in Memphis concerned with the mixing of the races or the threat of the growing black population—one of the meanest nuns at Holy Names used to try to scare us by saying that because so many whites had embraced the immorality of birth control, the blacks would take over the earth (though they hadn’t yet managed to infiltrate Holy Names’s all-white student body). Those kinds of feelings were prevalent, and to a lot of people Elvis
Presley was nothing more than white trash playing black music.

  Some of the early press reports treated Elvis with interest and enthusiasm, or at least treated him as a phenomenon worth taking note of, but the general feeling of conservative old-school Memphis was that the city should be more embarrassed by Elvis than proud of him. From the early concert clips we see these days, it might be assumed that even if old-school Memphis didn’t get Elvis, the kids did. But that’s not quite true, either. Memphis kids were not automatically Elvis fans. He was a poor white boy, and that was something that a lot of people in Memphis were used to looking down on (the thinking being that blacks were poor because that was just their nature, but whites who were as poor as blacks were truly despicable). A lot of the kids who’d been used to looking down at somebody like Elvis weren’t going to suddenly change their minds because he had a popular record out. If anything, they disliked him more now because they had something to be jealous about.

  These were the early days of what would soon be called “the youth culture.” And for all the kids who got excited about the first sounds of rock and roll, there were at least twice as many who thought it sounded just plain horrible. Those of us excited about Elvis were part of an underground that a lot of our generation still didn’t want anything to do with.

  The reaction of my brother, Billy Ray, to Elvis was probably pretty typical of the time. When he found out about my ongoing participation in the Guthrie Park games, Billy Ray—a serious, clean-living, hardworking athlete—could not disguise his utter contempt when he asked, “Why are you always hanging around THAT guy?”

  As Elvis started to get bigger and bigger, I had a few up-close views of the split feelings toward him. I saw the positive side in a significant way on February 6, 1955—the day I became an official teenager and the day of Elvis’s first big show at the premier concert venue in Memphis, Ellis Auditorium. My birthday treat to myself was to spend some of my hard-earned paper-delivery money on a pair of tickets to both the 3:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M. shows at Ellis. It was my first chance to see Elvis Presley as a performer on stage.