by Alanna Nash
It was glamorous, mirrored ballroom kind of work. But in his new outlet, the Florence, Alabama, native who had grown up destitute on a tenant farm alongside black workers, intended to spotlight the opposite end of the social strata. Largely through his burgeoning Sun Records, located in the same small building, Phillips hoped to create a commercial market for rhythm and blues, the real rhythm and blues, the kind they sang over in West Memphis, Arkansas, in the cotton fields, and in the back parlors of Beale Street. Phillips would later say he was looking for “Negro artists of the South” who wanted to make a record but had no place to go. As Keisker noted, “There had never been an opportunity in Memphis for a Negro to get into a record company. Negroes weren’t even allowed to perform in white clubs.” In essence, Phillips sold hope to people who had none.
“Somehow or another, deep down in my soul, I guess I just had an affinity for music and people, especially people who had the ability to express themselves but didn’t have the opportunity to go to New York or Chicago and try to get somebody to listen to them. I didn’t want to work with anybody except untried and unproven talent, and I just had a desire to work with black people.”
The idea was both revolutionary and unpopular, and there was vitriol in some of the comments he got from his coworkers at the radio station. “Some of my best friends would kid me, say I smelled that morning when I came in, and ask why I would leave the Peabody and go out and start recording ‘niggers.’ ”
But Phillips had a fiercely independent heart. He began with men whose names would be legendary: B. B. King, Joe Hill Louis, and soon Howlin’ Wolf. In 1951, with Ike Turner’s band sitting in, he produced singer Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” probably the first rock-and-roll record.
Phillips lived for the creativity of the studio. He loved seeing what people would come up with in the exchange of energy in the room, in getting sound down on tape. He could alter sound with acoustics and engineering tricks, and in 1954, using two Ampex 350 recorders, developed a tape delay echo, or “slapback” technique to make the music sound “real alive,” as he put it. But the dynamics had to be created out of the musicians themselves (“the worst thing you can do is overproduce”), and he could pull things out of them that even they never knew were there. A slight man at the time—he weighed only 125 pounds—the black-haired Phillips was so charismatic that when he got talking in a big way, his rhetoric—half preaching, half reminiscence—had an almost mystical quality.
“None of these people that I recorded had ever had any experience. Some of them had never really seen a broadcast-type microphone. Most of them certainly had never seen a recording studio, and I kind of liked that.”
A homespun genius with an integral understanding of the blues, Phillips also had a mission—to cross the racial divide. His idea was to mix the music of the black man with the country sounds he’d grown up hearing all around him in Alabama—the first record his family owned was a 78 rpm of Jimmie Rodgers—and on such radio stations as Nashville’s WSM. He knew that great music—and it was great music he was always after—defied easy categorization. And if he could find a musician who wedded southern white and black gospel to country and blues, well, he’d have an act like no other. It might also help him pay the $150-a-month rent on his little twenty-by-thirty-five-foot storefront studio, which was often a struggle, especially with the eight or ten dollars for electricity.
Phillips had come up as the youngest of eight kids, and he lost his father early, seeing his dream of becoming a criminal defense lawyer go up in smoke. But the music business had nearly killed him, too. In 1949 he’d had a nervous breakdown but, “I got off my back after ten shock treatments and I was back working in a couple of months—less than that—because I had just worked myself to death with a lot of responsibility for a young person.”
Now that he had small children, he didn’t want to put himself at risk like that again. He needed a commercial act, and he needed it soon. Though it was never really money that drove Sam, Marion knew the refrain. “Over and over I heard Sam say, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ ”
The newspaper story Elvis read on July 15, headlined “Prison Singers May Find Fame with Record They Made in Memphis,” focused on Phillips’s newest find, the Prisonaires. Phillips had transported the quartet from the Tennessee State Penitentiary under armed guard, bringing them to his studio on Union, where they recorded an original song, “Just Walkin’ in the Rain.” Phillips would release the song on Sun Records, with its bright yellow label depicting a spindly rooster greeting the day, music notes forming a circle around SUN RECORD COMPANY, and its location, “Memphis, Tennessee.”
By 1953 Phillips was already expanding his original intent with Sun, working with white artists, as well as black. Meanwhile, his bread-and-butter business, the Memphis Recording Service, was scrambling, too, advertising that “We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime.” Phillips wasn’t kidding—he’d lug the equipment out to weddings and bar mitzvahs, or make dubs, transfer tapes—in short, do anything to keep the doors open. His first big financial outlay was a neon sign in the window, which he hoped would lure drop-in customers. But parking was always a problem because of the way the streets formed a triangle, the building tucked behind the intersection of Union and Marshall, with Taylor’s restaurant next door.
Elvis would have noticed the newspaper story immediately, as would everyone else in his household, both for the word prison in the headline—no one could pretend to forget that Vernon had done his time—and for the novelty of such a recording service. Sometime that summer 1953, Elvis, who worked as an assembler at the M. B. Parker Company until the end of July, when the job ran out, took his guitar over to Union and plunked down four dollars to make a two-sided acetate of “My Happiness” and the Ink Spots’ “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.”
Marion, a bespectacled, blond, thirty-five-year-old divorcée who handled all the distributor relationships, bookkeeping, publicity, billing, and secretarial work (“I was the entire office”), was swamped that day. But she vividly remembered Elvis, a fidgety boy looking for a break.
“He came on a Saturday afternoon, a very busy afternoon. For some reason, I happened to be alone at the time. The office was full of people wanting to make personal records. I told him he would have to wait, and he said he would. Of course, he had his guitar, so while he was waiting, we had a conversation. He [asked] if anybody needed a singer. He said, ‘Somebody out there must want to hear me.’ I said, ‘What kind of singer are you?’ He said, ‘Well, I sing all kinds.’ I said, ‘Who do you sound like?’ And he said, ‘Like nobody. I don’t sound like nobody.’ It was true, of course, but it seemed so impossible.”
Marion went back to make the ten-inch acetate, and halfway through the first side, she thought she heard what Sam was looking for, “this Negro sound” in a white man. Quickly, she grabbed a piece of recording tape and threaded it through the two-track Ampex. “This was not something we did with drop-in business, but I wanted Sam to hear this. He was out at the time, and the only tape I could find was crumbly, and it was broken by the time I got it set up. I got maybe a third of the first song and all of the second song.
“When Sam came back I played it for him, and he was impressed and said he would do something, but the boy would take a lot of work. He said, ‘Did you get his name and address?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ I had the slip for many years. It said, ‘Elvis Presley, good ballad singer.’ ”
Sam would remember the events differently than Marion did, saying he was there that first day and set up the disc-cutting machine himself. The boy was so unsure of himself that Sam found it hard to believe he’d ever performed before an audience. “He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. . . . Elvis was probably, innately, the most introverted person that ever came into that studio.”
He liked Elvis’s recording, though, and told him he was about to go over to the penitentiary in Nashville to
see about the Prisonaires. He’d visit publisher Red Wortham while he was in town, and if Sam found any material he thought was fitting for Elvis, he’d give him a call.
Whether Sam confused his second visit with the first, Elvis returned to the Memphis Recording Service in January 1954 to make a second acetate, this time of two country tunes, “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way,” and “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You.” Again, Elvis got his hopes up, prayed to hear back from Marion or Mr. Phillips—he always called Sam “Mr. Phillips,” though he addressed Marion by her first name—but nothing happened.
Marion couldn’t get him out of her mind, though. She almost felt as if she had discovered him. He brought out her maternal instincts, and she’d even mentioned him to her own mother. “Oh, I’ve seen him on the streetcar,” her mother said. “The kid with the long sideburns. I wondered what in the world he was.”
That month, as Elvis turned nineteen, he began attending the First Assembly of God on McLemore Avenue, in South Memphis. He’d been there before—the church chartered three city buses on Sunday mornings to ride through the housing projects and bring worshippers to services. Aside from his “schooling” at Ellis Auditorium, it was here that Elvis first learned to love white gospel music, as it was the home church for the Blackwood Brothers quartet. There was also another connection: Cecil Blackwood, a nephew of founding member James Blackwood, lived in the Courts with his new wife, and he was just getting up a sort of apprentice quartet he called the Songfellows. Elvis fantasized about joining them one day, so he figured it wouldn’t hurt to show up in the pews.
The church had another draw, too. For the last ten years, Reverend James E. Hamill had presided over the church with firm leadership, growing the congregation to nearly two thousand members. A fire-and-brimstone preacher who encouraged fervent demonstrations of faith such as speaking in tongues, Reverend Hamill was nonetheless well-educated and cautious and thoughtful in his counseling of members for problems big and small. He carried himself with a demeanor that was both serious and benevolent, and his parishioners revered him as a second father, wise, kind, and good. For a boy whose daddy lazed around most of the time and let his wife steamroll him in nearly every way, Reverend Hamill was an appealing figure.
However, it wasn’t spiritual soothing Elvis desired in early 1954, but rather romantic salvation. He and his cousin Gene were looking for a way to meet girls. On Sunday, January 24, Elvis, with a wavy new Toni perm in his hair, attended a function at the church. He caught the eye of a young church secretary, the teenage Dixie Locke. She took one look at him and for a minute, almost stopped breathing. “He was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.”
Dixie got within earshot, and speaking a little louder than usual to be sure Elvis would hear, made plans with a girlfriend to go skating at the Rainbow Rollerdrome on Saturday night. The next weekend, sure enough, he showed up, but in nobody’s idea of a roller skating outfit—a ruffled shirt and black pegged pants with a pink stripe down the sides, topped with a bolero jacket.
At first, Dixie pretended she didn’t know he was there, waiting to see if he would approach her. But after he huddled by the rail for too long, it dawned on her that he couldn’t skate! She felt sorry for him now and went over and said, “Hi, I’m Dixie, from church.” He got shy on her, said, “Yeah, I know,” and looked down for a minute and then tossed his hair back a little. It was the first time they had spoken, but then they almost didn’t stop. They got a Coke and talked nearly the night away, telling each other their life stories.
Already they were moony over each other, and when it came time to go home, they extended their date at K’s Drive-In for a late night snack. Afterward, Dixie kissed him in the parking lot, and he drove her home—very late now, her father would kill her—in his ’41 Lincoln. The next night, and the next, they went to the movies. But she still didn’t want her parents to see him. Not yet.
“I had tried to tell my mom and dad about him, that he was a little different from the other guys.” But when he arrived at the house the next Saturday night, only a week since they first talked at the roller skating rink, she was not prepared for the reaction.
“My parents were so shocked at the way he looked and dressed that they wouldn’t let us leave together.” They spent the evening sitting on the front porch with her three sisters and her mom and dad. In time, her family “adored him. He was a perfect gentleman.” But one of her sisters kept raising her eyebrows so Dixie could see what she really thought of the guy, and her uncle offered Elvis two dollars to go get a crew cut.
Dark-haired, intelligent, and earnest, Dixie was everything Elvis wanted in a girlfriend. Even her age was right. A sophomore at South Side High, Dixie was fourteen years old. Almost immediately, Elvis gave her his ring and taught her the language (“almost a baby talk”) he had with his mother, reverting to a pouty, little boy voice when he used their special words.
When Dixie first saw him at church, “We knew almost immediately he was not one of us. There was a restlessness about him, an air of anticipation, as if he knew he was on the threshold of something wonderful and exciting.”
Part of it was his nervousness at what might come of his visits to the Memphis Recording Service, if anything. He hadn’t even told Dixie about making the record, and he was glad, because he hadn’t heard back from Marion or Sam. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t, did it? He had so much unfocused energy. When he sat, he drummed his fingers on the table, and his foot was just going all the time, shaking, tapping, as if he hadn’t a second to waste. His leg, too, just bounced, even when he was just sitting in the movie theater. If anyone commented on it, he’d stammer and say, “Oh, I just do that, I-I-I-just do that.”
He was settling into the church now. Partly to be closer to Dixie, he participated in many of the activities, and he hoped to impress her with his singing. Though Dixie found him a shy boy, when he sang, he threw himself into it completely, so much so that she thought he “kind of lost himself . . . And he had this feeling if he could just meet James Blackwood, it would be worth every feeling of insecurity.”
He was much more relaxed when they went for walks. He could be playful, too. He’d grab her from behind, his hands around her waist, and hug her up close, snuggling into her back. Dixie would let out a delighted squeal, her dimples showing, and then smile so big folks could probably see it all the way over in Nashville. Soon the young couple was nearly inseparable. Elvis and Dixie were falling in love. “It was serious right away,” she says. In fact, they considered marriage. “We knew that that was what was supposed to be. We talked about it from the very beginning.”
Elvis, too, would always remember how close the two came to marriage. “I got out of school and was driving a truck,” he said in a 1972 interview. “I was dating a girl and waiting for her to get out of school so we could get married.”
Yet even so, past loves were still on his mind. Billie Wardlaw, who had moved to Mississippi from the Courts, was back living in Memphis again and going to school at Tech High. Just as before, Elvis started showing up at places he knew she would be. “I came out of Tech one afternoon and there he was, under the trees on campus, picking his guitar.”
But Elvis could see Billie still didn’t care for him, not with the deep passion he held for her. He knew for sure now that it was time to move on. Two weeks after he and Dixie met, Elvis took her home to meet his parents, and soon after, the Lockes invited the Presleys for dinner.
Dixie was surprised at their family dynamics, at how Vernon, who was on disability a good portion of the time, was almost an outsider. If Elvis ever stepped out of line, she noticed that Gladys handled it, not Vernon.
“If it was okay with Gladys, then it was okay with Vernon. He was not a disciplinarian by any means, and he knew the bond that Gladys and Elvis had for each other—something I felt he was not allowed to be a part of. It almost seemed like Elvis and his mom made more of the decisions, and Mr. Presley just kind of went along. I think he knew that
Gladys and Elvis really called the shots.”
When Elvis and Dixie first got together, Gladys took a more protective stance, as if to make sure Elvis didn’t get his heart broken like he did with Billie Wardlaw. She saw that Dixie was a quality girl, and as Elvis had suggested, potential marriage material, despite the five-year age difference.
Soon, when Dixie was at the house, Gladys began asking her probing questions about her family and “how high I was up in the church, and have I done this, and where have I gone . . . I felt a little like I was being interrogated.”
Dixie’s father did the same thing with boys who came to call on her three sisters, so she wasn’t offended. In fact, she and Gladys developed a deep friendship. “She told us several times that she would rather he married me than anyone else he had dated.” And Gladys wanted him married. She was gaining a lot of weight and not feeling well, and she wanted him settled and happy in case something happened to her.
But Dixie also saw that the bond between mother and son was formidable and not likely to be broken. The Bible teaches that it’s God’s plan to leave your father and mother. She was well aware of that. “But I don’t know that that would have ever happened with them.” In retrospect, she believes that had they both lived their full life spans, “They would have been together. I don’t think he would have ever left her, regardless of the situation. She would always have been with him.” In all probability, Dixie, Elvis, and Gladys would have had a living arrangement much like that of Gladys, Vernon, and Minnie Mae, together until death.
Nonetheless, the four of them, Elvis, Dixie, Gladys, and Vernon, began doing things together, getting a bite to eat and then going to the All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium. Gladys loved the Blackwood Brothers best, but Elvis preferred the more flamboyant Statesmen, thrilling to Jake Hess’s forceful lead stylings, and the lake-bottom low notes of bass singer Jim “Big Chief” Wetherington, whose legs often shook inside his big loose pants when he sang.