“Then we all sat down and looked at my scrapbooks. I had lots of pictures from my early career, in Nashville and Raleigh, North Carolina, and the famous Renfro Valley Barn Dance, and he said to me, ‘I hope someday I can be as famous as you are. I sure would like to get to Nashville someday.’ And you know what I said to him? I remember it as well as if it were yesterday. I said, ‘Elvis, if you’ll learn you some good country songs, you just might get on the Grand Ole Opry.’ Of course he was very polite and thanked me, and then we went to the show.”
Backstage at the show Elvis took advantage of his newfound friendship to harmonize with Buddy’s singing partner on a Blackwood Brothers song. “We were going to sing a gospel song on our show entitled ‘I’m Feeling Mighty Fine.’ We all had little practice sessions before going out onstage, and Kay and I were singing over in a corner, and Elvis walked over and said, ‘Buddy, scoot on over, you can’t sing that song. Let me sing it with Kay.’ So he and Kay sang it, and he did his version much different from the way I did mine. ’Cause I did mine just plain, and he did his, ‘Well-uh, uh-uh’—you know, like he did. Well, Kay didn’t really like it, at least she said she didn’t, but I was real jealous of the way they sung it, and he just kept singing it over and over again, there’s no telling how many times they sung that chorus, he just didn’t know when to stop. But once he got onstage, it was all over.” And after the show was done, the mild-mannered boy asked Buddy to point him toward the best-looking girl in the crowd and joked that he would find out if she was wearing falsies or not.
IT WAS ALL LIKE A DREAM from which he was afraid he might one day awaken. It seemed sometimes like it was happening to someone else, and when he spoke of it, it was often with a quality of wonderment likely to strike doubt not so much in his listener’s mind as in his own. When he returned home for the show at Ellis, there was a full, four-column spread in the Memphis Press-Scimitar by Miss Keisker’s friend Mr. Johnson, an affable, easygoing fellow in a battered newspaperman’s hat, who spent as much time with Mr. Phillips as he did with the somewhat tongue-tied subject of his story. “Suddenly Singing Elvis Presley Zooms into Recording Stardom,” read the headline, with the explanatory introductory phrase, “Thru the Patience of Sam Phillips,” running above. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Elvis, Scotty, and Bill in the studio, and underneath the photograph it said, “A white man’s voice singing negro rhythms with a rural flavor [has] changed life overnight for Elvis Presley.” The body of the text mapped out in plain, accurate, and generally admiring terms the story of his meteoric rise: growing up in Tupelo, moving to Memphis, lugging his guitar every day to Humes. It described how Sam Phillips had discovered his talent, how Dewey Phillips had revealed it to the world, how Elvis had been invited to appear on the Grand Ole Opry, “hillbilly heaven,” within a month of the debut of his first record and was today a star of the Louisiana Hayride. The article made note, too, of the phenomenon that had helped give rise to the young man’s success and of Sam Phillips’ contribution to it. “That’s All Right,” Johnson noted, was “in the R&B idiom of negro field jazz, ‘Blue Moon’ more in the country field, but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both.” The last section of the story, headlined “In a Class Alone,” stressed the unclassifiability of Elvis’ talent and the likelihood of a glowing future for this good-looking young star with the “slumbrous” eyes who, with his new manager, Bob Neal, had recently opened up an office downtown under the title of Elvis Presley Enterprises. “Spin ’em again, boys,” wrote Bob Johnson, announcing in bold type everything that Elvis himself had been afraid to even whisper to his friends: the celebrity, the dramatic impact of his success, its scale, the almost unmentionable thrill that went with it.
There were two shows, at 3:00 and 8:00 P. M. The ad in the paper placed him fourth on a “Five Star” bill, with Faron Young and Ferlin Huskey headlining and “Beautiful Gospel Singer” Martha Carson making her Memphis debut, but it was clear from all the attention he was getting that a good deal was expected of him. The first show went fine. He sang his new songs, “Milkcow Blues Boogie” and “You’re a Heartbreaker,” as well as “That’s All Right” and “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and he told Ronnie Smith backstage how much fun he was having on the road. He was fascinated, too, with the performance of Martha Carson, a spectacular redhead who looked like a movie star and sang and moved like Sister Rosetta Tharpe when she performed her trademark hit, “Satisfied,” and a host of traditional “colored” spirituals. She broke several strings, danced ecstatically at the end of a long guitar cord, and in general created the kind of smoldering intensity and infectious enthusiasm that he sought to achieve in his own performance. He asked Miss Carson afterward if she knew a particular Statesmen number, and he made it clear that “he knew the words to every song that I had ever had out.” He told her that he would like to record her song, “Satisfied,” someday and that he hoped that they would be billed together again sometime soon. “He was very complimentary and very interested in what I did. I could feel this was sincere, it was from the heart—it wasn’t just someone saying this, he just really idolized me, and I could feel it.”
In between shows he and Scotty went across the street to a meeting Bob had set up with Colonel Parker. The Colonel had finally added him to Hank Snow’s upcoming southwestern tour, which was to start a week from Monday, and Bob said he thought it would be a good idea if they all got together and talked a little bit about the future. In addition to Bob and Colonel Parker, Sam Phillips would also be attending, along with the Colonel’s front man, Oscar Davis (whom Elvis had met in connection with the Eddy Arnold show three months before), and Tom Diskin, Parker’s associate in Jamboree Attractions, the booking agency in which he and Snow were partners. Ironically, Scotty had contacted Diskin in December, at the Chicago office listed in Billboard, to see if the agency might be interested in booking Elvis. He had gotten his reply only three weeks earlier, a stock letter of rejection which apparently failed to make any connection between the blind inquiry and the new act in whom the Colonel was already taking an interest on the basis of a very encouraging report from Texarkana DJ Uncle Dudley about the New Boston date. In fact, Diskin joined the Colonel on a quick visit to Shreveport to watch the boy on the Hayride on January 15, just two days after the letter was mailed. Scotty had heard that the Colonel was in the audience and even thought he might have spotted him standing toward the back of the auditorium. But Parker hadn’t come around to see them afterward, and though he spent much of January in touch with Neal about the tour, he had had no direct contact with the musicians until now.
The meeting at Palumbo’s did not get off to an auspicious start. The tension in the air was already marked when Elvis and Scotty walked in. Colonel Parker was sitting there with a big cigar, his jaw thrust out, and a pugnacious expression on his face, as Diskin, his young lieutenant, tried to explain to Mr. Phillips that the Colonel didn’t really mean anything against the Sun label in particular, that he was just trying to point out the shortcomings that would attach to any small record label, which necessarily lacked the kind of distribution that a major company like RCA, with which the Colonel had been associated for many years through both Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, could offer. Oscar Davis, sharp as ever with a fresh flower in his buttonhole and his cigarette holder cocked elegantly, just so, was plainly unhappy with his crude associate. And Sam was seething. What did Tom Parker mean—he wasn’t going to call that damn mountebank by some phony title—by saying that Elvis was going to get nowhere on Sun? This was a helluva way to start a business conference. His own deep-set eyes bored in on the Colonel, but Parker’s gaze never wavered, and both men sat locked in silent combat until finally Bob Neal broke the tension and suggested they discuss some of the specifics of the upcoming tour.
This could be a very fine opportunity for them all, Oscar Davis said with genuine feeling: it would give Sam a chance to get his records into new territories, it would offer young Elvis here an opportun
ity to expand his audience, and if things worked out it could cement a long-standing relationship—Davis undoubtedly hesitated on the word partnership—between Colonel Parker and our good friend Bob Neal and allow it to develop in exciting new directions. The Colonel only glowered, and Oscar was confounded as to just what he could be up to. As for Elvis, Bob had explained to him the Colonel’s far-flung connections, not just in the world of country music, but in Hollywood as well. Mr. Phillips had only reinforced what Bob had said. From what he understood, Sam declared before actually meeting him, there wasn’t a better promoter in the business than Tom Parker, and right now they could certainly use all the help they could get. But what, Elvis might well have been led to wonder at this point, was Colonel Parker’s compelling attraction?
THOMAS A. PARKER on first impression was a heavyset, crude, and blustering man with a brilliant mind and a guttural accent, which he claimed to have acquired in West Virginia, where, he said, he had been born forty-five years before. Orphaned as a child (the exact age varied from one telling to the next), he had run away and joined the circus, in this case the Great Parker Pony Circus, which he said was owned by an uncle. From there he had drifted into the carny life, eventually ending up in Tampa, where the Royal American show wintered and where, after half a dozen years “in the life,” he had married an older divorcée named Marie Mott in 1935 and settled down. He pursued a number of civilian ventures, eventually becoming field agent (this could be translated as “Chief Dogcatcher,” and often was in later years by the Colonel) for the Tampa Humane Society, a privately endowed animal shelter, where he and his family were given a free apartment above the pound. On his own he enterprisingly founded a pet cemetery that offered “Perpetual Care for Deceased Pets” while also promoting and working closely with country singers Gene Austin and Roy Acuff and film star Tom Mix on their Florida tours. Acuff, then known as the King of the Hillbillies, tried to persuade him to move to Nashville, and Parker seemed ready to entertain the idea if Acuff would consider leaving the Opry and giving Parker a free managerial hand. Acuff declined, and perhaps because Tom Parker was not quite ready to give up all his carny ties, this was the point at which they reached a parting of the ways. It wasn’t until a few years later, in 1944, when he met twenty-six-year-old Eddy Arnold headlining an Opry tent show tour, that he finally made his move.
Arnold, who had just left Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys and signed with RCA Records, was a big, handsome, square-jawed baritone with a full-throated melodic style altogether different from the conventional Nashville approach. Parker must have sensed in him the potential that he was looking for, because he went into show business now with the same creative, full-bore intensity that had always marked him in the carny world. According to Oscar Davis, who first met Parker in Florida while Davis was managing Ernest Tubb, there had never been another manager of this sort before. In his attention to every aspect of his client’s career, in his devotion to mapping out a program and to carrying it out in the most meticulous detail, in his use of radio for “exploitation” and his belief that his word was his bond, that a contract, once agreed upon, was a sacred commitment on both sides, Tom Parker “as a manager was tops, the greatest in the world. He was an uncanny businessman, very astute, he adjusted the cost so there was never a time when a promoter made more money than he did. If I were to select anyone in the amusement field—and I’ve been through it from 1912 on up—I would select him; I don’t think anyone has beaten him on a deal. He’ll read you very quickly. Working with the carnivals taught him that everything wasn’t the way that it looks on the surface, that everyone has their weaknesses. Tom was a strong man. He’d lay the law down, and you went that way or you didn’t play.”
To Biff Collie, the Houston DJ, the difference between the Colonel and Oscar—Davis’ chronic impecuniousness aside—was that the Colonel “always thought far beyond where he was,” while to Gabe Tucker, who met Parker when Gabe was playing bass for Eddy Arnold and who worked with him on and off for almost thirty years, “his operation was completely different” because of his attention to detail. “Most managers back then would just call up [the local promoter] and say, ‘Okay, can you book a tour down there?’ And the manager would never leave his office. But he didn’t work that way. He’d go out before, check out the place, he’d ask how many seats in the auditorium—not to be smart, but because we knowed percentagewise, if we had a five-thousand-seat auditorium, we knew how many [Eddy Arnold] songbooks to take in and how many we was going to sell. His theory was altogether different than most of them that come to Nashville. He was a carny.”
Once he got together with Eddy Arnold he concentrated his focus exclusively on his single client. He moved up to Nashville and virtually moved in with Arnold and his wife, Sally. “When Tom’s your manager, he’s all you,” wrote Arnold in his 1969 autobiography, It’s a Long Way from Chester County. “He lives and breathes his artist. I once said to him…‘Tom, why don’t you get yourself a hobby—play golf, go boating, or something?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hobby.’ ” One of the keys to Parker’s success, as Arnold saw it, was his apparent crudity. “Earthy, I guess a lot of people might describe him; uneducated maybe. A lot of times people think they’re dealing with a rube. ‘Oh, I can take him,’ they decide. They don’t take him. He’s ahead of ’em before they even sit down across a table… he fools ’em. They think, because his English might be faulty (he might say a word wrong here and there), ‘Oh, I’ll handle him.’ They walk right into his web!”
Arnold had three number-one hits in 1947 and the following year was persuaded by Parker to reluctantly quit the Opry: there were just too many other opportunities. In October 1948 Parker used his carnival connections to get himself an honorary colonel’s commission from Louisiana governor and noted country singer Jimmie Davis, the listed composer of “You Are My Sunshine.” From now on, he told Gabe Tucker, who accompanied him to the investiture, “see to it… that everyone addresses me as the Colonel.” Within a year or two after that he had gotten Arnold into the movies, hooked Eddy up with William Morris, the leading Hollywood talent agency, gotten him on Milton Berle’s top-rated television show, and even booked him into Las Vegas. It was a far cry from what any previous country music manager had envisioned for his talent (though a few might have dreamt of it, none achieved it), but eventually the exclusivity of his focus got him into trouble.
In 1953, in an episode that has been widely reported but never fully explained, Eddy Arnold fired him. According to Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins, who got the story from Oscar Davis, “It was an argument in Las Vegas that made the relationship collapse. Parker had been laying out a two-page newspaper advertisement as a surprise to Eddy… and when Eddy walked into the Colonel’s room unexpectedly, Parker quickly hid the lay-out, Eddy accused him of doing something behind his back, one thing led to another, and pretty soon Eddy was without a manager, Parker was without a star.” It may have had something to do with a weekly television show, too, in which Arnold was persuaded, against the Colonel’s always sober fiscal advice, to invest a great deal of his own money, and it was undoubtedly true, as Gabe noted, that Arnold and Parker “were dissipating much of their energy ironing out the difference in their personalities and private lives.” They went on working together in a booking arrangement that was part of an amicable separation agreement, and they never ceased to be personally cordial, but it must have come as a terrible blow to Parker to be abandoned so abruptly by his protégé, in a manner that left him unavoidably exposed in the glare of the show biz spotlight.
Within a year he had rebounded, after initially making his office in the lobby of Nashville radio station WSM, where with Oscar Davis and other independent operators he used the lobby phone to book his acts. “When the phone rang,” according to Billboard editor Bill Williams, “by agreement whoever was closest answered it by the number… and between them they lined up more clients and did more business than the Opry’s Service Bureau
, which was directly across the hall, while WSM blithely picked up the tab—for years!” By the spring of 1954, though, he was working extensively with Hank Snow, whose “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” was the sensation of the first six months of the year. In its November 6 issue Billboard announced that Colonel Tom Parker of Jamboree Attractions had “inked a pact with Hank Snow to handle the latter exclusively on personals. After the first of the year… he’ll take over management of Hank Snow Enterprises, which includes radio, TV, film and recording commitments.” He was back in the big time.
And yet, oddly enough, he remained something of an enigma, an unpredictable quantity, certainly, for someone in so visible a position who did not exactly eschew the public eye. Something about his background simply didn’t make sense. “No one knows very much about his boyhood,” said Oscar Davis, who doubted the story about the Great Parker Pony Circus when he spoke to Jerry Hopkins in 1970. “I never knew if he had brothers or sisters; he’s a bit of a mystery.” From time to time he would explode in a fit of temper, or perhaps just an outburst of exuberant good humor, in a language that none of his associates recognized or understood. They wondered if he was speaking German, but he always stipulated that it was Dutch, with a twinkle in his eye that left them in little doubt that he was pulling their leg.
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