Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Sometime around the middle of May he started hearing about a young ballad singer with possibilities. There was something different about his voice, Sam said; Sam was interested in trying him out on this new song he had picked up on his latest trip to Nashville to record the Prisonaires. At some point Marion mentioned his name, Elvis Presley—to Scotty it sounded like “a name out of science fiction”—but since Sam kept talking about him, he asked Sam to dig up a telephone number and address, maybe they could get together, maybe this kid really had something. Somehow Sam never seemed to have the information on hand, he always said he’d have Marion look it up the next day, and Scotty was keenly disappointed on this Saturday afternoon to find out that the boy had actually been in the studio just a week before and that they had worked unsuccessfully on the Nashville song. “This particular day,” Scotty said, “it was about five in the afternoon—Marion was having coffee with us, and Sam said, ‘Get his name and phone number out of the file.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Why don’t you give him a call and get him to come over to your house and see what you think of him?’ Bill Black lived just three doors down from me on Belz that ran into Firestone—I had actually moved just to be near Bill—and Sam said, ‘You and Bill can just give him a listen, kind of feel him out.’ ”

  Scotty called Elvis that evening, right after supper. His mother answered and said that Elvis was at the movies, at the Suzore No. 2. Scotty said that he “represented Sun Records,” and Mrs. Presley said that she would get him out of the movies. There was a call back within an hour; Scotty explained who he was and what he wanted to do. The boy seemed to take it all in stride—his voice sounded confident enough, but wary. “I told him I was working with Sam Phillips and possibly would like to audition him if he was interested, and he said he guessed so. So we made an appointment for the next day at my house.”

  On Sunday, July 4, Elvis showed up at Scotty’s house on Belz in his old Lincoln. He was wearing a black shirt, pink pants with a black stripe, white shoes, and a greasy ducktail, and asked “Is this the right place?” when Scotty’s wife, Bobbie, answered the door. Bobbie asked him to have a seat and went to get Scotty. “I said, ‘That boy is here.’ He said, ‘What boy?’ I said, ‘I can’t remember his name, it’s the one you’re supposed to see today.’ Scotty asked me to go down to Bill’s house and see if Bill would come practice with them—Bill’s bass was already in our apartment, because Bill and Evelyn had two kids, and there was more room there.”

  After a few minutes of awkward small talk, Bill showed up and they got down to business. Elvis hunched over his guitar and mumbled something about not really knowing what to play, then launched into disconnected fragments, seemingly, of every song he knew. Scotty and Bill fell in behind him on numbers like Billy Eckstine’s “I Apologize”; the Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care”; “Tomorrow Night”; Eddy Arnold’s latest hit, “I Really Don’t Want to Know”; Hank Snow’s “I Don’t Hurt Anymore”; and a Dean Martin–styled version of Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me.” They were all ballads, all sung in a yearning, quavery tenor that didn’t seem ready to settle anywhere soon and accompanied by the most rudimentary strummed guitar. At some point Bill flopped down on the sofa, and there was some talk about how Elvis lived on Alabama, just across from Bill’s mother, and how Elvis knew Bill’s brother Johnny. Bill, the most affable man in the world and the clown of the Starlite Wranglers (“He never met a stranger,” Scotty has said in seeking to describe him), said he had heard from Johnny just the other day, Johnny had been in Corpus Christi since he got laid off from Firestone. They talked a little about the football games down at the Triangle, and Bill said it was funny they had never formally met before, but, of course, he had left home before the Presleys moved into the Courts, he had gone into the army at eighteen, and when he got out in 1946 he was already married. There were a lot of musicians in Memphis, and you couldn’t know them all—Elvis didn’t happen to know a guitar player named Luther Perkins who lived just around the corner, did he? Elvis met all of Bill’s attempts at conversation with perfunctory nods and stammered little asides of agreement that you could barely make out—he was polite enough, but it was almost as if he was filled with a need to say something that couldn’t find proper expression, and he couldn’t stop fidgeting. “He was as green as a gourd,” Scotty would recall, with amusement, as his reaction at the time.

  When Bobbie came back with Evelyn and Bill’s sister, Mary Ann, they were still playing, but “all of a sudden there was a crowd, we probably scared Elvis,” said Bobbie. “It was almost all slow ballads. ‘I Love You Because’ is the one that I remember.” Eventually Elvis left, trailing clouds of oily smoke behind him in the humpbacked old Lincoln. “What’d you think?” Scotty asked, hoping that Bill might have seen something in the boy that he didn’t. “Well, he didn’t impress me too damn much,” said Bill. “Snotty-nosed kid coming in here with those wild clothes and everything.” But what about his singing? Scotty asked, almost desperately—he wanted the kid to be good for reasons that he didn’t even care to examine. “Well, it was all right, nothing out of the ordinary—I mean, the cat can sing….”

  That was Scotty’s opinion, too. It was all right, nothing special—he couldn’t see where the boy had added all that much to the songs that he had sung; Scotty didn’t think he was going to make the world forget about Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. But he called Sam anyway, what else was he going to do after making such a fuss about meeting the kid? What did you think? Sam asked.

  “I said, ‘He didn’t really knock me out.’ I said, ‘The boy’s got a good voice.’ I told him a lot of the songs he sang. Sam said, ‘Well, I think I’ll call him, get him to come down to the studio tomorrow, we’ll just set up an audition and see what he sounds like coming back off of tape.’ I said, ‘Shall we bring in the whole band?’ And he said, ‘Naw, just you and Bill come over, just something for a little rhythm. No use making a big deal about it.’ ”

  The next night everybody showed up around 7:00. There was some desultory small talk, Bill and Scotty joked nervously among themselves, and Sam tried to make the boy feel at ease, carefully observing the way in which he both withheld himself and tried to thrust himself into the conversation at the same time. He reminded Sam so much of some of the blues singers he had recorded, simultaneously proud and needy. At last, after a few minutes of aimless chatter and letting them all get a little bit used to being in the studio, Sam turned to the boy and said, “Well, what do you want to sing?” This occasioned even more self-conscious confusion as the three musicians tried to come up with something that they all knew and could play—all the way through—but after a number of false starts, they finally settled on “Harbor Lights,” which had been a big hit for Bing Crosby in 1950, and worked it through to the end, then tried Leon Payne’s “I Love You Because,” a beautiful country ballad that had been a number-one country hit for its author in 1949 and a number-two hit for Ernest Tubb on the hillbilly charts the same year. They tried up to a dozen takes, running through the song again and again—sometimes the boy led off with several bars of whistling, sometimes he simply launched into the verse. The recitation altered slightly each time that he repeated it, but each time he flung himself into it, seemingly trying to make it new. Sometimes he simply blurted out the words, sometimes his singing voice shifted to a thin, pinched, almost nasal tone before returning to the high, keening tenor in which he sang the rest of the song—it was as if, Sam thought, he wanted to put everything he had ever known or heard into one song. And Scotty’s guitar part was too damn complicated, he was trying too damn hard to sound like Chet Atkins, but there was that strange sense of inconsolable desire in the voice, there was emotion being communicated.

  Sam sat in the control room, tapping his fingers absentmindedly on the console. All his attention was focused on the studio, on the interaction of the musicians, the sound they were getting, the feeling that was behind the sound. Every so often he would come out and change a mike placement slightl
y, talk with the boy a little, not just to bullshit with him but to make him feel at home, to try to make him feel really at home. It was always a question of how long you could go on like this, you wanted the artist to get familiar with the studio, but being in the studio could take on a kind of mind-numbing quality of its own, it could smooth over the rough edges, you could take refuge in the little space that you had created for yourself and banish the very element of spontaneity you were seeking to achieve.

  For Elvis it seemed like it had been going on for hours, and he began to get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen. When Mr. Phillips had called, he had taken the news calmly to begin with, he had tried to banish all thoughts of results or consequences, but now it seemed as if he could think of nothing else. He was getting more and more frustrated, he flung himself desperately into each new version of “I Love You Because,” trying to make it live, trying to make it new, but he saw his chances slipping away as they returned to the beginning of the song over and over again with numbing familiarity….

  Finally they decided to take a break—it was late, and everybody had to work the next day. Maybe they ought to just give it up for the night, come back on Tuesday and try it again. Scotty and Bill were sipping Cokes, not saying much of anything, Mr. Phillips was doing something in the control room, and, as Elvis explained it afterward, “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around with [it].” It was a song that he told Johnny Black he had written when he sang it in the Courts, and Johnny believed him. The song was “That’s All Right [Mama],” an old blues number by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup.

  “All of a sudden,” said Scotty, “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open—I don’t know, he was either editing some tape, or doing something—and he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’ ”

  SAM RECOGNIZED IT right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup—nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies.” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded—it was “different,” it was itself.

  They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes—“Simplify, simplify!” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the damn studio!” He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!” And yet that wasn’t it either—it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”

  They worked on it over and over, refining the song, but the center never changed. It always opened with the ringing sound of Elvis’ rhythm guitar, up till this moment almost a handicap to be gotten over. Then there was Elvis’ vocal, loose and free and full of confidence, holding it together. And Scotty and Bill just fell in with an easy, swinging gait that was the very epitome of what Sam had dreamt of but never fully imagined. The first time Sam played it back for them, “we couldn’t believe it was us,” said Bill. “It just sounded sort of raw and ragged,” said Scotty. “We thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so completely different. But it just really flipped Sam—he felt it really had something. We just sort of shook our heads and said, ‘Well, that’s fine, but good God, they’ll run us out of town!’ ” And Elvis? Elvis flung himself into the recording process. You only have to listen to the tape to hear the confidence grow. By the last take (only two false starts and one complete alternate take remain), there is a different singer in the studio than the one who started out the evening—nothing had been said, nothing had been articulated, but everything had changed.

  Sam Phillips sat in the studio after the session was over and everyone had gone home. It was not unusual for him to hang around until two or three in the morning, sometimes recording, sometimes just thinking about what was going to become of his business and his family in these perilous times, sometimes mulling over his vision of the future. He knew that something was in the wind. He knew from his experience recording blues, and from his fascination with black culture, that there was something intrinsic to the music that could translate, that did translate. “It got so you could sell a half million copies of a rhythm and blues record,” Sam told a Memphis reporter in 1959, reminiscing about his overnight success. “These records appealed to white youngsters just as Uncle Silas [Payne’s] songs and stories used to appeal to me…. But there was something in many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music. The Southern ones especially felt a resistance that even they probably didn’t quite understand. They liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not. So I got to thinking how many records you could sell if you could find white performers who could play and sing in this same exciting, alive way.”

  The next night everyone came to the studio, but nothing much happened. They tried a number of different songs—they even gave the Rodgers and Hart standard “Blue Moon” (a 1949 hit for Billy Eckstine) a passing try—but nothing really clicked, and both that evening and the next were spent in more or less getting to know one another musically. Nonetheless, Sam had little doubt of what had transpired in the studio that first night. There was always the question of whether or not it was a fluke; as far as that went, only time would tell. But Sam Phillips was never one to hold back, when he believed in something he just plunged ahead. And so, on Wednesday night, after calling an early halt to the proceedings, he telephoned Dewey Phillips down at the new WHBQ studio in the Hotel Chisca. “Get yourself a wheelbarrow full of goober dust,” Dewey was very likely announcing when Sam made the call, “and roll it in the door [of whatever sponsor Dewey happened to be representing], and tell ’em Phillips sent you. And call Sam!”

  DEWEY PHILLIPS in 1954 was very nearly at the apogee of his renown and glory. From a fifteen-minute unpaid spot that he had talked his way into while managing the record department at W. T. Grant’s, he had graduated to a 9:00-to-midnight slot six nights a week. According to the Memphis papers he would get as many as three thousand letters a week and forty to fifty telegrams a night, a measure not just of his audience but of the fervor of that audience. When, a year or two later, he asked his listeners to blow their horns at 10:00 in the evening, the whole city, it was said, erupted with a single sound, and when the police chief, who was also listening, called to remind Dewey of Memphis’ antinoise ordinance and begged him not to do it again, Dewey announced on the air, “Well, good people, Chief MacDonald just called me, and he said we can’t do that anymore. Now I was going to have you do it at eleven o’clock, but the chief told me we couldn’t do it, so whatever you do at eleven o’clock, don’t blow your horns.” The results were predictable.

  One night an assistant started a fire in the wastebasket and convinced Dewey that the hotel was on fire, but Dewey, a hero of the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, kept right on broadcasting, directing the fire department down to the station and staying on the air until the hoax was discovered. He broadcast in stereo before stereo was i
nvented, playing the same record on two turntables which never started or ended together, creating a phased effect that pleased Dewey unless it got so far out of line that he took the needle off both records with a scrawk and announced that he was just going to have to start all over and try it again.

  WDIA DJ and r&b singer Rufus Thomas referred to Dewey as “a man who just happened to be white,” and he never lost his Negro audience, even after the white teenage audience that Sam sensed out there made itself known. He went everywhere in Memphis, paraded proudly down Beale Street, greeted the same people who, the Commercial Appeal reported in 1950, had flocked to Grant’s “just to see the man ‘what gets hisself so messed up.’ ” He had several chances to go national but passed them up—or allowed them to pass him up—by remaining himself. There were two kinds of people in Memphis, the Press-Scimitar declared in 1956, “those who are amused and fascinated by Dewey, and those who, when they accidentally tune in, jump as tho stung by a wasp and hurriedly switch to something nice and cultural, like Guy Lombardo.” “He was a genius,” said Sam Phillips, “and I don’t call many people geniuses.”

  DEWEY STOPPED BY the recording studio after his show. It was well after midnight, but that was as good a time as any for Dewey. “Dewey [was] completely unpredictable,” wrote Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson, his (and Sam’s) friend, in various celebrations of his spirit over the years. “He would call at three or four A.M. and insist I listen to something over the phone. I tried to tell him it was no time to be phoning anyone, but Dewey had no sense of time. Sometimes I wonder if there is a real Dewey, or if he’s just something that happens as he goes along.” If he was a personality that just unfolded, though, it was because he cared so much about what he was doing. Whatever Dewey did, everyone agreed, was from the heart. Ordinarily, when he stopped by the studio, all he could talk about at first was the show. “Oh God, he loved his show,” Sam Phillips said. “He wasn’t just playing records and cutting the monitor down. He was enjoying everything he said, every record that he played, every response that he got from his listeners. Dewey could get more excited than anyone you ever saw.” And he loved to argue with Sam. To Marion Keisker, Sam and Dewey were so close that she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with the two of them—and it wasn’t just that she saw Dewey as a bad influence (though she did). She was also, she admitted, jealous; she saw Dewey as a threat. “Dewey loved to argue with Sam, just for the sake of arguing,” recalled the singer Dickey Lee. “Talking about how Sam can intimidate people, one night Sam was off on one of his tirades, and right in the middle Dewey had a rubber band and snapped it at Sam and hit him in the head. He thought it was the funniest thing. Sam would get so mad at Dewey, but he loved him. Dewey always referred to Sam as his half brother, even though they weren’t related at all.”