Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  THEY WENT TO CHURCH together, though not as often as Dixie would have liked. Elvis was good about attending his Bible class, but he didn’t always go to the service and sometimes he would just pick her up afterward. Sometimes when they did attend, they would arrive with a group of young people just before the service and sit in the back, making sure that parents and elders knew they were present. Then when the service was well under way and all eyes were on Reverend Hamill, they would sneak out the door and drive down to the colored church at East Trigg, less than a mile away, where the Reverend Brewster delivered his stirring sermons and Queen C. Anderson and the Brewsteraires were the featured soloists. They reveled in the exotic atmosphere, the music was out of this world—but they could only stay a few minutes, they had to get back to First Assembly before they were missed. Sometimes at night they would come back for the WHBQ broadcast of Camp Meeting of the Air. Often James Blackwood would be present, and Pastor Hamill’s son, Jimmy, and the other Songfellows frequently attended; there was in fact a whole contingent of whites who came to be uplifted by the music and by Dr. Brewster’s eloquence and probity of character. Dr. Brewster constantly preached on the theme that a better day was coming, one in which all men could walk as brothers, while across Memphis Sam Phillips listened on his radio every Sunday without fail, and future Sun producer Jack Clement often attended with his father, a Baptist deacon and choir director, “because it was a happening place, it was heartfelt, that’s what was happening in Memphis.”

  They went to the movies—double features—at least twice a week. A couple of times Elvis took Dixie to Humes. Once he sang a song on the talent show in which he told her he had performed the previous year. He paraded proudly in front of his old schoolmates, put his arm around her, talked with some of the guys that he knew from the Courts, while all the while turning her hand over in his—he didn’t so much want to introduce her into his world as show her off to it. It was a little bit the same when they visited Tupelo. Once they went with Mr. and Mrs. Presley and visited relatives; another time they went down with Elvis’ aunt Clettes and uncle Vester, and once again Elvis showed every respect to his uncles and aunts and cousins down there, but it was definitely a “look at me” kind of thing. He was proud of himself, proud of his clothes, proud of his girl, proud of what he had learned in the city—and why not? In Dixie’s view he had every reason to feel that way about himself.

  Mostly, though, they stayed close to home, didn’t do anything that exotic—it was almost like playing house. Sometimes they would baby-sit for Dixie’s cousins and just sit there and watch TV. Sometimes Mr. and Mrs. Presley would go out, leaving them the house to themselves. Much of the time they stayed in the same North Memphis neighborhood where the Presleys had lived for the past five and a half years. The Suzore No. 2 was just around the corner and was cheaper than any of the movie palaces uptown—even if you did run the risk of finding rats underfoot when the lights came up. Charlie’s Record Shop moved across the street that spring; the bus stopped right in front of it, and sometimes Dixie met Elvis there. Evidently the proprietor and his wife, Helen, had known Elvis for some time, because after a few visits he introduced her to them, and after that they always greeted her in a friendly way, even if Elvis hadn’t arrived yet. There was a jukebox playing all the time and a little soda fountain where you could get a Coke or a NuGrape soda—and then there were the hundreds of 78s, not just the latest hits but r&b hits from years before, too. There were two or three listening booths, and if it wasn’t crowded you could hang around for hours sometimes just listening to the music. That was where Elvis first played her the original of one of the songs he sang all the time, Lonnie Johnson’s “Tomorrow Night.” It was good, but it wasn’t as good as Elvis’. That was where she first heard the original versions of a lot of the songs that he sang, and sometimes if he wanted to try a new one he would ask her for the words, because she always had a good memory for music.

  He seemed to know quite a few of the kids who hung out there, but he never introduced her. He told her about a record he had made a few months before at some little record company out on Union, but he never played it for her, and he never told her that Charlie had put it on the jukebox for a while right in the store, with his name written out in script on the jukebox selection list. Once in a very rare while one or the other of them would actually buy a record—they both had record players at home, and Elvis had a small, treasured collection. Sometimes he would bring some of his favorite records over to her house, and they would just sit there and listen.

  More and more she realized how much he loved music. As spring turned to summer, he would sing to her for hours sometimes, free of the self-consciousness that had plagued him initially, particularly around her family. She didn’t know whether he was singing to her or just singing for the sake of singing, but his face took on a luminous quality, there was a special expression that he had when he was momentarily at rest. At the Presleys’ he was always fooling around on the piano, picking out a tune that they might have heard on the radio—he could play anything after hearing it once or twice, nothing fancy, simply sticking to the melody. Sometimes he would sit at the piano and just sing hymns. Occasionally Gladys might join in, though never Vernon, and Dixie was very self-conscious about her own voice, but they would all gather around the piano in a tight little group, participating if only by their presence and by their approval. “We shared everything, we talked about everything—he would talk to me about things that I’m confident he never would have revealed to anyone else. But nothing was ever said about what he wanted to do. Maybe he had deep ambitions that we didn’t talk about, because in his mind it was so completely alien, but he wasn’t trying to be a musician at night or anything like that. I just thought he was a guy who played the guitar and loved music.”

  He did talk to her about his ambition to join the Songfellows, but that was just a little amateur quartet out of church. At some point that spring he confessed to her that he had auditioned for the group and been turned down—he was deeply disappointed, and even though he told Dixie that the reason they hadn’t taken him was that the guy they thought was going to leave had decided to stay, it seemed obvious that he didn’t believe it. “They told me I couldn’t sing,” he told his father. Jimmy Hamill, the minister’s son, said, “Elvis, why don’t you give it up?” He was hurt, Dixie said, “but it was like, ‘Well, that didn’t work out, let’s go on to the rest of it.’ ”

  Without fail they attended the monthly All-Night Singings at Ellis that the Blackwood Brothers sponsored. They had each gone on their own before they ever met and happily discovered that this was yet another thing they had in common. They loved the Speer Family and the LeFevres out of Atlanta, Wally Fowler never failed to shake the audience up with “Gospel Boogie,” and they thrilled to the Sunshine Boys, featuring the zoom bass of J. D. Sumner, formerly of the Stamps’ Sunny South Quartet. The Statesmen and the Blackwoods both had RCA Victor contracts, and in the spring of 1954 the Blackwood Brothers went up to New York and won the Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts contest, which it seemed everyone in Memphis must have watched. Elvis and Dixie never went backstage at Ellis—they would never have dared, and they had no reason to—but during the intermissions they joined the other fans who clustered around the tables that each group set up to sell their records and songbooks and hung on their every word. They knew James Blackwood, of course; they saw him at church all the time and had great respect for the dignified appearance and professionalism of the group, with their dark suits, precise diction, and carefully worked out harmonies. But it was the Statesmen who remained their favorites—listen to Jake, Elvis would say to Dixie as he hit yet another thrilling high note with that controlled vibrato and the crowd went wild and called for him to do it again. As for Big Chief, he went about as far as you could go, it seemed: the crowd just loved him, they were with him from the moment he first walked out onstage, and when he started in to shaking his leg and dancing around, they just about tore the r
afters off. Pastor Hamill wouldn’t approve, he didn’t think much of quartet singing in any form, despite his son’s participation and the celebrity the Blackwood Brothers lent his church. Good Christian people didn’t seek out that sort of adulation, good Christian people didn’t need to shake their leg and dance the hootchy-koo up onstage, good Christian people were saved by faith, not stardom—but Elvis and Dixie didn’t care. “We were just so impressed with them, we practically worshiped Jake Hess, we were like groupies, I guess, the quartets were like part of our family.”

  They would even go down to WMPS sometimes just to catch the noontime broadcasts that Bob Neal hosted. Dixie had never been to a radio station before, but Elvis was right at home, finding them a seat in the front row, nodding curtly at James Blackwood while looking away from him as if it was accidental—there was never any more contact than that. Elvis couldn’t be still, he was fidgeting constantly, drumming his fingers on the side of the chair, his leg going all the time. It drove Dixie’s mother crazy, she’d ask her if there was something the matter with him, even bring it to Elvis’ attention, and Dixie would defend him without fail, but it embarrassed her, too. She wondered if there was something the matter; she supposed he would grow out of it, she just wished he wouldn’t do it in public. They enjoyed the broadcasts. Sometimes while Bob was doing the commercials James or one of the other Blackwoods would sneak up behind him and comb his hair down over his eyes and the audience would bust out laughing.

  Starting in April they began to go out to Riverside Park every week, two or three times a week, whenever it was warm enough. Sometimes on the weekends they would eat fried chicken on the bluff; McKellar Lake was full of boaters and water-skiers and young couples just having a good time. More often than not, they would double-date with Elvis’ cousin Gene, who was going out off and on with Dixie’s sister Juanita. Elvis and Gene were goofy together—they acted as if they had some kind of joke going on between them all the time, speaking in a kind of private language that no one else could understand, laughing at things that weren’t funny to anyone else. It made Dixie momentarily uncomfortable, as if somehow she were being excluded, as if—despite all the intimacies that they had shared and the ease with which she could have embarrassed him (she thought that Elvis must be the most easily embarrassed boy she had ever met)—as if she were somehow the outsider. But then she remembered the innate sweetness of his nature, the dreams and confidences they shared: “He was not a phony, he was not a put-on, he was not a show-off, and once you were around him long enough to see him be himself, not just act the clown, anyone could see his real self, you could see his sweetness, you could see the humility, you could see the desire to please.” It was just that he and Gene acted funny together sometimes.

  So many nights they ended up at the park, with or without Gene, in a group or by themselves, but whether they came alone or with others it seemed like they always connected with their crowd. They hung out at the pavilion area overlooking the lake, where you could get a Coke or listen to the jukebox and dance at Rocky’s Lakeside refreshment stand, a screened-in area especially for teens. Usually there would be at least ten or twelve couples in the parking lot, and, without too much coaxing, Elvis could always be induced to get his guitar out of the backseat and, leaning up against the car, start to play. “He wasn’t shy, he just had to be asked—I think he just didn’t want to impose. No one else ever did it, no one else had the nerve. He sang songs that were popular and a lot of the old blues-type songs; he did some of the old spirituals, too. You know, it was funny. Right from the start it was as if he had a power over people, it was like they were transformed. It wasn’t that he demanded anybody’s attention, but they certainly reacted that way—it didn’t matter how rough they were or whether they even acted like they were going to be interested or not, they were, once he started singing. Like when Pastor Hamill walked up in the pulpit he commanded everyone’s attention, it was the same thing with Elvis, it was always that way.” Sometimes he would command their attention with a beautiful love song, then change the lyrics to parody the song, but he always kept their attention. “People were just mesmerized, and he loved being the center of attention. I think he could have sung to everybody in the entire city of Memphis and not cared at all.”

  Sometimes they would just park in the lot overlooking the lake and listen to the radio, looking down at the water. They listened to Dewey Phillips playing the rhythm and blues hits on Red Hot and Blue, never country music. They got a big kick out of Dewey’s Dizzy Dean impressions, his constant pitch to his audience to go out and buy a “fur-lined mousetrap,” and his ads for locally brewed Falstaff beer (“If you can’t drink it, freeze it and eat it. If you can’t do that, open up a cotton-picking rib and POUR it in”). “Call Sam!” Dewey repeated at frequent intervals, almost as punctuation for his show—but, for his part, Elvis never spoke to Dixie about Sam; she had practically forgotten about the record that he said he had made, and as far as she was concerned they could just keep coming out to Riverside Park forever, Elvis would go on singing to her and their friends, they would get married someday, and life would go on, just as it was meant to be. Every so often a police car would pass by, sweeping the parking lot with the big beam of its spotlight, making sure no boy was taking unwanted advantage, no girl was going to get in trouble. But there was nothing like that to worry about here. You had two level-headed teenagers listening to Dewey Phillips on the radio who knew when it was time to go home.

  Toward the end of April, Elvis got a new job. He hadn’t been happy with the old one since they made him get a haircut, and the new one on Poplar was just around the corner from the Courts. It involved working for an electrical contractor, Crown Electric, and he was going to be driving a truck, bringing supplies out to the industrial building sites. If he wanted he would have a chance to train as an electrician; it was a long apprenticeship and required going to night school, but the opportunity was there. The owners, Mr. and Mrs. Tipler, seemed very nice—they were warm and considerate and seemed to accept their new employee for who he was.

  In fact, Gladys Tipler had been warned by the lady at the employment office that she might find the new applicant’s appearance a bit off-putting. But, the woman said, he was a good boy, despite his appearance, and the Tiplers were won over by his polite manner and by his clear devotion to his mother. He just wanted to help her, he told them at his job interview on a Monday, and they hired him on the spot, never regretting the decision, although Mrs. Tipler was bemused that he spent so much time on his hair when he arrived in the morning and every time he came back in from a run. She finally sent him to her hairdresser, Blake Johnson, of Blake’s Coiffures at Poplar and Lauderdale, but he would go only after closing time because he was embarrassed. Once in a while at work he might see Paul Burlison, who was well on his way to becoming a master electrician and whom he knew from playing around the Courts and from playing with Dorsey Burnette, yet another employee of Crown. Paul and Dorsey told him about some of the places they played out near the naval base in Millington, and Dorsey told him about one night he had played at Shadow Lawn in Oakland with Johnny Black’s brother Bill, and a guitarist named Scotty Moore, from Gadsden, Tennessee, who had only recently gotten out of the navy himself and was now living in Memphis. There had been a big brawl that night, and Dorsey had gotten stabbed in the tailbone. He and his father and his brother, Johnny, had gone out looking for the guys who had done it, but they never found them. Dorsey and Paul invited Elvis to come out and play with them some night if he felt like it, but he told them he didn’t think so, he was kind of tied up with other things right now, he might be playing out at the Home for Incurables again, and he had a little thing coming up at the Girls’ Club over on Alabama—his voice trailed off in a mumble.

  His paycheck came to forty dollars a week, and every Friday he came home and presented it to his father. It was, Dixie noted with some amazement, almost as if it were Elvis’ responsibility to take care of his dad. “He just took out
enough to last us for the week, fifty cents for gas, a dollar-fifty to get us into the Suzore three times maybe, a little bit extra for food, the rest was for his mom and dad.” There was no reluctance about it whatsoever, it was just the way things were; his parents were getting older, he told Dixie, and he wanted to take care of them. And they were just so proud of him, too—Mrs. Presley bragged on him every chance she got, and it seemed like he was equally proud of the strides he had made, for himself and his family. One time he came to pick Dixie up at her house after work, and they must have been doing a dirty job, because he was a mess, wearing greasy overalls with a hole in them. Dixie’s mother wanted to take a picture of them both, but he hid behind a clothesline so you couldn’t see the clothes he had on.

  One Saturday in mid May Elvis floored Dixie. He had run into a mutual friend, Ronnie Smith, at the Cotton Carnival. Dixie knew Ronald from the neighborhood and from South Side High, but Elvis had met him at a birthday party and discovered a mutual passion for music, as well as for cars and girls. With Ronnie he had played a couple of little gigs (the highlight was a Lodge banquet at the Columbia Mutual Towers on Main), but at sixteen Ronald was also a member of a full-fledged professional band led by Eddie Bond, and, he said, Eddie was looking for a singer. Why didn’t Elvis stop by? He had a tryout that night, Elvis told Dixie excitedly, at a club called the Hi-Hat on South Third, not far from her house. He wondered if she would go with him—he needed her to go with him, they would just stay a little while, then they could go to a movie or McKellar Lake or something.