Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  She was pleased, then, when he started going to the Assembly of God Church at 1084 McLemore in South Memphis. The Assembly of God in Memphis had started out in a tent and later moved to a storefront location on South Third and finally into a church on McLemore in 1948. In 1954 Pastor James Hamill, a well-educated, fire-and-brimstone preacher who denounced movies and dancing from the pulpit and encouraged ecstatic demonstrations of faith (such as speaking in tongues) in his church, had been minister for ten years. Over that time membership had grown to close to two thousand, three buses were dispatched each Sunday to pick up congregants without automobiles (one of the stops was at Winchester and Third, just outside the Presleys’ door), and since 1950 the famous Blackwood Brothers Quartet and their families had been prominent members of the congregation. When they were in town, the Blackwoods performed frequently at a church service that was renowned for its music (the hundred-voice church choir was well known throughout Memphis), and only recently Cecil Blackwood, a newly married resident of Lauderdale Courts and a nephew of founding member and leader James Blackwood, had started a kind of junior quartet, the Songfellows, with Pastor Hamill’s son, Jimmy, a student at Memphis State. They were also members of the Bible study class that met each Sunday at 9:30 A.M. as broader members of a Young Men’s Christian group called the Christ Ambassadors.

  That was where Dixie Locke first saw Elvis Presley. She had not seen him before, though she and her family were faithful members of the church since its days on South Third, not far from where they lived. Dixie was fifteen and a sophomore at South Side High. Her father worked for Railway Express, and she and her three sisters shared a single bedroom, while her parents slept in the living room. If her father went to bed at 8:00 because he had to go to work early, that was when everyone went to bed.

  She had a boyfriend at the time, but it wasn’t anything really special. She was bright, attractive, and with two older sisters—one of whom had eloped at fourteen and was now back home—was alert to a world whose existence she could barely have glimpsed. In the half hour before the boys and girls split off into their respective classes, she noticed the new boy, dressed so oddly in pink and black, with his long greasy hair and fidgety manner, as he sought so desperately to become a part of the group. The other kids all laughed at him a little, they made fun of him, but strictly for his appearance—he appeared to be serious about his Bible studies. The other girls thought he was peculiar: “He was just so different, all the other guys were like replicas of their dads.” And yet to Dixie he was different in another way. “To watch him you would think, even then, he was really shy. What was so strange was that he would do anything to call attention to himself, but I really think he was doing it to prove something to himself more than to the people around him. Inside, even then, I think he knew that he was different. I knew the first time I met him that he was not like other people.”

  Dixie and her girlfriends went out nearly every weekend to the Rainbow Rollerdrome, east on Lamar (Highway 78 to Tupelo), just beyond the city limits. They rode the bus in their skating skirts; Dixie had one of black corduroy with white satin lining, and she wore white tights underneath. The Rainbow was a big teenage hangout, with a snack bar and a jukebox, an organist who played the “Grand March” for the skaters, and a swimming pool next door. There were dance contests on the floor and generally, on a weekend night, up to six or seven hundred kids, who could gather without any fear of trouble or any concern that they might be getting in with a bad crowd. One Sunday at church, at the end of January, Dixie started talking with some girlfriends about her plans for the upcoming weekend. She spoke loudly enough so that the boys in the groups next to them might overhear, and particularly so that the new boy, who was pretending not to be paying any attention, would know. She wasn’t sure that he would come, she thought it almost brazen of herself to be doing this, but she wanted very badly to see him. When she arrived at the rink on Saturday night with her girlfriends, she noticed with a little start that he was there, but she ignored him, pretending to herself that she hadn’t seen him until one of her friends said, “Did you know that boy, Elvis Presley, was here?” She said, “Yeah, I saw him,” kind of casually, and then watched for a while to see what he was going to do. He was standing by the rail with his skates on, wearing a kind of bolero outfit, short black bullfighter’s jacket, ruffled shirt, black pegged pants with a pale pink stripe down the legs. He was leaning up against the rail all by himself, trying to look detached, nonchalantly surveying the floor aswirl with activity, and after a while Dixie realized he couldn’t skate. She took pity on him at last, went up and introduced herself. He said, “Yeah, I know,” and hung his head down, then tossed back his hair. Finally he asked Dixie if she wanted to go get a Coke, “and I said yes, and we went to the snack area, and I don’t think we ever went back out to the skating floor the whole night.” They talked and talked and talked; it was almost as if he had been waiting to unburden himself all his life. He talked about how he wanted to join the Songfellows, how he had spoken with Cecil and Jimmy Hamill about it and maybe they were going to give him a tryout. It was as if “he had a plan, he knew that he had a talent, there was something for his life that he was supposed to do. It was like from that moment on there was nobody else there.”

  The first session was over at 10:00 P.M., and Dixie was supposed to go home with her friends, but she told them to leave without her. Elvis asked if she could stay for the second session, and while he was standing there, she pretended to call her mother from the pay phone, but she dialed a number at random (she wouldn’t have wanted to admit that she didn’t have a phone but had to call her uncle and aunt next door anyway) and gabbled on at length about the nice boy from church that she happened to have run into and how they were going to stay for the second session but she would be home right after midnight. She had never done anything like this before, but she didn’t think twice about it. In the end they didn’t even stay. After she made the call, he suggested that they go to a drive-in; why didn’t they go to K’s on Crump Boulevard, where they could get a hamburger and a milk shake? They kept talking as they finally unlaced their skates. He opened the door of the Lincoln for her and was careful to explain that it wasn’t his (he wanted to see if she would still go out with him, he explained afterward, if he didn’t have a car), and they drove west into town on Lamar until it ran into Crump, talking the whole way.

  She sat close to him on the front seat, closer than you ever would on a normal first date, and at K’s she kissed him sitting in the parking lot. It was a chaste kiss, a loving kiss—Dixie wasn’t planning to keep this a secret for long, even from her mother. She was so swept up in it, he was, too, it was like nothing that had ever happened to either one of them before. When he dropped her off at her door, he whispered that he would call her next week, Wednesday or Thursday probably, about going out on the weekend—there was never any question that they would see each other again, and again. She tiptoed in the door, knowing she was late, even for the late session—she was bound to wake up her parents, her father was going to kill her, but she didn’t care, not really, she was truly in love.

  HE CALLED THE NEXT DAY. Her aunt called over to her from next door, just as the family was sitting down to a Sunday dinner of fried chicken. When she hadn’t seen him at church that morning, her heart sank a little, but she never doubted that she would hear from him. And now he couldn’t even wait a day.

  They went out that night to the movies, and then again on Wednesday night. She still hadn’t let him meet her parents, inventing one excuse or another, for him and for them, but then on Saturday, just a week from the night they had truly met, he came to pick her up at the house and she brought him inside to meet her family, as much because he wanted to as because she knew she had to. She had tried to prepare everyone, but she found when she met him at the door that she was scarcely prepared herself: she had forgotten how different he looked, she had forgotten about his hair and his dress, she hadn’t thought about the effect it
might have on others. At night in bed she had whispered to her sisters about him, and she had confided to her diary that she had at last found her one true love. She had even told her mother what she had done when she called from the skating rink, but she had emphasized that he came from a good family (which she didn’t really know—he acted like she was some kind of royalty because she was from South Memphis, though they were as poor as Job’s turkey) and that she had met him in church. Now as her father addressed him gravely, and Elvis mumbled his replies, tossing his head back whenever he said, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and presenting the gravest, most respectful mien, she wasn’t so sure, she knew that she loved him, but she saw him for the first time as her father must see him. There was no way of telling what her father was thinking, he never gave any clue—he gave his full attention without ever saying much of anything. All the boys she and her sisters had ever brought to the house were scared of Mr. Locke, big (six foot two), impassive, but if he ever made up his mind about something he didn’t hesitate to let you, or anyone else, know about it, and you just did it, regardless. Her mother was calling her—she didn’t want to leave Elvis alone with her father, but she felt she had no choice. In the kitchen, “my mother read me the riot act: ‘How can you go out with a boy like that?’—that kind of thing. I was saying, ‘Mother, you can’t go by the way… Just because his hair is long, or he’s not dressed like everybody else….’ I was really defending him, telling her what a nice boy he was—I had met him at church, after all. And meanwhile I was afraid they would say something that would hurt his feelings and he would just leave.”

  Eventually they escaped—her sister met him briefly, she was perfectly nice to him to his face, but behind his back she raised her eyebrows so Dixie could see what she really thought. The next day her uncle offered Dixie $2 for the boy if he would just get a haircut. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered; that night he gave her his ring, that meant they were going steady, neither of them would see anybody else—ever.

  Two weeks later she met his parents. It was a weekday night, cool for February, when he picked her up and drove her back to Alabama Street. She was amazed to discover that even though neither parent was working (Mr. Presley was out of work at the moment with a bad back, and Mrs. Presley’s employment at St. Joseph’s had evidently stopped) and Elvis’ salary at Precision could scarcely have amounted to more than $50 a week, they had a piano, a piano and a television set, and he was calling her “high class”! She wanted so badly to like his mother, but Mrs. Presley seemed suspicious at first, she seemed nervous and apprehensive, she had a hundred questions for Dixie—where her father worked, how big a family she came from, where she and Elvis had met, how long they had been going out, what school she attended. Mr. Presley was polite, attentive, but he had nothing much to say, “it was almost like he was an outsider, not part of the group.” Eventually Mrs. Presley shooed Elvis and his dad to one side to pursue the questioning on her own. Elvis was pacing back and forth, he would come in and out of the room and touch her on the shoulder, as if to say it was all right, then disappear again. He was clearly beside himself, just waiting to get out of there, but it went on and on. And after an hour or two a number of relatives came over—his cousin Gene, whom she had already met, a bunch of other cousins (it seemed like his only friends were his family), and they all sat around and played Monopoly. She was embarrassed and self-conscious, and aware that Elvis would be mad at her if she acted all “prim and proper,” if she wasn’t just herself. Finally they were able to leave: “He was so relieved, I think he couldn’t wait to take me home, so he could come back and say, ‘What do you think?’ to his mom. You know, they had such a strong love and respect for each other, she was just totally devoted to him, it was like this mutual admiration. A day or two later, I said something like ‘I wonder what your mother thinks…’ or ‘I hope…,’ something like that, and he said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, she thinks you’re neat.’ I knew I had her stamp of approval then.”

  They went out almost every night, even weeknights. If they didn’t, they spoke on the phone, long heartfelt conversations, until her uncle and aunt got mad about her monopolizing the line. At one point her dad put a halt to their seeing each other for a few days, but her family soon came “to love him almost as much as I did. They saw that I was serious, and he was always so polite, and they knew it was a very honest relationship, they trusted us together as far as our conduct was concerned. Within a very short time he was just part of the family.”

  Mrs. Presley, to Dixie, was almost like a second mother, and the Presley house on Alabama became like a second home to her. Some days Mr. Presley would come and pick her up at her house on Lucy after school so she could meet Elvis the moment he got home from work. Sometimes, if Mr. Presley didn’t feel like driving, she would ride the bus. “Which was very unusual for those days—that was another one of those things that my mom and dad were not at all in favor of—but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it for me.” Not infrequently she visited Mrs. Presley on her own—one time they went to a Stanley Products party together, often they just sat and talked. There was one subject they had in common about which each had an inexhaustible curiosity, but they shared a number of other interests as well. Mrs. Presley showed Dixie her recipes, and occasionally they would go shopping together, maybe even pick out a surprise for Elvis. Dixie found Mrs. Presley to be one of the warmest, most wonderful, and genuine people she had ever met. “In no time we were just great friends. We could call and talk to each other and enjoy each other—whether Elvis was there or not. We could just laugh and have a good time together.” But even at fifteen Dixie soon realized that the Presleys were different from her own family in at least two significant respects. One was the role that Vernon played. Perhaps because it was in such sharp contrast to her own father’s role and behavior (“I had seen my dad go to work with a brace on his back for years, and he had a very physically demanding job”), his passivity struck her particularly forcefully. “I never saw him be unkind. I never saw him drink or be unruly, I’m sure he was a very loving husband and devoted to his family, and it probably had to do with his self-esteem—but it was like he was an outsider, really, he wasn’t really part of Elvis and Mrs. Presley’s group. I mean, it sounds weird, but they had such a strong love and respect for each other, and I don’t think there was a lot of respect for him during that time. It was almost like Elvis was the father and his dad was just the little boy.”

  The other striking difference was their view of the outside world. The Lockes regarded the world at large comfortably, as a friendly, for the most part unthreatening sort of place. Coming from a big family herself, having an even larger extended family through the church and all the church activities in which she took part, Dixie was accustomed to a large circle of acquaintances, a constant whirl of social activity, and an open-door policy at home, where friends and family were likely to drop in without notice (they had to—there was no telephone!). The Presleys, by contrast, she felt, regarded the world with suspicion. They had few close friends outside of family; apart from his cousins, Dixie never met any of Elvis’ friends. In fact “he just came into our crowd completely, there was nobody he went to school with, nobody from the neighborhood that he palled around with at that point particularly.

  “Mrs. Presley was a very humble person, and it was almost like she felt inferior around people where she didn’t feel like she quite fit in—maybe she didn’t have the right hairdo or the right dress to wear. She had a couple of lady friends from Lauderdale Courts, and one of them had a daughter who really thought Elvis was for her. One night we were all sitting on the porch, and this girl came over—as I remember it she was a very attractive girl—and when she came in, it was as if she belonged there, it was like she was so comfortable with being in the house and being with Elvis that she made me feel uncomfortable. So I just set back and was just kind of reserved and quiet, and Mrs. Presley said, ‘Let’s have a glass of iced tea
’ or something. Normally I just would have gotten up and gotten it, but before I could say anything, the other girl said, ‘Oh, I’ll go fix it.’ When she left, I’ll never forget, Mrs. Presley got onto me good. She said, ‘I could just pinch you. Why did you just set there and let her take over?’ She said, ‘Don’t you ever do that again. You know you’re just as at home here as Elvis is. You get up and do something next time, just like you would if you were in your own home.’

  “She and I were just so close, sometimes Elvis would talk to me and say things that normally he would reserve for his mother, little pet names and gestures, put his face almost in your face and talk like they talked, how sweet you looked today, that kind of thing, just the way he always talked with his mother. And I would think, ‘Oh, don’t do that in front of her.’ ’Cause that was just for her.”

  They saw each other all the time. When the weather turned warm, they sat out on the front porch, either at Dixie’s house or on the long brick-pillared porch on Alabama—they would sit on the swing and Elvis would sing to her sometimes: “Tomorrow Night,” “My Happiness,” sweet, tender little ballads. He was slightly inhibited and didn’t sing very loud if he thought her family was around. Often they would walk down to the corner and get a purple cow or a milk shake at the Dairy Queen, then go and sit on a bench in Gaston Park, just a few blocks from Dixie’s house. A big date was going to the movies at the Suzore No. 2 on North Main, fifty cents’ worth of gas, fifty cents for the movies, and a dollar for something to eat at K’s or Leonard’s afterward. They loved each other, they were committed to remaining “pure” until marriage, they shared everything with each other, there were no secrets. One time there was a crisis at work; Elvis was told if he didn’t get a haircut he would be fired. He was so embarrassed by the haircut he got that he didn’t want anyone to see him, and it didn’t help when Dixie’s uncle, who had been telling him to get a haircut all along, kidded him about it. He was so sensitive—Dixie had never met anyone as sensitive as him. One time early in their relationship he got upset with her at a drive-in, about something that she had said in front of his cousin, and he got out of the car and was going to hitchhike home. Another time he got into a fight with his mother and was going to leave—forever. He came over to Dixie’s house to say good-bye. They cried in each other’s arms; then she watched him drive off, and promptly drive back again, as she stood on her front porch. They couldn’t be separated—ever. They talked about marriage, but they were going to wait. When they got married they wanted their families to share in it.