Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

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  KATZ DRUG STORE OPENING, SEPTEMBER 8, 1954.

  (OPAL WALKER)

  For my mother and father and for Alexandra

  Author’s Note

  “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

  —Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

  I FIRST WROTE about Elvis Presley in 1967. I did so because I loved his music and I felt that it had been unjustly ridiculed and neglected. I was not writing about movies, image, or popularity. I was writing about someone whom I thought of as a great blues singer (I might today amend the term to “heart” singer, in the sense that he sang all the songs he really cared about—blues and gospel and even otherwise inexplicably sentimental numbers—without barrier or affectation) and who I imagined must conceive of himself in the same way. In that same spirit of barrierlessness I sent Elvis a copy of the review at his address, 3764 Highway 51 South (later renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard) in Memphis, and I got a printed Christmas card in reply.

  I wrote about him a number of times over the years, seeking in one way or another to rescue him from both his detractors and admirers. What I wrote was based on passionate listening, research, and interviewing, and, of course, the kind of speculation that we inevitably apply to anything, or anyone, whom we admire from a distant shore. I wouldn’t altogether disown anything that I wrote, though in retrospect I might correct a good deal of its perspective. But I don’t know if I ever thought about the real Elvis Presley until I was driving down McLemore Avenue in South Memphis one day in 1983, past the old Stax studio, with a friend named Rose Clayton. Rose, a native Memphian, pointed out a drugstore where Elvis’ cousin used to work. Elvis used to hang out there, she said; he would sit at the soda fountain, drumming his fingers on the countertop. “Poor baby,” said Rose, and something went off in my head. This wasn’t “Elvis Presley”; this was a kid hanging out at a soda fountain in South Memphis, someone who could be observed, just like you or me, daydreaming, listening to the jukebox, drinking a milk shake, waiting for his cousin to get off work. “Poor baby.”

  I didn’t come to the book itself for several years after that, but this was the vision that sustained it. When I finally decided to write the book, I had one simple aim in mind—at least it seemed simple to me at the start: to keep the story within “real” time, to allow the characters to freely breathe their own air, to avoid imposing the judgment of another age, or even the alarums that hindsight inevitably lends. That was what I wanted to do, both because I wanted to remain true to my “characters”—real-life figures whom I had come to know and like in the course of both my travels and research—and because I wanted to suggest the dimensions of a world, the world in which Elvis Presley had grown up, the world which had shaped him and which he in turn had unwittingly shaped, with all the homeliness and beauty that everyday life entails.

  Discovering the reality of that world was something like stepping off the edge of my own. The British historian Richard Holmes describes the biographer as “a sort of tramp permanently knocking at the kitchen window and secretly hoping he might be invited in for supper.” Holmes is presumably alluding to the researcher’s attempt to penetrate the recesses of history, but he might as well be describing the literal truth. If one cannot recognize one’s status as an outsider, if I were not able to laugh at the comic contretemps in which I have often found myself over the years, then I would be lacking in the humility necessary for the task. But if one were not vain enough, on the other hand, to think it possible to make sense of the mass of random detail that makes up a life, if one did not imagine oneself capable somehow of the most diverse explorations, divagations, and transcendental leaps, then one would never seek to tell the story. “The moment one begins to investigate the truth of the simplest facts which one has accepted as true,” wrote Leonard Woolf in his autobiography, “it is as though one had stepped off a firm narrow path into a bog or a quicksand—every step one takes one steps deeper into the bog of uncertainty.” And it is that uncertainty which must be taken as both an unavoidable given and the only real starting point.

  For this book I interviewed hundreds of firsthand participants. To my great joy, and not incidental distraction, I discovered worlds within worlds: the world of quartet singing; the pioneering spirit of post–World War II radio; the many worlds of Memphis (which I might have thought I already knew); the carnival world of self-invention and self-promotion out of which Colonel Thomas A. Parker emerged; the small-time dreams of a music industry that had not yet defined itself; the larger dreams of an art form that had not yet been explored. I have tried to suggest these worlds, and the men and women who peopled them, with a respect for the intricacy, complexity, and integrity of their makeup, but, of course, one can only suggest. As for the central figure, I have tried to convey his complexity and irreducibility as well. This is an heroic story, I believe, and ultimately perhaps a tragic one, but—like any of our lives and characters—it is not all of one piece, it does not lend itself to one interpretation exclusively, nor do all its parts reflect anything that resembles an undifferentiated whole. To say this, I hope, is not to throw up one’s hands at the impossibility of the task; it is, simply, to embrace the variousness, and uniqueness, of human experience.

  I wanted to tell a true story. I wanted to rescue Elvis Presley from the dreary bondage of myth, from the oppressive aftershock of cultural significance. To the extent that I have succeeded, I suppose, I have merely opened up the subject to new aftershocks, new forms of encapsulation. Like any biographer, I am sure, I have worried over scenes, imagined and reimagined the way that things must have been, all too keenly aware of my own limitations of perspective and the distorting lens of history. I have sought to reconcile accounts that cannot be reconciled, and I have engaged in the kind of dialogue with my subject that Richard Holmes describes as leading to “a relationship of trust” between biographer and subject. As Holmes points out, trust is what one seeks, implicitly, to achieve, and yet there is always the possibility that trust is misplaced: “The possibility of error,” he insists, “is constant in all biography.”

  That is why I would like to suggest that this work, like any other, is a beginning, not an end, an invitation to inquiry, not an attempt at foreclosure upon it. So much of what becomes a story, whether formally or merely in the relation of a dinner-table anecdote, is based upon verbal shorthand, metaphorical leaps of faith, interpretation of the facts at hand. It should be clearly understood: facts can change, and new interpretations can, at any moment, alter our interpretation of them. This is my story of Elvis Presley: it cannot be the story of Elvis Presley. There is no such thing; even autobiography, or perhaps autobiography most of all, represents an editing of the facts, a selection of detail, an attempt to make sense of the various, arbitrary developments of real life. In the end, there should be nothing shocking about human existence, because, in the
end, whatever has occurred is simply human. If I have succeeded in my aim, I have given the reader the tools to create his or her own portrait of a young Elvis Presley, the opportunity to reinvent and reinterpret, within the broad context of a particular time and place, the early life of a remarkable American original.

  PROLOGUE: MEMPHIS, 1950

  WITH DEWEY PHILLIPS, BEALE STREET, 1956.

  (ROBERT WILLIAMS)

  IT IS LATE MAY or early June, hot, steamy; a fetid breeze comes in off the river and wafts its way through the elegant lobby of the Hotel Peabody, where, it is said, the Mississippi Delta begins. There is a steady hum of conversation in the room—polite, understated, well bred, but never letting up: the room is redolent with the suggestion of business dealings transacted in grandiloquent style, amid curlicues of cigar smoke rising toward the high Florentine ceiling, with the anticipation of a social evening to come. When the novelist William Faulkner is in town, he always stays at the Peabody; perhaps he is observing this very scene.

  Out on the street men pass by, walking with deliberate speed. They are wearing Panama hats and straw boaters; some are in shirtsleeves and suspenders, wearing their pants high up on their waist; most are more formally dressed in summer-weight seersucker suits. The women generally look cool and elegant in broad, shadowing hats and light summer dresses. The Negroes whom you see all fulfill a function: they are maids, bootblacks, barbers, bellboys, each playing a familiar, muted role. But if you wanted to get another sense of the life of these accommodating, uncomplaining, almost invisible handmaidens and impersonal valets to white wealth and power, you would only have to go around the corner, to Beale Street, a lively, thriving, brightly colored metropolis of quite another sort.

  In the Peabody Drugstore, on the corner of Union and Second, a well-dressed, elegant-looking young man of twenty-seven sits, nervously drumming his fingers on the countertop. His tie is carefully knotted, his luxuriant chestnut-brown hair is carefully sculpted in such a fashion that you know that this might be the feature of which he is most proud; he is smoking a Chesterfield in a slender cigarette holder and wearing a gold pocket chain. He is an arresting-looking young man in every way, but it is his eyes which truly compel attention. Set low under fairly prominent brows, they are neither small nor especially close together, but they give the impression in a photograph that they are squinting, in real life that their possessor is gazing into your very soul. Right now they are looking about, distracted, not focusing on anything in particular, until at last they catch sight of the very person they are looking for, as a tall, redheaded, loose-limbed, and rawboned young man, clearly from the country and not ashamed of it, bursts through the door. His mouth curls in a little smile that suggests neither the need for, nor the hint of, any apology; his brightly patterned shirt stands at odds with the elegance of the earlier arrival, whom he evidently does not know but greets with an expansive wave, an infectious bonhomie, and then a clap on the back and a loudly brayed “Dee-gaw!”

  The newcomer, Dewey Phillips, is twenty-four years old and already a radio celebrity, with his own show on WHBQ broadcasting from the Gayoso Hotel just up the street. He is on the air from 10:00 P.M. to midnight every weekday, and until 1:00 A.M. on Saturday nights, while keeping his job in the record department at W. T. Grant’s, on South Main. The music that he plays is some of the finest American vernacular music ever recorded: in the course of one fifteen-minute segment, you might hear Muddy Waters’ latest hit, a gospel number by the Soul Stirrers (with their great singer, R. H. Harris), Larry Darnell’s “For You, My Love,” and Wynonie Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight”—“boogies, blues, and spirituals,” as the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports in a full-length feature. He mangles the names of his advertisers, plays 78s at the wrong speed, and appends to every commercial message the grace note “I don’t care where you go or how you go, just tell ’em Phillips sent you.” Only recently one of his listeners was taken to the hospital emergency ward and announced to a startled medical staff that Phillips had sent him. He has perhaps the most popular show on Memphis radio, with talk of Mutual broadcast syndication. Tastes being what they are, and the postwar world being as unpredictable and unconventionally wide open as it has become, there is only one thing that is truly startling about his success: the music that he plays, and the listeners that he reaches, are almost exclusively black.

  That is why Sam Phillips has wanted so badly to meet him. Aside from the coincidence of their names, there is a coincidence of purpose which links these two very disparate-seeming young men. Just six months ago, Sam Phillips, with the assistance of Marion Keisker, a prominent Memphis radio personality best known for her Kitty Kelly show on WREC, launched his own studio, the Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Avenue, with the avowed purpose of recording “Negro artists in the South who wanted to make a record [and] just had no place to go…. I set up a studio just to make records with some of those great Negro artists.” Phillips, an engineer and sometime disc jockey on WREC, the CBS affiliate whose offices were in the Peabody, had come to town in 1945. He had started in radio as a teenager in his native region of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and at twenty-two was engineering the network broadcasts every night from the Peabody Skyway. And yet despite his abiding love for big band music—for the Dorsey brothers and Glenn Miller, Freddy Martin and Ted Weems—he had come to feel that it was all just too programmed, that “the girl singer just sat up there and looked pretty, the musicians might have played the damn song four thousand times, but they were still turning the pages!”

  At the same time Sam believed wholeheartedly in the music that he had grown up with as a child, in the glorious spiritual offerings of the Negro church, in the tales and songs of Uncle Silas Payne, who had worked on his father’s farm and told the little boy stories of Memphis’ Beale Street, trips to the Molasses River, and the battercake trees which grew up next to the sausage trees in Africa. “I listened to that beautiful a cappella singing—the windows of the black Methodist church just half a block down from Highland Baptist would all be open, and I was just fascinated by the rhythms. Even when they hoed, they’d get a rhythm going, maybe more than one, and there was that beautiful rhythmic silence of the cotton fields, with a hoe hitting a rock every now and then just as it spaded through the dirt, and then the singing, especially if the wind happened to be from the right direction—believe me, all that said a lot to me.”

  Many children have been entranced by just such encounters, but they grow up, they put aside childish things, in Sam Phillips’ words, they conform. Sam Phillips believed in something else. He believed—entirely and without reservation—in differentness, in independence, in individuation, he believed in himself, and he believed—even to the point of articulating it in public and private utterances from earliest adulthood on—in the scope and beauty of African-American culture. He wanted, he said, “genuine, untutored negro” music; he was looking for “Negroes with field mud on their boots and patches in their overalls… battered instruments and unfettered techniques.” The music that he was attempting to record was the very music that Dewey Phillips was playing on the air.

  The ostensible reason for his meeting with Dewey was that his uncle-in-law, Jimmy Connolly, who was general manager of the 250-watt station WJLD in Bessemer, Alabama, where he had gone after first hiring Sam in Muscle Shoals, had launched a program called The Atomic Boogie Hour. This was an afternoon program similar to the kind of show that Dewey had started in Memphis and that was springing up in one form or another all across the South: black music on a white radio station with a strong Negro audience and a growing, if for the most part unacknowledged, core of young white listeners with a growing, if for the most part unexamined, buying power. The owner of the station, a Mr. Johnson, didn’t want Connolly doing the show anymore, because it was “lowbrow,” and Sam had told his uncle-in-law about “this cat that’s on the air here that you wouldn’t believe.” Jimmy suggested that he talk to Dewey about coming to Bessemer, and Sam agreed, but his h
eart wasn’t in it. “I just didn’t want Dewey leaving Memphis. I even backed off a little on my recommendation afterwards: I told Jimmy, ‘Well, your Atomic Boogie Hour is fantastic, but I’m just not sure if Dewey would fit in. This is a guy that somehow or another generates a night atmosphere…. What we need in Memphis is exactly what Dewey Phillips is doing.’ I could have gotten Dewey a job just like that, but I told him, I said, ‘Dewey, I’m going to try to get something going, in the way of making records.’ ”

  Who knows what they did in the immediate aftermath of that initial meeting? Perhaps they wandered over to Beale Street, where Dewey, who has been described as “transracial” by more than one admirer, could go wherever he liked, where Dewey, Sam came to see with some ambivalence, was “a hero, everyone loved him.” Perhaps they walked by the Hippodrome, where Roy Brown or Larry Darnell or Wynonie Harris could have been playing that very evening. They might have run into club owner–entrepreneur Andrew “Sunbeam” Mitchell or the Beale Street Blues Boy himself, B. B. King, whom Sam would start to record for the California-based RPM (Modern) label just around this time. One-man band Joe Hill Louis was probably playing in Handy Park. Or they might have just decided to go down to Johnny Mills’ Barbecue at Fourth and Beale for a fish sandwich.

  Wherever they went, Dewey would have been greeted with cries of delighted recognition, and he returned those greetings with unfeigned goodwill, unfettered enthusiasm, a delighted exclamation of his own. Sam, meanwhile, quieter, more reserved, more formal somehow, hung back, soaking up a scene that held long-standing reverberations for him as well. He had dreamt of Beale Street long before he ever saw it, from the stories that Uncle Silas had spun, and his first view of it, at sixteen, had not failed to live up to his expectations. He was on his way to Dallas with his older brother Jud and some friends to hear the Reverend George W. Truett preach, but he was drawn, it seemed, almost inexorably to Beale, because “to me Beale Street was the most famous place in the South. We got in at five or six o’clock in the morning and it was pouring down rain, but we just drove up and down, and it was so much more than I had even envisioned. I don’t know if I can explain it to this day—my eyes had to be very big, because I saw everything, from winos to people dressed up fit to kill, young, old, city slickers and people straight out of the cotton fields, somehow or another you could tell: every damn one of them was glad to be there. Beale Street represented for me something that I hoped to see one day for all people, something that they could say, I’m a part of this somehow.” This was Sam Phillips’ vision, and he kept it with him when he moved to Memphis with his wife and infant son some six years later. Memphis had drawn him like a magnet, but not for the elegant appointments of the Hotel Peabody or the big band broadcasts from the Skyway. It was Beale Street that lured him in a way he would never be able to fully explain and Beale Street with which, as it was, he could never be fully comfortable.