Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  The reaction to Elvis’ Hoedown appearance was good, and he was held over “by popular demand” for two additional nights, but to Biff the nature of his act was about the same as what he had observed in Memphis. The repertoire was extremely limited, and the boy was obviously just learning the ropes, though by now Biff Collie was beginning to see the light, even if he wasn’t sure exactly why. “I said, ‘Don’t you do any slow songs?’ He said, ‘I don’t… I don’t… I like to do these things because they make me feel good, you know.’ I said, ‘Yeah, they like this stuff that you are doing pretty good, it seems like, but this rhythm and blues stuff is not going to stay forever. You really need to sing some slow songs.’ His reaction was, ‘I don’t like… I don’t… I just like to sing… You know, they make me feel good.’

  “That night after we were through we went across the street to Stuart’s Drive Inn restaurant, and we sat down at a booth and ordered something, and I saw Sonny Stuart come through. His dad was the boss, and he was learning the business at the time. And I winked at him and said, ‘Just for fun, get the girl upstairs on the PA to page Elvis Presley.’ He said, ‘How do you spell that?’ And they did it three or four times over a period of fifteen minutes, and, obviously, nothing happened. Nothing at all. And I remember telling Elvis that night, ‘One of these days you’ll have to have somebody to keep you from getting run over.’ And that was—again, it was not because of what he had done there. I just felt like something was going to happen.”

  The next day Elvis sent a telegram home from Houston. “HI BABIES,” it read. “HERE’S THE MONEY TO PAY THE BILLS. DON’T TELL NO ONE HOW MUCH I SENT I WILL SEND MORE NEXT WEEK. THERE IS A CARD IN THE MAIL. LOVE ELVIS.”

  MEANWHILE, Bob Neal was looking on his new project with increasing enthusiasm; the idea of becoming Elvis Presley’s full-fledged manager was beginning to appeal to him more and more. The few dates that they had done together only confirmed his view of the boy’s potential. So did the reports that kept coming in from Louisiana and East Texas. And while they had not yet signed any official papers, there was no question in his mind that this was an experiment that could fail only if he chose to walk away from it. Here at last was an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something instead of just signing on to another Nashville package promotion; it could be a chance of going all the way to the top.

  Because that was where Bob Neal quickly judged this kid was heading. Not much older than Bob’s oldest boy, Sonny, and, seemingly, without the ability to articulate what it was he was really looking for, the kid seemed to possess as unerring an instinct for how to connect with an audience—as well as the fierce drive and determination to accomplish it—as Neal had seen in his dozen years in radio and four or five years of serious promotion. In the parts of Mississippi and Arkansas where the Hayride signal came in strongest, he seemed to practically explode, coming out onstage like a sprinter out of the starting blocks, with an energy and a crackling enthusiasm that could barely be contained. In places where he was less well known, on the other hand, “they didn’t know exactly how to take him, they just didn’t know what to do. Sometimes they were a very quiet audience. A lot of them would come out to the shows because they had been followers of my radio show, and it was a little frustrating to Elvis sometimes. They would gather around to ask me about my family and my kids and so forth, and they would more or less ignore Elvis. [But] the more they sat on their hands, the harder he worked to break them up. His show developed in that sometimes if he was onstage and just through some accidental movement there would be a big scream or reaction, he would automatically remember. On the other hand, if he devised something and got a dead reaction, he would never worry about it, he would drop it and go on to something else. It was just as automatic as breathing to him.”

  Nearly as important as this natural gift, though, were the two men who made up the remaining two thirds of the trio. They may not have been the best musicians in the world, but Elvis felt perfectly at ease with them, and in those rare instances when his own instincts failed, Bill’s always took over. These were country audiences they were playing for, and Bill’s rough-hewn humor and memory for old Opry routines, in addition to a thoroughly ingratiating personality, always stood him in good stead. Sometimes Bill would come out of the audience dressed like a hobo and yelling, “Wait a minute, I want to play with y’all. I can play just as good as you can!” Other times he might brandish an oversize pair of bloomers that Bobbie and Evelyn had bought for the act or black out his front teeth or tell one of the old jokes about Rotterdam (“Rotterdam socks off!” was the punch line), and the audience always went crazy when he rode that bass, egging Elvis on with both arms uplifted and the bass between his legs like a Brahma bull. He could save Elvis, too, if the boy got too far out on a limb or misjudged the audience for its tolerance of his novelty, vulgarity, or simply his bad jokes. “On some of the early shows,” said Scotty, whose unassailable calm and ability to deal with any crisis that came up were just as integral a part of the whole experience, “if it hadn’t been for Bill, we would have fallen flat on our face. Because Elvis was such an oddity, if you will, when people first saw him, they were practically in shock. But Bill’s antics loosened them up.”

  Admission, generally, was $1 for adults, 50 cents for children, with 10 percent retained for expenses and 15 percent taken off the top, after the local sponsor or Kiwanis Club had been paid. Sometimes there might be as much as $300 to divide, with $45 going to Bob and the rest split 50–25–25 between Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. Just as often there was less, but one or two commissions of $25 to $45 a week were a nice supplement to a comfortable DJ’s salary, and if you added up all the little side benefits that a popular radio personality was heir to, it didn’t make for a bad living.

  There were any number of other signs that business was likely to pick up in the near future. Billboard magazine noted that the records were still ping-ponging around on the charts (the week of November 17, “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was number five in Memphis and “Good Rockin’ Tonight” number eight), while in a DJ poll Elvis Presley was named eighth Most Promising C&W Artist behind Tommy Collins, Justin Tubb, Jimmy and Johnny, the Browns, and Jimmy Newman, among others. Meanwhile Bob Neal announced his own third annual listeners’ poll, which had Elvis in tenth position behind such country stalwarts as Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Ray Price, Hank Snow, and Kitty Wells. The December 11 issue of Billboard reported in its “Folk Talent and Tunes” column that “the hottest piece of merchandise on the… Louisiana Hayride at the moment is Elvis Presley, the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat,” while Marty Robbins recorded a creditable country version of “That’s All Right” for Columbia on December 7.

  What struck Neal most of all, though, was the boy’s ambition, something he might have missed altogether if it hadn’t been for his wife. Sometimes coming back from the shows, on the drive home to Memphis, Elvis would ride with Bob and Helen, so that Bob, who had his 5:00 A.M. show coming up practically as soon as they got into town, could catch some sleep. Elvis would talk to Helen then in a way that he didn’t seem able to talk to Bob, or even to Scotty and Bill—he would reveal himself in fragments that Neal would catch in moments between wakefulness and sleep or as Helen would describe it to him afterward. “He would talk about his aspirations and plans,” Neal told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins. “Helen said he talked not in terms of being a moderate success; his ambition was to be big in movies and so forth. He’d ask her, did she think he could make it, and her response—well, she was a believer, too—she felt that he could go as far as he wanted to. From the very first he had great ambitions to be nothing in the ordinary, but just to go all the way with it.”

  DIXIE HOPED, with Christmas coming, that Elvis would be able to spend a little more time at home. This would be their first Christmas together, and she really wanted to make it special. When he got back from Texas, he had brought her something in anticipation of Christmas, a pair of shorts and a sleeveless blouse in pale p
ink. He wanted her to try it on right away, and she was excited, too, because she loved the outfit, but she loved his enthusiasm about it even more. They had never been much for gift giving—they just didn’t have the money. But she knew that Christmas this year was going to be different.

  Elvis had already given himself a present some months before, a 1942 Martin guitar that he had bought for $175 from the O. K. Houck Company on Union. He was a little self-conscious about it; it seemed kind of extravagant to pay so much money, but this was the way he now made his living, he told himself, and he never hesitated, except when the man threw his old guitar in the trash. “The man gave me eight dollars on the trade-in,” he told anyone who would listen afterward, still a little openmouthed with disbelief. “Shucks, it still played good.” He had his first name spelled out in black metallic letters across the blond wood of the D-18, so that it came out smartly on a diagonal below the fret board, and the guitar looked a lot more professional than his old one, but, Elvis joked, he frailed away at it just the same.

  They went by Humes for the Christmas show, and all the teachers and kids flocked around, but some of them acted stuck-up, like they thought he was going to act stuck-up first, which didn’t seem right at all. They went by Scotty’s to rehearse for a session that they managed to get in not long before Christmas. First they did an old blues number that had become a western swing standard in different versions by Bob Wills and his brothers, Billy Jack and Johnnie Lee, over the years. The new version opened up in a beautiful, slow, lilting blues tempo that almost seemed to tease the listener, until Elvis announced, with just a trace of amusement in his voice, “Hold it, fellas, that don’t move me. Let’s get real, real gone for a change.” And plunged into what became known as “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” The other side was a new song by a Covington, Tennessee, theater manager named Jack Sallee, whom Sam had met when he came into the Memphis Recording Service to make some promos for his Friday-night hillbilly jamboree. Sam said he was looking for original material for his new artist, and Sallee went home and wrote a song. “You’re a Heartbreaker” was the first of Elvis’ songs on which Sam Phillips owned the publishing, and it was also the closest that they had come to date to an explicitly country number.

  They played the Hayride on the eighteenth, then Bobbie waited for Scotty to come home with her Chevrolet. “Scotty was supposed to be home in time for me to go Christmas shopping. They were using the car, and I was riding the bus. They were supposed to come home Thursday night after a show (Christmas was on a Saturday). I said, ‘Well, I’ll just wait until you get here and go finish my Christmas shopping.’ When they hadn’t gotten home by the middle of the afternoon on Friday, I decided that they had stayed over, but I still didn’t go out. I said, ‘I’m not going to go riding the bus. Scotty just won’t get anything for Christmas.’ They came in about five-thirty, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you come home last night?’ And they said, ‘Elvis wanted to stay in Shreveport and do his Christmas shopping this morning.’ I said, ‘Okay, Elvis gets what Elvis wants, and you don’t get a Christmas present!’ But Scotty wasn’t too much on that anyway.”

  Elvis and Dixie spent all day Christmas together, first at Dixie’s house, then at the Presleys’. Elvis gave her a suit that he must have bought in Shreveport—she loved it, everything he got her was something she liked, but it wasn’t like she thought it was going to be, somehow. Here he had just breezed into town the night before, and now he told her he was going to have to be off again before she even knew it. He was scheduled to play in Houston for Biff Collie at the Cook’s Hoedown Yuletide Jamboree on the twenty-eighth, and then at a special New Year’s Night broadcast from Eagle’s Hall, which Biff had also set up.

  She waved good-bye as they drove off and then went over to the Presleys’, where she and Gladys alternately shared their pride in the course his life had taken and consoled each other over what they both had lost.

  FORBIDDEN FRUIT

  January–May 1955

  LOUISIANA HAYRIDE.

  (LANGSTON McEACHERN)

  ELVIS SIGNED WITH BOB NEAL formally at the start of the year. The official picture, which ran in the trades and in the March issue of Country & Western Jamboree, shows him sitting at a desk with a fireplace behind him, pen poised, grin crooked, hair perfectly coiffed. Sam Phillips and Bob Neal stand beside him on either side. Sam has his hand companionably on Elvis’ right shoulder, Bob is wearing a broad smile and an elaborately bowed western tie, while all three stare straight into the camera. Because he was still technically a minor, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Presley signed the contract as parents and legal guardians, with every expectation that this would mark a dramatic upturn in their son’s fortunes.

  It did, almost from the start. Bob had bookings that would keep Elvis on the road for much of January, with a hometown debut at Ellis Auditorium scheduled for February 6, 1955. He was also in the process of making a solid connection with Colonel Tom Parker, who through his new management and booking-agency partnership with Hank Snow was in a position to put Elvis in front of a greatly expanded audience. Although the Colonel at first appeared somewhat reluctant to get involved, he was now talking about trying Elvis out on a Hank Snow package tour that started in New Mexico in mid February. For the present Elvis was booked into West Texas the week of January 2 on a Hayride package; then, after returning to Shreveport, he played nearby New Boston, Texas, and on the twelfth he was scheduled to play Clarksdale, Mississippi, with the brother-sister duo of Jim Ed and Maxine Brown and “Tater” Bob Neal as MC, going to Helena, Arkansas, the next night with the same bill. The following week there was a solid block of bookings in the area around Corinth, Mississippi, with a side excursion to Sikeston, Missouri, then a return to the Gladewater area for a five-day tour the week after that.

  He didn’t always take the show. Jim Ed and Maxine Brown were a highly polished act. They had had a number-eight national hit the previous summer with “Looking Back to See,” were comparative veterans of the Hayride, and had an audience that turned out for them every time. Jim Ed was a big, good-looking guy, just a year older than Elvis and not above preening himself for the girls; his sister, Maxine, was attractive and outgoing, and they never failed to reach a good portion of the crowd. Tom Perryman remembered one show he put on in Gilmer, Texas, near Gladewater, when the Browns actually came out on top. “They did a lot of their harmony gospel songs, and they had their big record, and there was a lot of older family people there. That was the only time I ever saw anybody steal the show from Elvis. Of course it was a big thrill for the Browns.” Most of the time, though, they didn’t seem to know what had hit them. It wasn’t that they were any less popular or that the fans didn’t flock around them when they came out after the performance to sign autographs and sell their records; it was just that when that boy was onstage, it was like nothing that had ever been before. Whether people liked it or not, they didn’t seem able to think of anything else, and it prevented them from focusing on just about anything that followed.

  In Corinth, Mississippi, the show was sponsored by the local Jaycees Club and scheduled to take place at the courthouse, and local DJ/singer Buddy Bain was on the bill. Buddy, who was thirty-one and had had his chance in Nashville, where he had deejayed on WSM after a five-year stint in Knoxville with Chet Atkins, didn’t particularly like the new style. He was a traditional country singer himself, who had grown up admiring Gene Autry and Jimmie Rodgers, but he had met Sam Phillips at WLAY in Muscle Shoals, and he knew the Presleys from the Tupelo area, where he had grown up and where his sisters Mary and Marie had worked with Gladys in the sewing room at Reed Manufacturing Company. So when Sam brought not only the first record but the boy himself down to radio station WCMA in Corinth one sweltering day the previous summer, Buddy played it (“Well, I played ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’; ‘That’s All Right’ was a little too much for me”) and interviewed Elvis himself for about ten minutes on the air.

  By the time he returned to Corinth, in January, Elvis was somethin
g of a local phenomenon, and Buddy was featured on the bill, along with his singing partner, fifteen-year-old Kay Crotts from Michie, Tennessee, whom he would marry three years later. Buddy had been plugging the Browns’ appearance all week because he had kind of a crush on Maxine (“We had hit it off real good. She wrote to me, and I wrote to her, and I thought something might really come of it until I found out later that she had actually done so many disc jockeys that way, you know, to get them to play her record”), and he was skeptical of the new performer’s attraction because he had heard that Bob Neal had paid half a dozen local girls fifty cents apiece to scream, but he was quickly won over.

  “You know, they came to make fun of him, but they ended up backstage practically trying to tear him apart. He was the show, even then—it wasn’t like anything you ever heard. But there was one little thing that happened before the show I’ll never forget. They got in in the middle of the afternoon, and we had a little two-story house in Corinth, my mother and I, and we had a girl that would come in and cook for us because my mother was in a wheelchair. Well, I invited Elvis and Maxine and Jim Ed over to the house. And before we had supper, we gave Jim Ed and Maxine my bedroom to lie down in and take a nap. And Elvis said, ‘I’d like to lie down, too. The living room sofa’s fine for me.’ So he lay down on this long red plastic sofa that we had, with his feet over the end, he just went right out. And when I woke him up for supper, the little girl that worked for us, Martha Morris, had filled that table full of food, but all he would eat was some corn bread, and he asked if we didn’t have any buttermilk. Well, I chased down to the store for it, and he just crumbled up that corn bread in the buttermilk and ate a whole lot of it and said, ‘This is delicious. Just what I want.’ After supper was over, my mother was sitting by the window, looking out like she always did, and Elvis went over and said, ‘Mrs. Bain, I really enjoyed the meal.’ And he kissed her on the cheek, which my mama wasn’t used to because I didn’t even kiss her, I just said, ‘Thank you, Mama.’ She was a stern woman. When he went out of the room for a minute, she said, ‘Who was that slobbering all over me?’ I said, ‘Mama, that was Elvis Presley.’ She said, ‘I wondered who that was.’