Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Every Saturday and Sunday, Elvis would show up with his guitar. Although Mrs. Denson was a champion of Christian fellowship, it didn’t extend so far as to let the boys practice in her home, so they went down to the laundry room underneath the Presleys’ apartment. Lee’s friends Dorsey Burnette and his younger brother, Johnny, whose family had lived across from the Densons for thirteen years on Pontotoc Street, were frequently present and, as Lee had predicted, did give Elvis a hard time. Dorsey was another prominent Golden Gloves boxer, but as many of their friends remarked, he and Johnny just liked to fight, and the more pacific Elvis referred to them somewhat ruefully as the Daltons, after the famous outlaw gang.

  Lee dazzled the other boys with his virtuosic execution of “Wildwood Flower” and “Under the Double Eagle,” not to mention the tremolo yodel that he had developed for his vocal showpieces. With still another resident of the Courts, Johnny Black, whose older brother Bill was a sometime professional musician, the five boys became well known for their concerts on Market Mall, the cool, leafy path that ran down the middle of the Courts. Often in the evening the boys would sing, harmonizing on “Cool Water” and “Riders in the Sky,” showcasing Lee’s guitar and his vocals, too, on numbers like “I’m Movin’ On,” “Tennessee Waltz,” or just about any Eddy Arnold song you could name. In the summertime there were informal dances on the lawn, while older residents sat on their porches and patted their hands and the sound carried all over the Courts. Lee Denson’s older brother, Jimmy, recalled them as a group centering around his younger brother. “They walked single file, Indian-fashion, four or five teenage boys holding their guitars wherever they went.” To Johnny Black it was more of a loose-knit association: “We would play under the trees, underneath those big magnolia trees—I’ve got pictures of us all. It was just whoever would come, whoever showed up. We’d have a mandolin maybe, three or four guitars, and the people would gather. We weren’t trying to impress the world, we were just playing to have a good time.”

  No one has ever remembered Elvis Presley in the foreground of any of these pictures, but he clearly showed up in the back, hovering on the edges of the frame, tentatively forming his chords, joining in occasionally on the background vocals. When he missed a note, he threw up his hands in the air and then shrugged with a shy, self-deprecating grin that caused his audience to laugh. To the older boys he was a mush-mouthed little country boy, a mama’s boy who deserved a certain amount of respect just for not letting himself be run off. To Buzzy and Farley and Paul he was something of a hero—their memories centered on their friend. Like younger boys of every generation they don’t think much of the older boys, they see them as bullies and boors, if they ever get in that position themselves, they tell each other, they will never act that way.

  Everyone reacts in predictable enough fashion, except for the dreamy boy at the edge of the picture. For Elvis it is as if he has been set down in a foreign land. Music both thrills and holds him in its hypnotic sway. With music he is transported to another place, he experiences a soft dreamy feeling, a sense of almost cushiony release, but at the same time it is as hard and concrete as desire. The older boys might be surprised that he knows the words to every song that they have sung (Lee Denson, for one, has no idea that he has not taught “Old Shep” to his bumbling pupil); he may well know the lyrics to every song that they might ever want to sing—the words imprint themselves on his memory, he has only to hear them once or twice, the chords, too, it is just his fingers which stubbornly resist. In his mind he hears the song differently; it is less florid at times, less like the Irish tenor John McCormack on the sentimental songs, more dramatic on the hillbilly ones. The only songs he would not change are the gospel numbers—those he would do just as they have been done, by the Statesmen, the Blackwood Brothers, the Sunshine Boys. It would seem like sacrilege almost to alter those songs.

  He sits alone on the steps of the apartment house at night, fingering the chords softly in the dark. His voice barely rises above a murmur, but he is looking for attention, mostly from the girls, from Betty McMahan, his “first love,” and from Billie Wardlaw, who lives next door to Betty on the third floor and took Betty’s place when Betty started going with a boy from Arkansas. Betty had met Gladys before she met her son. “She used to come out and we had lawn chairs, or we’d sit on the steps. My mother and his mother started a conversation. Finally one night I guess she just forced him to come outside and sit with us and talk.” Billie Wardlaw moved in with her mother at fourteen in 1950—even before Betty broke up with him, he started courting Billie. “Elvis was a great kisser, and since we were always playing spin the bottle in the dark, he didn’t let his shyness get in the way…. Lots of times when my mother and I would walk home, Elvis would be outside picking his guitar in the dark. His mother and dad would be sitting out there on quilts, listening. Elvis would do anything in the dark…. Once my mother told him, ‘Elvis, you sing so good you ought to be singing on the radio.’ He blushed and told my mother, ‘Mrs. Rooker, I can’t sing.’ ”

  He likes the company of women, he loves to be around women, women of all ages, he feels more comfortable with them—it isn’t something he would want to admit to his friends, or even perhaps to himself. His aunt Lillian notices it: “He’d get out there at night with the girls and he just sang his head off. He was different with the girls—I’m embarrassed to tell, but he’d rather have a whole bunch of girls around him than the boys—he didn’t care a thing about the boys.” The women seem to sense something coming out of him, something he himself may not even know he possesses: it is an aching kind of vulnerability, an unspecified yearning; when Sam Phillips meets him just two or three years later, in 1953, he senses much the same quality but calls it insecurity. “He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way; his insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person.” Bathed in the soft glow of the streetlight, he appears almost handsome—the acne that embarrasses him doesn’t show up so badly, and the adolescent features, which can appear coarse in the cold light of day, take on a kind of delicacy that is almost beautiful. He sings Eddy Arnold’s “Molly Darling,” a Kay Starr number, “Harbor Lights,” Bing and Gary Crosby’s “Moonlight Bay,” all soft, sweet songs, in a soft, slightly quavering voice, and then, satisfied, takes his comb out of his back pocket and runs it through his hair in a practiced gesture clearly at odds with his hesitancy of manner. With the women, though, he can do no wrong: young girls or old ladies, they seem drawn to his quiet, hesitant approach, his decorous humility, his respectful scrutiny. The men may have their doubts, but to the women he is a nice boy, a kind boy, someone both thoughtful and attentive, someone who truly cares.

  THE SUMMER BEFORE his junior year in high school Elvis went to work at Precision Tool, where his father had started when they first moved to Memphis and where his uncles Johnny and Travis Smith and Vester Presley all continued to work. He was making twenty-seven dollars a week, but it didn’t last long, because an insurance inspector found out that he was underage, so he went back to his yard business with Buzzy, Farley, and Paul. Sophomore year he had worked as an usher at Loew’s State for much of the fall, giving the Presleys three breadwinners for a while and enabling them to purchase a television set and have Vernon’s mother, Minnie, move in with them full-time.

  Junior year was something of a watershed; even his teachers remarked upon the change. His hair was different—he was using more Rose Oil hair tonic and Vaseline to keep it down, and he had grown sideburns both to look older and to emulate the appearance of the kind of cross-country truck driver that he sometimes said he wanted to be (“Wild-looking guys, they had scars, I used to lay on the side of the road and watch [them] drive their big diesel trucks”). He seemed to have gained in self-confidence, and his appearance was more distinctive; without calling attention to himself in words he demanded it by his dress and demeanor (“It was just something I wanted to do, I wasn’t trying to be better than anybody else”). He e
ven went out for football, an ambition that he had harbored for some time but that proved to be the single, dramatic misstep in an otherwise carefully navigated high school career. By trying out for the team he made himself vulnerable to the very forces which most scorned him, and in perhaps the best-known story of his growing-up years some of the other players ganged up on him in the locker room and threatened to cut his hair, and the coach eventually kicked him off the team when he refused. Whether it happened exactly that way or not, there is little question that he had his pride hurt, and he frequently referred to the incident in later life with some ruefulness and anger.

  He went back to work at Loew’s State, on South Main, but that didn’t last long either, after he got into a fight with another usher who he thought had been a stool pigeon and was fired by the manager. In November 1951, Gladys got a job at St. Joseph’s Hospital as a nurse’s aide at $4 a day, six days a week. St. Joseph’s was just a couple of blocks from their home, and she was very proud of the job, but she had to quit the following February after the Memphis Housing Authority threatened to evict them because their combined family income exceeded the maximum allowed. “Illness in the family,” Vernon wrote to the Housing Authority by way of explanation. He had hurt his back and been out of work for a while. “Wife is not working [now]. Trying to pay ourselves out of debt. Bills are pressing and don’t want to be sued.” In February they got a new lease at a reduced rent of $43 a month and a $3,000 ceiling on income. By June they had recovered enough financially to purchase a 1941 Lincoln coupe, which Elvis was encouraged to consider “his” car. “My daddy was something wonderful to me,” said Elvis to a 1956 interviewer. One time, Vernon recalled, Elvis brought the car home and “came running up yelling, ‘Hi, Dad, I put fifteen cents’ worth of gasoline into the car.’ Everyone laughed, and he like to have died of embarrassment.”

  He didn’t need the car, though, for the majority of his common pursuits. He had seen the lights of Main Street, and as Bob Johnson of the Memphis Press-Scimitar wrote in 1956 in the first official fan biography: “Elvis saw the street late, with the signs glowing, and to this day it holds a spell over him…. Sometimes with his friends, sometimes alone, Elvis would head for Main Street, where the windows, the bustle of moving traffic, the hurrying crowd gave him something to watch and wonder about.”

  He started hanging out at Charlie’s, a little record store, which was at first situated next to the Suzore No. 2 on North Main across the alley from the firehouse, then directly across the street. It had a jukebox and a little soda fountain and even sold “dirty” Redd Foxx comedy records under the counter—and within a short time Elvis became a regular there, sometimes alone, as Bob Johnson suggested, sometimes with friends. He might go to the movies, where you could still see a double feature for a dime, stop by the firehouse, where the firemen, who welcomed any diversion, were always happy to hear him sing a song, then sidle into Charlie’s, not to buy anything, necessarily, just to listen, to handle the precious 78s, to put a nickel in the jukebox every once in a while. The proprietor, Charlie Hazelgrove, never kicked anyone out; the store was a hangout for teenagers who were passionate about music, which was why Buzzy Forbess, for example, never went in there at all. For while he and Elvis were the best of friends, that part of Elvis’ life did not impinge on his own. “One time we were hanging around Charlie’s,” recalled Johnny Black, a more casual acquaintance but a musician, “and Elvis said to me, ‘Johnny, someday I’m going to be driving Cadillacs.’ It’s so weird to think about—we’re talking about an era when we probably couldn’t have gotten the money together for a Coke between us.”

  He wandered down the street, past Loew’s to the corner of Beale and Main, then headed down Beale to Lansky’s clothing store. A lot of kids liked to go on Beale just to watch the colored acting up. One store a few doors down from Lansky’s had its customers lie down on the floor to be measured, with the salesman drawing a chalk outline for a new suit with the gravest of faces; another displayed the tuxedo that local mobster Machine Gun Kelly was said to have been mowed down in, bullet holes intact. The political machine of Boss E. H. Crump took a benevolent attitude toward its Negro population—anything went on Beale Street, up to the point that it threatened the safety of whites—but city censor Lloyd Binford consistently bowdlerized Lena Horne’s movies and banned the Hollywood comedy Brewster’s Millions, because costar Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had “too familiar a way about him, and the picture presents too much racial mixture.” In the late 1940s he banned the stage musical Annie Get Your Gun, because it had a Negro railroad conductor and “we don’t have any Negro conductors in the South. Of course it can’t show here. It’s social equality in action.”

  For Elvis, though, it was the clothing, it was the styles, the bold fashions, that drew him in, as he gazed hungrily into Lansky’s windows. He made a definite impression on Guy and Bernard Lansky, the brothers who owned and operated the store. “He came down and looked through the windows before he had any money—we knew him strictly by face,” recalled Guy. “He was working at the theater at that time, holes in his shoes and socks, real shabbily dressed, but he stood out, his hair, sure, but it was his… what I’m trying to say, it was his, you know, manners. He was just a very nice person.”

  At noon—if it was a Saturday or a vacation day or maybe just a day when he cut school—he headed down to the WMPS studio on the corner of Union and Main for the High Noon Round-Up, where the Blackwood Brothers appeared live with WMPS DJ Bob Neal emceeing. “I suppose that was where I saw him for the first time,” said Bob Neal, who would become his first manager several years later and who, like Guy Lansky, was struck more by his manner than his appearance. Even James Blackwood, leader of the Blackwood Brothers Quartet, who had a national hit on RCA in 1951 with “The Man Upstairs,” remembered the hungry-looking young boy, as did his counterpart in the Statesmen, lead singer Jake Hess, who recalled meeting Elvis at this time not in Memphis but in Tupelo, when the Presleys were presumably back for a visit. How, Jake Hess was asked, could he remember the boy? Weren’t there other fans equally ardent in their enthusiasm? To Hess, a spectacular singer with the kind of soaring tenor voice and controlled vibrato that Elvis would explicitly aspire to, it was not prescience that caused him to notice but, rather, something about the young man’s fierce, burning desire. “I mean, we didn’t know Elvis Presley from a sack of sand. He was just nice, a nice kid, this bright-eyed boy asking all kinds of questions, and asking in a way that you would really want to tell him. He wanted to know about the spiritual aspects of it—did you have to do this or that? He wanted to know if he would be handicapped because he couldn’t read music. He was such a bright-eyed boy, you know, he just looked important, even as a kid.”

  He became a regular at the All-Night Gospel Singings, which had started at Ellis Auditorium up the street and all through the South in the previous two or three years, not with his friends from the Courts or even with musician friends like Lee Denson and the Burnette brothers, who had started playing the roadhouses by now, but by himself, with his mother and father, maybe with his cousin Junior or Gene, with whoever would go—but he rarely missed a show. Once a month Ellis was filled for what amounted to a marathon sing-off, into the early hours of the morning, among the top white gospel quartets of the day. He sat there mesmerized by what he later described as “the big heavy rhythm beats” of some of the spiritual numbers and the delicate beauty of others. There was probably no type of music that he didn’t love, but quartet music was the center of his musical universe. Gospel music combined the spiritual force that he felt in all music with the sense of physical release and exaltation for which, it seemed, he was casting about. And the shows—the shows themselves were the broadest of panoplies, running the full spectrum of gospel styles, from the dignified “shape note”–influenced singing of older groups like the Speer Family and the Chuck Wagon Gang, to the flashy showmanship of the Sunshine Boys, to the stately harmonies of the Blackwoods, who adapted many o
f their hits from the new spiritual style of such Negro quartets as the Soul Stirrers and the Original Gospel Harmonettes of Birmingham. There were hints of the Ink Spots and the Golden Gate Quartet, and even of contemporary rhythm and blues singers like Clyde McPhatter and Roy Hamilton, in their beautifully arranged, precisely articulated stylings, but for all of his admiration for the Blackwoods’ work, it was the Statesmen who really captured Elvis’ imagination.

  The Statesmen were an electric combination, anchored by the disarmingly conventional and unremittingly cheerful manner of their accompanist, leader, and founder, Hovie Lister, and featuring some of the most thrillingly emotive singing and daringly unconventional showmanship in the entertainment world. Sharply dressed in suits that might have come out of the window of Lansky’s, they piled tenor on top of countertenor, and then falsetto on top of that, building to Jake Hess’ virtuosic lead. Meanwhile bass singer Jim Wetherington, known universally as the Big Chief, maintained a steady bottom, ceaselessly jiggling first his left leg, then his right, with the material of the pants leg ballooning out and shimmering. “He went about as far as you could go in gospel music,” said Jake Hess. “The women would jump up, just like they do for the pop shows.” Preachers frequently objected to the lewd movements, racial fundamentalists decried the debt to Negro spirituals (particularly in the overt emotionalism of the delivery), but audiences reacted with screams and swoons. It was a different kind of spirituality, but spirituality nonetheless, as the group ran, not walked, out onto the stage, singers tossed the microphone back and forth, and Jake Hess at the audience’s coaxing repeated the thrilling climax of his last song over and over again, as Chief maintained his tireless act.

  Music, more and more, became the focus of his life. At parties in the Courts Elvis would always sing, sometimes to the point that his friends would groan, “Oh, no, not again!” He was still extremely shy, didn’t know how to dance, and sometimes would play only with the lights out, even in as intimate a setting as his cousin Bobbie’s birthday party, said his aunt Lillian. “I moved everything out of the living room, and Elvis come in, brought his guitar, but we had to put the lights out before he’d sing. We had a fire in the fireplace, but it wasn’t enough light to show his face. He got way over yonder in the corner—that’s just how shy he was.” He sang quite a few of Kay Starr’s songs, he was partial to Teresa Brewer, Joni James, Bing Crosby, Eddie Fisher, and Perry Como as well as Hank Williams and Eddy Arnold. Some evenings Vernon and Gladys would go to the movies so that he, Buzzy, Paul, and Farley could have a party in the apartment. Elvis would never play a slow song, Buzzy said, when Buzzy was dancing with Elvis’ girlfriend, Billie Wardlaw, though Billie broke up with him not long afterward when she started going with a sailor she had met at the USO on Third Street. Elvis’ reaction when he saw another boy’s picture in her wallet surprised her. “He grabbed it out of my purse and began stomping and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his shoe.” When she actually broke up with him, “he started crying. Until that night I had never seen a man, or a boy, cry.”