Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  They left not long afterward and wandered down the hill to 417 Broadway, the location of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where they were scheduled to play the famous Midnight Jamboree (the Jamboree went on the air live from the record store at the conclusion of the Opry broadcast). Their first impression of the shop was how small it was, but maybe that was just because of how crammed it was with record bins and all the people who had already arrived for the start of the broadcast. Someone introduced Elvis to Ernest Tubb, and Tubb, the most gracious and courteous of entertainers, listened patiently as the nineteen-year-old poured out his love for Tubb’s music and told him that it was his real ambition to sing country music. “He said, ‘They tell me if I’m going to make any money, though, I’ve got to sing [this other kind of music]. What should I do?’ I said, ‘Elvis, you ever have any money?’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, you just go ahead and do what they tell you to do. Make your money. Then you can do what you want to do.’ ”

  Scotty and Bill headed back to Memphis with their errant wives after the broadcast. They felt simultaneously elated and depressed (they had made it to the big time, even if they were now in all likelihood on the road to oblivion), but for Sam Phillips the evening was an unmitigated triumph. To play the Opry—and then to get approval, however grudging, from Jim Denny and Bill Monroe! Even the criticism would not hurt. It could be used, Sam was firmly convinced, to further the boy’s appeal—if he could just turn around some of this damn rejection he was getting, if he could just straighten out some of the wrongheaded thinking he was encountering, the blind could be made to see, the lame could be made to walk. “I needed the attention that I got from the people that hated what I was doing, that acted like: ‘Here is somebody trying to thrust junk on us and classify it as our music.’ Well, fuck them, let them do the classifying. I just had to peak that damn pyramid, or else the damn sonofabitch would have fallen down.” And with Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips was sure he had the means to peak the pyramid.

  ELVIS PRESLEY’S second Sun single was released on the Monday before his Opry appearance. It was, if anything, an even bolder declaration of intent than the first, especially the strident blues number “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” which rocked more confidently than anything they could have imagined in those first, uncertain days in the studio. Maybe Sam still couldn’t diagram the path, but, he felt, they were finally beginning to find their way to “that damn row that hadn’t been plowed.”

  They had seized every opportunity they could to get into the studio all through August, but Sam was on the road so much, and the band was working so many weekends (while still holding down full-time jobs), that this was easier said than accomplished. On August 19 they spent hours doing take after take of “Blue Moon,” in an eerie, clippity-clop version that resembled a cross between Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” and some of the falsetto flights of the r&b “bird” groups (the Orioles, the Ravens, the Larks). After it was all over, Sam wasn’t satisfied that they had anything worth releasing, but he never uttered a word of demurral for fear of discouraging the unfettered freshness and enthusiasm of the singer. “The sessions would go on and on,” said Marion Keisker, “each record was sweated out. Sam showed patience beyond belief—in a personality that’s not really given to patience.”

  The problem did not appear to have so much to do with time, in any case, as with confidence and direction. They had captured the ring once, seemingly by accident, but now no one appeared to have a clear vision of how to capture it again, and Sam was reluctant to impose his own. “I had a mental picture, as sure as God is on His throne I had a mental picture of what I wanted to hear, certainly not note for note, but I knew the essence of what we were trying to do. But I also knew that the worst thing I could do was to be impatient, to try to force the issue—sometimes you can make a suggestion just [to change] one bar and you kill the whole song. And sometimes you can be too cocky around people who are insecure and just intimidate them. I mean, as far as actually saying, ‘Hey, man, don’t be scared,’ I’ve never told anybody in my life not to be scared of the microphone—don’t go calling attention to the thing you know they are already scared of. I was never a real forward person, because I didn’t give a damn about jumping out in front to be seen, but I tried to envelop them in my feelings of security.”

  Over the course of the next few weeks they made several attempts at “Satisfied,” Martha Carson’s rousing spiritual hit from 1951, and “Tomorrow Night,” the Lonnie Johnson blues ballad which Elvis had crooned so often to Dixie. They made any number of false starts on other tunes, all of them erased because tape was expensive, after all, and they just weren’t going anywhere. The slow numbers, Sam said, “would hang you out to dry,” but he was determined to give Elvis’ creative imagination free play. He was equally determined, said Marion, not to release anything even a jot below the standard they had already set; he wanted to be sure he had done all that he could to make every record as good as it was “humanly possible to make it.” From Sam’s point of view: “I wanted simplicity, where we could look at what we were hearing mentally and say, ‘Man, this guy has just got it.’ But I wanted some biting bullshit, too. Everything had to be a stinger. To me every one of those sessions was like I was filming Gone With the Wind.”

  Finally, starting on September 10, they hit a streak—once again it seemed almost as if they had stumbled onto it by accident, but when they did it was, as Sam Phillips said, as if it had been waiting for them all along. They cut “Just Because,” a rollicking, honky-tonk blues which the Shelton Brothers had originally recorded as the Lone Star Cowboys in 1933. The great good humor and burbling effervescence of the new trio version can be traced in equal parts to the singer’s confident exploitation of his gospel-learned technique (here for the first time we hear the characteristic Presley drop to a slurred lower register), Bill Black’s almost comically thumping bass, and Scotty’s increasingly rhythm-driven guitar. “It was almost a total rhythm thing,” Scotty said. “With only the three of us we had to make every note count.” Although Sam never released this cut or the next one either, a weepy version of Jimmy Wakely’s 1941 “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)” with a tagged-on, double-time ending, both are characterized by the kind of playfulness and adventurousness of spirit that Sam was looking for, the fresh, almost “impudent” attitude that he was seeking to unlock.

  With “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” an even more unlikely transformation took place. Originally written for the Disney animated feature Cinderella by Mack David, brother of the celebrated pop composer Hal David (Mack himself wrote such well-known songs as “Bippidi Bobbidi Boo” and “La Vie en Rose”), the song didn’t make the film score’s final cut, but it was popularized in 1950 by Patti Page and by Dean Martin in conjunction with Paul Weston and His Dixie Eight. The rhythmic approach couldn’t have been more different, but it was Martin’s version on which Elvis’ is clearly based; for all the energy that Elvis, Scotty, and Bill impart to the song, and for all the high spirits of Elvis’ vocalizing, it is Martin’s lazily insouciant spirit that comes through. It’s as if Dennis the Menace met the drawling English character actor George Sanders. “That’s what he heard in Dean,” said Sam, who was well aware of Martin’s influence, “that little bit of mischievousness that he had in his soul when he cut up a little bit—[that’s why] he loved Dean Martin’s singing.”

  With the last song of the session, Wynonie Harris’ r&b classic “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” everything finally fell into place. By this time everyone may have been getting a little testy, and no one was really sure whether they had anything or not, but as Scotty said, “Sam had an uncanny knack for pulling stuff out of you. Once you got a direction, he’d work you so hard you’d work your butt off, he’d make you so mad you’d want to kill him, but he wouldn’t let go until he got that little something extra sometimes you didn’t even know you had.” He would insist that they play nothing but rhythm, he would have them change keys just when the
y finally got used to the one they were in, and he called for tempos so slow sometimes that everyone was ready to scream. “A lot of times it was a tempo that I absolutely knew they weren’t going to like, but we were in a situation where we just weren’t getting anywhere, and when they came back [to the original tempo], it was like they’d hit a home run.”

  To Marion Keisker it was like a puzzle to which only Sam had the key. “I still remember the times when everyone would be so tired, and then some little funny thing would set us off—I’d see Elvis literally rolling around on the floor, and Bill Black just stretched out with his old broken-down bass fiddle, just laughing and goofing off. It was a great spirit of—I don’t know, everyone was trying very hard, but everyone was trying to hang very loose through the whole thing. [Sometimes] if Elvis would do something absolutely extraordinary and somebody would hit a clinker or something would go wrong before the tape was completed, Sam would say, ‘Well, let’s go back, and you hold on to what you did there. I want that.’ And Elvis would say, ‘What did I do? What did I do?’ Because it was all so instinctive that he simply didn’t know.”

  Sam’s one organizing principle was that it had to be fun. “I could tolerate anything, we could have tensions as long as I knew that we all had confidence in what we were trying to do, and I could get everybody relaxed to the point where they could hear and react to something without that threshold of apprehension where you almost get to a point where you can’t do anything right. Every time we did a number I wanted to make sure to the best of my ability that everybody enjoyed it.”

  In the case of this final number, that sense of enjoyment comes through from the very first note, as Elvis’ voice takes on a burr of aggression that is missing from the previous recordings, the band for the first time becomes the fused rhythm instrument that Sam had been seeking all along, and there is a sense of driving, high-flying good times almost in defiance of societal norms. “Have you heard the news?” is the opening declaration, drawn out and dramatic. “There’s good rocking tonight.”

  The other dramatic element to declare itself was the quality that Sam thought he had sensed in Elvis from the start, that strange, unexpected impulse that had led the boy to launch himself into “That’s All Right, Mama” in the first place—it seemed to come out of nowhere, and yet, Sam felt, he heard something of the same feeling in the sentimental ballads, too. He equated the insecurity that came through so unmistakably in the boy’s stance and demeanor with the sense of inferiority—social, psychological, perceptual—that was projected by the great Negro talents he had sought out and recorded. Sam couldn’t be sure, he thought he sensed in Elvis a kindred spirit, someone who shared with him a secret, almost subversive attraction not just to black music but to black culture, to an inchoate striving, a belief in the equality of man. This was something that Sam felt could never be articulated; each man was doomed to stumble in his own darkness, if only because the stakes were so high.

  “I had to keep my nose clean. They could have said, ‘This goddam rebel down here is gonna turn his back on us. Why should we give this nigger-loving sonofabitch a break?’ It took some subtle thinking on my part—I’m telling you [some] resolute facts here. But I had the ability to be patient. I was able to hold on almost with a religious fervor, but definitely subdued—I wasn’t looking for no tall stumps to preach from. And I sensed in him the same kind of empathy. I don’t think he was aware of my motivation for doing what I was trying to do—not consciously anyway—but intuitively he felt it. I never discussed it—I don’t think it would have been very wise to talk about it, for me to say, ‘Hey, man, we’re going against—.’ Or, ‘We’re trying to put pop music down and bring in black—.’ The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to be one of the biggest things that ever could have happened to us, though. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music—but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think? I went out into this no-man’s-land, and I knocked the shit out of the color line.”

  Sam knew that he had found a kindred spirit in other ways as well. Over the course of the next month, as he worked at trying to set up the Opry appearance, as he took around an acetate of the new single and encountered the same resistance in Nashville from old friends like WLAC DJ Gene Nobles and one-stop record distributors Randy Wood and Ernie Young, all strictly rhythm and blues men, he nevertheless knew that his instincts had not been wrong. Getting to know the boy a little better, getting him to open up a little more, having the chance to talk to him not just about music but about life and love and women, he sensed a potential that even he had not fully anticipated. “I was amazed. Here I am twelve years older than him, I’m thirty-one and he’s nineteen, and I’ve been exposed to all kinds of music and lived through the damn Depression, and yet he had the most intuitive ability to hear songs without ever having to classify them, or himself, of anyone I’ve ever known outside of Jerry Lee Lewis and myself. It seemed like he had a photographic memory for every damn song he ever heard—and he was one of the most introspective human beings that I’ve ever met. You see, Elvis Presley knew what it was like to be poor, but that damn sure didn’t make him prejudiced. He didn’t draw any lines. And like [Billboard editor] Paul Ackerman said, you have to be an awful smart person or dumb as hell (and you know he wasn’t dumb) to put out that kind of thinking.”

  Elvis Presley, our homegrown hillbilly singer, is continuing his swift, steady stride toward national prominence in the rural rhythm field. Latest honor to come his way is as guest performer with the Louisiana Hayride, to be broadcast Saturday night over KWKH, Shreveport. Louisiana Hayride is about the second or third most popular hillbilly program on the air. The tops is Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry, which never takes anyone but long-established stars in the country music field. But Presley has already appeared on the Grand Ole Opry—on October 2—and neither customers nor fellow performers wanted him to quit. It is unprecedented for Grand Ole Opry to take a performer on the basis of a single record, which is what Presley had until two weeks ago.

  —Memphis Commercial Appeal, October 14, 1954

  SAM CALLED PAPPY COVINGTON, the talent booker for the Hayride, on the Monday after the Opry appearance. They settled on a date less than two weeks away, both because that suited Sam’s purposes and because Tillman Franks, who had made the contact for Pappy in the first place, had a chance to book his act, Jimmy and Johnny, into the Eddy County Barn Dance in Carlsbad, New Mexico, if he could find a replacement for them on the Hayride. Jimmy and Johnny had the number-three hillbilly hit in the country on Chicago’s Chess Records, and Tillman had been offered $500 by Carlsbad promoter Ray Schaffer (as opposed to $24 apiece, Hayride scale). As a result Tillman approached Hayride director Horace Logan about this singer he had heard on T. Tommy Cutrer’s program on KCIJ. Tillman had thought the singer was black, and so had Horace, the flamboyant, pistol-toting MC of the Hayride, when Tillman played the record for him. But T. Tommy, who was playing the record only as a favor to Sam Phillips after Sam came through town a couple of months before (the two men knew each other from T.’s brief stint with WREC just after the war), quickly disabused Horace and Tillman of the notion: after all, hadn’t Slim Whitman and Billy Walker shared the same stage with the boy in Memphis? And Tillman, a pepper pot of a man possessed of the greatest enthusiasm and love for the music (he had already managed, and lost, Webb Pierce and Bill Carlisle, helped guide Slim Whitman’s career, and would go on to manage Johnny Horton while continuing to play bass on the Hayride), got Pappy Covington to take it from there.

  The Hayride was a little over six years old at this point. It had been predated by a similar program, the KWKH Saturday Night Roundup, before the war and, as the Commercial Appeal stated, was probably the second most popular hillbilly program on the air, with a 50,000-watt clear-channel signal that rivaled the Opry’s, reaching up to twenty-eight states, and a CBS hookup that enabled it to reach 198 stations for an hour the third Saturday of every month. The hallmark of the Hayride was in
novation, and it was as the Opry’s brash younger cousin that the Hayride really made its mark. Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, the Carlisles, David Houston, Jim Reeves, all debuted on the Hayride before eventually lighting out for Nashville, and under the leadership of Horace Logan it continued to be a haven for new talent, fast-paced variety, and new directions. The Hayride audiences in the thirty-eight-hundred-seat Municipal Auditorium showed the same kind of enthusiasm as the performers, and Logan placed microphones out among the crowd to register their reaction, whether to something that was going out over the air or to longtime announcer Ray Bartlett (who broadcast during the day as rhythm and blues DJ Groovey Boy) doing unrestrained somersaults and back flips onstage. Shreveport was a lively music town, just on the cusp of oil affluence and with the kind of unassuming racial mix (nothing like desegregation, of course, but with two populations living cheek by jowl, locked in an inescapable cultural alliance) that gave Memphis its own musical flavor. The Hayride had everything, in fact, except an aggressive booking agency to support its acts (Pappy Covington had the job only because he had a lease on the building) and record companies to sign them. This was the principal reason for the one-way migration to Nashville, but in the fall of 1954 it looked as if the supply of new talent might be inexhaustible, and the Hayride had grown accustomed to thumbing its nose at the Opry, which Horace Logan referred to frequently on the air as “the Tennessee branch of the Hayride.”

  Sam, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill set out for Shreveport, a good seven- or eight-hour ride from Memphis, not long after the boys got off work at their regular Friday-night gig at the Eagle’s Nest. They missed the turnoff at Greenville, Mississippi, because Bill had everybody laughing so hard at one of his jokes, and then Scotty almost hit a team of mules as they struggled to make up the time. When they finally got to Shreveport, they checked into the Captain Shreve Hotel downtown—they got a big double room and a smaller adjoining room—and then they had to wait forever while Elvis combed his hair. Sam took the boys around to meet Pappy, who made them feel “like four hundred million dollars, just this kindly, fatherly old man who made you feel like you were the greatest thing that could ever walk into his office. I thought that was the best thing that could happen for these young men and even myself.” From there he and Elvis went and paid their respects to T. Tommy, who had until recently been laid up from an automobile accident in which he had lost a leg, though he continued to broadcast from his bed at home. Elvis was wearing a typical black and pink outfit and, according to T.Tommy, “his hair was long and greasy and he didn’t look clean. My wife commented afterwards, she said, ‘That boy needs to wash his neck.’ ” T. Tommy, a highly astute, charming, and capable man who kept up a little band of his own at the time and went on to become a Tennessee state senator and a top Teamster official, still had doubts about how far this boy was going to go, and Elvis scarcely opened his mouth the whole time, but Sam was such a believer, and T. Tommy was nothing if not a pragmatist, so he figured, Well, let’s just see where it goes.