Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  With a new Jamboree tour coming up in May, headlined by Hank Snow and covering the entire mid South, Elvis and Scotty and Bill were not about to start looking back. They didn’t have the time. Bob Neal was excited and optimistic about all the connections Tom Parker was helping them to make. He felt as if they were finally about to move up to another league.

  THE TOUR BEGAN on May 1 in New Orleans, the day after Elvis’ fourth Sun single, “Baby, Let’s Play House,” was released. It was billed as a three-week, twenty-city tour that would employ thirty-one different artists, some of whom would pick up and leave the tour at various points. Headliners were Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, and the Carter Sisters with Mother Maybelle, and Martha Carson and Faron Young would join the show in Florida. In a solution the Colonel devised to prevent the kind of thing that had happened on the last tour, there would be a first half of “younger talent” that included Jimmie Rodgers Snow, the Davis Sisters, and the Wilburn Brothers, with “one of the newest though most exciting personalities in the Hillbilly field… [whose] singing style is completely different from any other singer in the field,” Elvis Presley, appearing just before the intermission.

  There were near-riots almost everywhere they played. Johnny Rivers saw the show in Baton Rouge and decided, “I wanna be like that guy,” while in Mobile, Jimmie Rodgers Snow remembered Elvis being chased across a football field. There were girls in every city, and after the show Elvis never lacked for company, cruising around town in the pink and white Cadillac he had just acquired to replace the Lincoln (once again he had his name painted in black on the door). Jimmy Snow roomed with him on this tour, “and he would run the women, he’d run two or three of them in one night—whether or not he was actually making love to all three, I don’t know, because he was kind of private in that sense and if I thought he was going to run some women in the room with him, I didn’t stay. But I just think he wanted them around, it was a sense of insecurity, I guess, because I don’t think he was a user. He just loved women, and I think they knew that.”

  Every night he called his parents at their new home on Lamar just to let them know how he was doing, how the show had gone, to find out how they were. Many nights Dixie was there, and he liked that, both because it saved him a call and because he knew that they were keeping an eye on her. “He didn’t want to relinquish that control, regardless of how long he was gone or what he was doing; [he wanted to know] that I was still going to be sitting there. If I wasn’t there, he would ask his parents, ‘Was Dixie there?’ Or: ‘Have you heard from her? Has she been over? Did she spend the night?’ I think he expected his parents to kind of keep me there while he was gone so I wouldn’t do anything else—but it just got to be harder and harder after a while.” He wanted to know how they liked the new house—they were still renting, of course, but it was the first time since they had moved to Memphis that they had had a real home of their own. How was Daddy feeling? Was his back any better? No, he reassured Gladys, she didn’t have to worry, he was doing just fine—he knew it bothered her the way the audiences did sometimes, but they weren’t going to hurt him any. Yes, they were taking good care of the new Caddy, wasn’t it the prettiest thing? No, they were being careful. He didn’t know if he’d even let Bill drive this one! And how was the pretty little pink and white Crown Victoria he had bought for them? It was the first new car they had ever owned. He tried to reassure her: he was safe, he was happy, he was still hers. But Gladys was not to be reassured. Some part of her feared what was about to happen. Some part of her feared what she saw was happening already. “I know she worshiped him, and he did her,” said Dixie, “to the point where she would almost be jealous of anything else that took his time. I think she really had trouble accepting him as his popularity grew. It grew hard for her to let everybody have him. I had the same feelings. He did not belong to [us] anymore.”

  HE MET MAE BOREN AXTON, publicist for the Florida leg of the tour, at the first Florida date, in Daytona Beach. A forty-year-old English teacher at Paxon High School in Jacksonville, where her husband was the football coach, Axton had gotten into country music through the back door when she was asked by Life Today, a magazine for which she did occasional freelance work, to write an article on “hillbilly” music. Though she had been born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Oklahoma (her brother, David, later became a prominent U.S. senator from Oklahoma), she claimed to have no idea what hillbilly music was. “We listened to the opera, and my teacher taught me classical, and folk songs I knew, but the term ‘hillbilly’ was foreign to me.” Her research took her to Nashville, where she met Minnie Pearl, who introduced her as a country songwriter to powerful song publishing executive Fred Rose. Taking Mae for what Minnie Pearl said she was, Rose told her he needed a novelty song for a Dub Dickerson recording session that afternoon, and she wrote one, if only to prove her newfound friend correct.

  Soon she had gotten a number of her songs cut (Dub Dickerson recorded more of their collaborations, as did Tommy Durden) while continuing to write stories for fan club magazines. She hooked up with the Colonel in 1953 on a Hank Snow tour and began doing advance press work for him in the Jacksonville-Orlando-Daytona area. As a woman who was both attractive and feisty, Mae claimed to be the only person that she knew ever to get an apology out of the Colonel. Ordinarily, his one response to any form of criticism was “The Colonel is the boss.” “You be the boss,” she said angrily when he tried this line on her. “Be the big wheel. But don’t ever ask me to do another thing for you.” Which led to the apology. Despite this incident, or perhaps because of it, she always got along well with the Colonel and for a time even served as Hank Snow’s personal publicist. She was energetic and resourceful and proved an excellent local PR woman on a management team that left nothing to chance.

  They were scheduled to play Daytona Beach on May 7, and Mae met them at the motel. “I had gotten up real early and gone and done an interview about the show that night and about Elvis, and I came back around eleven, and, you know, the back of the motel was facing the ocean, the little rails were up there, the little iron rails. And I walked out of my door—my room was right near Elvis’—and Elvis was leaning over looking at the ocean. Of course there were a lot of people on the beach, and I said, ‘Hi, honey, how are you doing?’ And he looked up and said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘Miz Axton, look at that ocean.’ Of course I had seen it a million times. He said, ‘I can’t believe that it’s so big.’ It just overwhelmed him. He said, ‘I’d give anything in the world to find enough money to bring my mother and daddy down here to see it.’ That just went through my heart. ’Cause I looked down here, and here were all these other kids, different show members for that night, all the guys looking for cute little girls. But his priority was doing something for his mother and daddy.”

  In the interview he persisted in calling her Miz Axton, and she suggested that he “just make it Mae. That makes it better…. Elvis,” she said, “you are sort of a bebop artist more than anything else, aren’t you? Is that what they call you?”

  Elvis: Well, I never have given myself a name, but a lot of the disc jockeys call me—bopping hillbilly and bebop, I don’t know what else….

  Mae: I think that’s very fine. And you’ve started touring the country, and you’ve covered a lot of territory in the last two months, I believe.

  Elvis: Yes, ma’am, I’ve covered a lot—mostly in West Texas is where, that’s where my records are hottest. Around in San Angelo and Lubbock and Midland and Amarillo—

  Mae: They tell me they almost mobbed you there, the teenagers, they like you so much. But I happen to know you have toured all down in the eastern part of the country, too. Down through Florida and around and that the people went for you there about as well as out in West Texas, isn’t that right?

  Elvis: Well, I wasn’t very well known down here—you know, I’m with a small company, and my records don’t have the distribution that they should have, but—

  Mae: … You know, I watched you perform one time
down in Florida, and I noticed that the older people got as big a kick out of you as the teenagers, I think that was an amazing thing.

  Elvis: Well, I imagine it’s just the way we, all three of us move on the stage, you know, we act like we—

  Mae: Yes, and we mustn’t leave out Scotty and Bill. They really do a terrific job of backing you up.

  Elvis: They sure do. I really am lucky to have those two boys, ’cause they really are good. Each one of them have an individual style of their own.

  Mae: You know, what I can’t understand is how you keep that leg shaking just at the right [general laughter] tempo all the time you’re singing.

  Elvis: Well, it gets hard sometimes. I have to stop and rest it—but it just automatically wiggles like that.

  Mae: Is that it? Just automatically does it? You started back in high school, didn’t you?

  Elvis: Ah—

  Mae: Singing around, public performances with school and things of that sort?

  Elvis: Well, no, I never did sing anywhere in public in my life till I made this first record.

  Mae: Is that right?

  Elvis: Yes, ma’am.

  Mae: And then you just went right on into their hearts, and you’re doing a wonderful job, and I want to congratulate you on that, and I want to say, too, Elvis, it’s been very nice having you in the studio—

  Elvis: Well, thank you very much, Mae, and I’d like to personally thank you for really promoting my records down here because you really have done a wonderful job, and I really do appreciate it, because if you don’t have people backing you, people pushing you, well, you might as well quit.

  Later that night at the show Mae ran into one of her former students, now a student nurse. Elvis was onstage, “and she was just right into it, didn’t know who he was, none of them did. But she was just ahhhh—all of them were, even some of the old ones were doing like that. I looked at the faces—they were loving it. And I said, ‘Hey, honey, what is it about this kid?’ And she said, ‘Awww, Miz Axton, he’s just a great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.’ ”

  They played Orlando that week, and local reporter Jean Yothers, still evidently in somewhat of a daze several days later, wrote it up in the Orlando Sentinel of May 16.

  What hillbilly music does to the hillbilly music fan is absolutely phenomenal. It transports him into a wild, emotional and audible state of ecstasy. He never sits back sedately patting his palms politely and uttering bravos of music appreciation as his long-hair counterpart. He thunders his appreciation for the country-style music and nasal-twanged singing he loves by whistling shrilly through teeth, pounding the palms together with the whirling momentum of a souped-up paddle wheel, stomping the floor and ejecting yip-yip noises like the barks of a hound dog when it finally runs down a particularly elusive coon.

  That’s the way it was, friends, at the big Hank Snow show and all-star Grand Ole Opry Jamboree staged last week in municipal auditorium to jam-packed houses both performances. It was as hot as blue blazes within the tired sanctums of the barnish auditorium, but the hillbilly fans turned out in droves and seemed oblivious to the heat…. The whole shebang seemed like a cross between the enthusiasm displayed at a wrestling match and old-fashioned camp meeting….

  This was my first tangle with a hillbilly jamboree, a poignant contrast to Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta, I must say. I was awed and with all due respect to opera in Atlanta, I got a tremendous boot out of this loud, uninhibited music that’s sending the country crazy….

  Ferron [Faron] Young was real sharp singing that ditty about living fast, loving hard, dying young and leaving a beautiful memory, but what really stole the show was this 20-year-old sensation, Elvis Presley, a real sex box as far as the teenage girls are concerned. They squealed themselves silly over this fellow in orange coat and sideburns who “sent” them with his unique arrangement of Shake, Rattle and Roll. And following the program, Elvis was surrounded by girlies asking for autographs. He would give each a long, slow look with drooped eyelids and comply. They ate it up. The crowd also ate up a peppy and perspiring Miss Martha Carson calling the parquet-sitting spectators “you folks a-sitten over there on the shelves” and the same Miss Carson breaking two guitar strings and a pick with her strong strumming of This Old House and Count Your Blessings. Fans were forever rushing up near the stage snapping flashbulb pictures during the program, and they all instinctively recognized a tune with recognizable roars before the second plunk of the guitar had been sounded. It was amazing! Hillbilly music is here to stay, yo’all!

  On the thirteenth they played Jacksonville. Before the show Mae took Elvis and some of the other musicians out to dinner, and she tried to wheedle him out of the frilly pink shirt he was wearing. “Skeeter Davis was there, and June and Anita [Carter], and some of the boys with Elvis, and I said, ‘Elvis, that’s vulgar. And it would make me such a pretty blouse.’ And Skeeter said, ‘I want it,’ and June said, ‘I want it.’ And he just kind of grinned. And I said, ‘Elvis, you ought to give it to us, one of us anyway, because they are just going to tear it off you tonight.’ Not really thinking about it—knowing the people liked him but not really thinking about it.”

  That night at the show, in front of fourteen thousand people, he announced at the conclusion of his act: “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” Almost immediately they were after him. The police got him into the Gator Bowl’s dugout locker room, where Mae and the Colonel were totaling up the night’s receipts. Most of the other acts were backstage, too, Mae recalled, when the fans started pouring in through an overhead window that had been inadvertently left open. “I heard feet like a thundering herd, and the next thing I knew I heard this voice from the shower area. I started running, and three or four policemen started running, too, and by the time we got there several hundred must have crawled in—well, maybe not that many, but a lot—and Elvis was on top of one of the showers looking sheepish and scared, like ‘What’d I do?’ and his shirt was shredded and his coat was torn to pieces. Somebody had even gotten his belt and his socks and these cute little boots—they were not cowboy boots, he was up there with nothing but his pants on and they were trying to pull at them up on the shower. Of course the police started getting them out, and I never will forget Faron Young—this one little girl had kind of a little hump at the back, and he kicked at her, and these little boots fell out.”

  The Colonel, said Mae, “and I don’t mean it derogatorily, got dollar marks in his eyes.” It was Jacksonville, said Oscar Davis, that marked the turning point—that was the real eye-opener, the Colonel said to him. By the time the show got to Richmond three days later, it was as if Elvis had never been anything but the Colonel’s boy. The whole troupe was staying at the old Jefferson Hotel, and by happenstance RCA c&w promotion manager Chick Crumpacker was in Richmond on one of his three-or-four-times-a-year southern swings to meet DJs, distributors, and field reps. Regional representative Brad McCuen, who had heard Elvis’ first record in Knoxville the previous year and, witnessing the reaction to it, sent it on to New York with a glowing report, persuaded Crumpacker to go to the show, and Crumpacker, a sophisticated, serious, and witty Northwestern School of Music graduate who continued to write classical compositions but had a healthy respect for “America’s folk music,” enthusiastically accepted. Both Crumpacker and McCuen knew the Colonel not only from his present association with Hank Snow and his former management of Eddy Arnold, RCA’s two leading country artists, but because each had briefly accompanied the RCA Country Caravan, which the Colonel had managed the previous year. Both had had interesting experiences with the Colonel. In Jacksonville the previous April, in Chick’s presence, Parker had accused publicist Anne Fulchino of “deliberately steering Life and Look magazine people, whom she had gotten to cover the show, away from him and his wife Marie, who he bragged were responsible for the Caravan’s success. When I attempted to explain that this wasn’t so, he turned nearly physical and said he would have both our jobs over it.” Brad, who had worke
d extensively with Snow and Eddy Arnold for a number of years, had enjoyed a more congenial relationship overall, but from the opportunity he had had to watch the Colonel in action, he, too, was fully aware of Parker’s mania for control, his need to maintain the upper hand, and his predilection for unpredictable acts in order to keep even close friends and associates on their toes. Neither man was entirely certain of the reception they would get, but, true to form, the Colonel surprised them by acting as if he couldn’t have been more pleased to see two such old and dear friends.

  They were even more surprised by the show they saw that night. Although Chick had been prepared to some extent by McCuen’s description of the music, and he might have heard one or two of the records himself in passing, neither one of them had seen the boy perform, and neither was prepared for either the ferocity of his performance or the reaction to it. “We were astounded by the reaction,” said Chick, “both among the Richmonders and in ourselves. There were kids in the audience—it was definitely a noisier audience than I remembered from the Caravan the year before. And lo and behold, out comes this guy whose picture we had seen in the trade papers, and he was something else. All the mannerisms were more or less in place. The body language—I don’t remember exactly what he sang, but there were frequent belches into the mike, and the clincher came when he took his chewing gum out and tossed it into the audience. This, of course, was shocking, it was wild—but what really got the listeners was his energy and the way he sang the songs. The effect was galvanic. It was also somewhat embarrassing, because as friends and promoters of Jimmie Rodgers Snow, we had to watch him be totally eclipsed.”