Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  I don’t think anyone visiting the latter-day Courts could get a sense of what the Courts were like at that time: a humming, bustling little village, full of kids and ambition. Forty years later graduates of the Courts would include doctors, lawyers, judges, and successful businessmen, and many would have achieved the Housing Authority goal (“From slums to public housing to private ownership”) in a single generation. The homes, 433 units in all, were inspected at frequent but unspecified intervals (“We always found Mrs. Presley to be an excellent housekeeper,” Jane Richardson told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins, “and a very nice person…. She kept [the oak floors] waxed all the time”), and the grounds were immaculate. For many of the residents it was “like we’d come into the money.” For some it was the first time they had ever had indoor plumbing or taken a real bath.

  It would be easy to romanticize the sense of hope and striving that dominated the Courts, because this was still a hard, tough world in which many of the kids came from broken homes, the quickest way to resolve a problem was with your fists, and you would rather die (if you were male, anyway) than articulate your innermost hopes and dreams. But it would be wrong to ignore the sense of social aspiration, and of pride, too, because that was the dominant tone of the Courts. The prevailing attitude was that you didn’t talk about it, you just did it. Yet it was an idyllic world, too. For a kid growing up there was a degree of comfort, a sense of place, and a reassuring sense that everyone was heading in the same direction, everyone was looking toward a bright new day. In many ways it mirrored the comfortable small-town environment of Tupelo. It was just the kind of thing that a wide-eyed boy from the country, too doubtful to know what he really felt, too fearful to express it even if he did, needed. It was home.

  THE PRESLEYS themselves were not atypical Lauderdale residents: Mr. Presley dour and grave on the outside, a decent man, a good provider, a man whose taciturnity not infrequently conveyed a sense of suspiciousness, of mild disapproval; Mrs. Presley working part-time at Fashion Curtains, attending Stanley Products (Tupperware-like) parties with the other ladies, laughing, sociable, exchanging recipes and small confidences, but sometimes bringing her adolescent son along, too—he never said anything, just sat silently by her side—which caused some of the women to talk. Mrs. Presley was much more popular than Mr. Presley. Everyone spoke of her warmth and liveliness and spontaneous expressions of emotion, but there was also a sense of a family set apart, a sealed-off world that few outsiders ever penetrated. They didn’t attend any one church regularly, for the most part they were not joiners, but as much as anything else the sense that others got of their separateness seemed to center on their son. “They treated him like he was two years old,” said Mrs. Ruby Black, most of whose ten children had grown up in the Courts. But even to Gladys’ sister Lillian, who, once she and her family had moved to Memphis, too, could look out her back door and practically see Gladys’ living room window, there was something about Vernon and Gladys’ focus on their only child that turned even family into outsiders. “He was particular about his funny books, Elvis—he wouldn’t even let anyone look at them. Grandma Presley would tell my little boys, ‘No, you can’t look at them. Elvis will get mad at me.’ He had his own dishes that he’d eat out of. A knife and fork and spoon. Mrs. Presley would say, ‘I’m gonna set the table,’ and she always washed his things and set them over there by their selves: his plate and his spoon and his bowl, whatever. She says, ‘Don’t you eat out of that.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘That’s Elvis’. He wouldn’t eat a bite if he knowed anybody had eat out of them.’ ” “He never spent a night away from home until he was seventeen,” Vernon told an interviewer, with only slight exaggeration, in 1978.

  He went to school each day, walking the ten blocks down Jackson to Manassas, where Humes stood imposing and monolithic and the halls reverberated with the clatter of voices, locker doors slamming, students seemingly confident of their destination, whatever it might be. At first he was frightened—this was a school where the principal was not reluctant to enunciate or act upon his philosophy and could write as his message in the graduation yearbook, “If one has no scruples about embarrassing this institution, he would do well to withdraw because hereafter we shall oppose the readmittance of one who has knowingly and willingly defamed the school’s good name.” That was something to think about—probably every day—but after the first day he got used to it, it was a whole new world to study, and gradually he even came to feel at home.

  At first Gladys walked him to the corner, until he made friends in the neighborhood. Outside of the Courts there was no one who really noticed much about him his first two years at Humes. “He was a gentle, obedient boy, and he always went out of his way to try to do what you asked him to do,” said Susie Johnson, his ninth-grade homeroom teacher. “His English was atrocious… but he had a warm and sunny quality about him which made people respond.” “He was during his first years in our school a shy boy…. At times he seemed to feel more at ease with [the teachers] than with his fellow students,” wrote Mildred Scrivener, his twelfth-grade homeroom and history teacher, in 1957. “Thinking back now, I wonder if he wasn’t overly conscious that he and his parents had just moved from Tupelo, that the other students were familiar with the place and knew each other. If so, it was a typical bit of teenaged near-sightedness.”

  His grades were decent. In the eighth grade he got an A in language and a C in music. In a rare moment of self-assertion, he challenged the contention of his music teacher, Miss Marmann, that he couldn’t sing. Yes, he could, he said, she just didn’t appreciate his type of singing, and he brought his guitar to class the next day and sang Fairley Holden and His Six Ice Cold Papas’ 1947 hit, “Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me.” According to a classmate, Katie Mae Shook, Miss Marmann “agreed that Elvis was right when he said that she didn’t appreciate his kind of singing.” In the ninth grade he got Bs in English, science, and math. “My older brother went to school with him,” recalled singer Barbara Pittman, “and he and some of the other boys used to hide behind buildings and throw things at him—rotten fruit and stuff—because he was different, because he was quiet and he stuttered and he was a mama’s boy.” Sophomore year he joined ROTC, became a library volunteer worker, and took wood shop, where he made projects for his mother. His grandmother was living with them part of the time, and Gladys was working at the coffee urn at Britling’s Cafeteria downtown.

  In pictures he does not look any different from his fellow students, neither humbler nor poorer nor more flamboyant. The only difference that one might detect is that he appears more diffident than his classmates. No one else appears to have any reservation about buying in—the pictured students are models of comportment and posture. But surely that is not fair either. What is so touching about this portrait of the American dream, circa 1950, is the conscious striving on everyone’s face, not least that of the young cadet, Elvis Aron Presley, who wore his ROTC uniform proudly everywhere, his face stern, his posture erect, his demeanor, one senses, boundlessly optimistic. In retrospect he clearly felt the same pride in Humes that most of his classmates did: that it was tough, tough but fair, and that one of the proudest achievements of his life would be simply getting through.

  In the Courts, meanwhile, his world was rapidly expanding. There were three other boys in his building—Buzzy Forbess, Paul Dougher, and Farley Guy—and Buzzy ran into him one day on his way to visit Paul. “Paul lived on the third floor (Farley lived on the second, right over Elvis), and Elvis was standing out on one of the little stairways out in front of the building, talking to some other people. And I went by and had some funny books in my hand rolled up. First time I ever saw him, I said, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ and slapped him on the back of the head with the funny books, and he slapped me upside the head as I went by. We like to got in a scrape. But as soon as I looked at him, and he looked at me, we both grinned and shook hands and I went upstairs to see Paul. That was how we become friends.” Soon the four of the
m were virtually inseparable. Together they formed a football team to play other neighborhoods, they rode their bikes, went to the movies, when it was warm enough they hung out at Malone Pool just a few blocks away, where they eyed the girls and made awkward stabs at actually swimming. It was nothing to brag about, said Buzzy, “just kids growing up together. If somebody moved into the Courts, they was going to get involved with everybody, one way or another. If you was going to have a party, everybody was going to get invited. We did all the things that you do. We lived two or three blocks from Main Street. We was right in the middle of everything. What we didn’t do was crack the books and study a lot. We were close enough. We were good friends.”

  One time Buzzy got hurt in one of their football games against another neighborhood team. “I was bleeding and pretty bruised, and Mrs. Presley started crying. She was a softhearted lady. But Mr. Presley was a fine person, too. I was around him enough to know that a lot of Elvis’ wit and abilities came from his dad. I loved Mrs. Presley to death, but as far as the humor, the dry humor—that’s Mr. Presley. Most people smile with their lips, but he laughed with his eyes. Dry wit, dry smile—Elvis got an awful lot of that from him.”

  Elvis and Buzzy and Farley and Paul roamed all around the downtown area; they walked everywhere together in a jaunty group, passing kosher butcher shops and Italian fruit stands, exploring the dock area below Front Street, observing the bustling prosperity of the downtown shoppers, checking out the blues guitarist and washtub bass player who stood out in front of the Green Owl, on the corner of Market, when the weather was good. Sometimes they might travel as far as the corner of Beale and Main, or they might even venture a block down Beale to get their pictures taken at the Blue Light Studio, four for a quarter, but there was no need to wander very far, there was so much going on all around them, a riot of sounds, colors, hustle, and excitement, even for a kid who’d grown up in the city. The summer after his freshman year Vernon bought Elvis a push lawn mower, and the four of them would go around with the mower and a couple of hand sickles soliciting yard work at four dollars per yard. “The first evening he came in,” said Vernon, “and sat there with a frown on his face and laid fifty cents out. Then all at once he broke out laughing and pulled a handful of change out of his pocket… and he had about seven dollars.”

  Elvis’ musical interests remained something of a secret his first couple of years at Humes. He didn’t bring his guitar to school, and he rarely carried it around the Courts with him. “With the three of us he played,” said Buzzy. “He wasn’t shy about it, but he wasn’t the kind of kid you just turn him around and put him onstage, either. He got used to it right there with us.” One time Farley’s mother complained that he was making too much racket, and the Housing Authority got several other complaints from older tenants, but Miss Richardson would just “ask him to tune down a little bit,” and he always would. He shared a tenth-grade biology class with Buzzy and was going to bring his guitar to school for the class’s Christmas party. “He even practiced two or three songs,” said Buzzy, “Christmas-type songs, but he chickened out—didn’t even bring it.” He doesn’t seem to have told any of his friends about the Mississippi-Alabama Fair; he never spoke of Mississippi Slim.

  And yet, one feels, he never lost sight of music for a moment. In fact, if he had never left the apartment, just listening to the radio would have been a big step toward completing his musical education. Memphis radio in 1950 was an Aladdin’s lamp of musical vistas and styles. Late at night Elvis could have listened—along with most of the other kids in the Courts and half of Memphis, it seemed—to Daddy-O-Dewey, Dewey Phillips, broadcasting from the Gayoso on WHBQ. In one typical 1951 segment he would have heard Rosco Gordon’s “Booted” (which had been recorded in Memphis, at Sam Phillips’ studio), Muddy Waters’ “She Moves Me,” “Lonesome Christmas” by Lowell Fulson, and Elmore James’ brand-new “Dust My Broom,” all current hits, and all collector’s classics some forty years later. “Rocket 88,” which has frequently been tagged the first rock ’n’ roll record, came out of Sam Phillips’ studio in 1951, too, and merited a write-up in the paper that led with the somewhat arch suggestion, “If you have a song you can’t get published, you might ask Sam Phillips for help.” “Come on, good people,” exhorted Dewey, telling his public to buy their threads at Lansky Brothers on Beale. “Do like me and pay for ’em while you wearing ’em out, or when they catch up with you, dee-gawwwww! And be sure and tell ’em Phillips sent you!” In the morning there was Bob Neal’s wake-up show on WMPS, hillbilly music and cornpone humor in a relaxed Arthur Godfrey style of presentation, and at 12:30 P.M. Neal offered thirty minutes of gospel with the Blackwood Brothers, who had recently moved to Memphis and joined the First Assembly of God Church on McLemore Avenue. The first half of the High Noon Round-Up featured country singer Eddie Hill, who along with the Louvin Brothers, Gladys Presley’s favorite country group (the Blackwoods were her favorite quartet, though Vernon and Elvis preferred the somewhat livelier Statesmen), was among Memphis’ biggest hillbilly stars.

  If you changed the dial to WDIA, which since its switchover in 1949 to an all-black programming policy had billed itself as “The Mother Station of the Negroes,” you could hear not only local blues star B. B. King, deejaying and playing his own music live on the air, but also such genuine personalities as Professor Nat D. Williams, history teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, columnist for Memphis’ Negro newspaper, the World, and longtime master of ceremonies at the Palace Theatre’s Amateur Night; comedic genius A. C. “Moohah” Williams; and the cosmopolitan Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert, not to mention the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, who had their own fifteen-minute program and made even the Carnation Milk jingle reverberate with feeling. On Sunday night on WHBQ the sermons of the Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, author of such Negro spiritual classics as Mahalia Jackson’s “Move On Up a Little Higher” and Clara Ward’s “How I Got Over,” were broadcast live from the East Trigg Baptist Church, with his famed soloist, Queen C. Anderson, leading the musical interludes.

  There would have been no way for any but the most avid student to keep up with it all—and this doesn’t even begin to take into account Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson’s broadcasts from West Memphis, Arkansas, just across the river, Sleepy Eyed John’s hillbilly parade on WHHM, all the regular showcases for popular tunes of the day, the big band broadcasts from the Peabody Skyway, and, of course, the Opry broadcasts on Saturday night. Here was an education of a sort, and of a quality, virtually unimaginable today and, in an age and a place that were strictly segregated in every respect, an education that was colorblind. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” wrote Billboard’s pioneering music editor Paul Ackerman, looking back in 1958 on the impact of the music that had first arrived in such profusion after the war, “integration has already taken place.” This was as true in 1950 as it was in 1958—but only in the privacy of the home, and only where music was truly in the air.

  PERHAPS IT WAS at one of the ladies’ Stanley Products parties that Gladys first asked Mrs. Mattie Denson, wife of the Reverend J. J. Denson, if her husband could possibly give her son guitar lessons. Mrs. Denson said her husband would be glad to help (“He has such a nice voice,” said Mrs. Presley), but it was her son Jesse Lee who was the real talent in the family. Jesse Lee was not thrilled when she told him about the idea. At eighteen he was two and a half years older than Mrs. Presley’s son in 1950 and possessed a well-deserved reputation as a school truant and something of a delinquent. He had run away from home for the first time at the age of nine, had started playing professionally when he was not much older, and had been in and out of one juvenile correctional facility or another for much of his young life. A superb athlete, he fought one of the most memorable Golden Gloves matches in Memphis history in 1952, when he lost the bantamweight championship to fellow Courts resident George Blancet and made the papers for performing Hank Snow’s “Golden Rocket” and the semiclassical “Blue Prelude�
�� in between bouts as well.

  He didn’t want to teach Elvis, he told his mother, because the other boy “was very shy, and kind of timid. ‘He’s scared of the other kids that I pal around with,’ I said. ‘They’re tough kids, and I’m afraid they’re going to tease me, and then I’ll get my hands all broken up from having to defend myself… and I don’t think I should do it!’ Well, she turned around and walked away and said, ‘Jesse Lee, remember: “Whatsoever you do for these the least of my brothers, that you would do unto me.” ’ I said, ‘Send him over, Mama.’

  “He showed up, he had a little itty-bitty, Gene Autry–type guitar that he really couldn’t play. He couldn’t press the strings down on it they was set so high, so I let him practice on mine—I had a little Martin. I just tried to show him basic chords. I would take his fingers and place them, say, ‘You’re pressing the wrong strings with the wrong fingers,’ trying to straighten him out. He couldn’t really complete a song for a long time, couldn’t move his fingers and go with the flow of the music, but once I straightened him out he started to learn to do it right.”