Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  The Assembly of God church in East Tupelo housed a small congregation in a tiny building, but both the people and the place were charged with the spirit of God. They saw themselves as an island of faith in a sinful world. They would carry on until Jesus Christ came to earth again, a family of the faithful, banded together in church and out. They addressed one another as “Brother” or “Sister.” Jesus, the Son of God, was near, and the spirit of God was always with them, but especially when they came together to pray, preach, and sing. “He walks with me, and he talks with me,” they would sing, “and he tells me I am his own.”

  Singing was vital to the religious experience. Frank Smith, “Brother Frank,” a minister who followed Gains Mansell to lead the Assembly of God church in East Tupelo, played the guitar and sang. The congregation joined in with faces lifted, voices strong with conviction, and hands double-clapping. “Where could I go but to the Lord,” they would sing joyfully, standing and dancing to the music. The piano would play and the singing would go on, the same song over and over, the same words rendered with increasing fervor each time. “Where could I go …” The piano sounded like a pedal-driven player piano; each note rang out clearly, distinctly, mechanically, predictably, faithfully.

  During the sermon, members of the congregation raised their faces and arms toward heaven and audibly affirmed the minister’s message. “Praise the Lord!” they would call out. As the Spirit seized them, they cried, laughed, shouted, fainted, jerked, and spoke in tongues. There would be a woman who would raise one arm high, palm open, and wave her hand slowly, smoothly back and forth as if signaling her presence to a heaven already in sight. There would be a man who could only express his jubilation physically, running, jumping over the backs of benches, and shouting. Some people would fall to the floor and lie perfectly still as if slain by the Holy Spirit, and some would fall and roll back and forth crying and moaning. Finally the minister’s speech would slow and soften, the piano would begin to play quietly, and the congregation, exhausted and ecstatic, would subside with a shuffling of feet and a scattering of low cries. “Yes, Lord.” “Amen.” “Yes, Lord.” It was as if a torrential rain had passed over them, washing away the trash and filth of earthly life, leaving them cleansed and quiet.

  These Christians felt the spirit of God with an intimacy and a power that mainline churches had found during the Great Awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but had lost. The people in the uptown churches had become sedate, subdued, and cerebral in their worship. They looked down upon the people in such churches as the Assembly of God as ignorant and overly emotional and called them “Holy Rollers” in derision. Meanwhile, the Pentecostal and Holiness churches could barely contain the joyous and noisy fervor of their worshippers.

  Members of the Assembly of God in East Tupelo recall Elvis at about age three toddling down the aisle toward the singers at the front of the church enthralled, his little mouth and voice attempting to imitate theirs. They would sing about “the wonder-working” power of the spirit or how on that “glad day” they would “fly away … to Glory.” Later, Elvis repeatedly asserted that he liked gospel music best of all. “It more or less puts your mind to rest,” he said. Then he reached down into that defining past of his childhood, and added: “At least it does mine, since I was two.”

  Elvis was two years old when he began to go to church with his mother alone. When he was three and four years old, every Sunday he went either to Parchman or to the little church at the bottom of the hill in East Tupelo. After he became successful, he ceased going to any church at all. He excused himself by saying that his presence would be disruptive. But he was famous among fellow entertainers for holding impromptu gospel singing sessions backstage between performances. Sometimes he would close his eyes as others sang and seem transported. Now and again onstage he would have his gospel group sing a hymn while he listened raptly, seemingly truly transported and unmindful of the audience. Only a few hours before he died, he was playing the piano and singing gospel songs at Graceland while his cousin, his cousin’s wife, and his fiancée listened.

  Getting Vernon out of Parchman

  Gladys did more than visit Vernon in Parchman and serve as his lifeline. She got him released.

  Mississippi had no parole board, and prison officials gave no paroles. The governor might pardon convicts, which he occasionally did for political or personal reasons. In addition, there were various loosely defined processes by which a convict might secure a “suspended” sentence, which would be authorized by the governor and would allow the convict to leave prison before he had served his full time and remain out during good behavior. Bad behavior would send him back to Parchman.

  A suspended sentence was rarely achieved. For Vernon to get his sentence suspended, the judge who sentenced him, the district attorney who prosecuted him, and his local sheriff would have to approve. Letters, petitions, and personal entreaties might encourage officials to leniency. A devoted, chaste, and faithful wife and little children needing his support would also help. Finally, a key person in the process was the sergeant who commanded his camp in prison. He had a veto, as it were, and Vernon himself had to please that man. He had to be responsive to authority and promise to be a responsible citizen, worker, husband, and father. He had to “walk the line,” as Johnny Cash would later sing so convincingly that some people thought he had actually served time in prison and on parole, which he had not.

  Between Gladys’s work outside and Vernon’s behavior inside, the authorities were persuaded to suspend Vernon’s sentence for six months beginning on February 6, 1939. Billy Smith, Travis’s son, understood that his aunt Gladys got up a petition and got Vernon out of Parchman as a hardship case. The record in Mississippi state archives shows that Governor Hugh White, who signed the order, was persuaded to do so by a petition of the citizens of Lee County and a letter from O. S. Bean, the party on whom the checks were forged. Surely it was Gladys who, by explaining her needs—including the means to support Elvis—and manifesting her virtues, convinced influential people to sign the petition and Orville Bean to write that letter.

  During the week when Vernon was released from Parchman on a suspended sentence, Gladys took part in two social events in East Tupelo reported by the Tupelo Daily News on Saturday, February 10, 1939. Her event on Sunday, February 4, was warm and personal. The News reported that “Miss Dora Harris and Miss Gladys Presley visited friends at Wheeler,” a village about twenty miles north of Tupelo.

  On Tuesday, February 6, the News announced that Vernon Presley was released from Parchman with a suspended sentence. Two days later, on Thursday, Gladys was one of eight “ladies” who came together for a sewing circle. The News reported that event on Saturday: “A sewing circle composed of the following ladies, Misses Gladys Pressley [sic], Dora Harris, Dora Alred, Sarah Cloyd, and Mrs. Luna Buse and Mrs. Nora Clarks met at the home of Mrs. Elmo Holloway Thursday afternoon at [type missing in the newspaper] o’clock. Mrs. Nell Peck of Tupelo is instructing the group in sewing. Coke and tea was served as refreshments.” The News misspelled the Presley name as Pressley once. Much more strikingly, it identified Gladys as “Miss,” not “Mrs.,” Presley twice. Where in the world was Vernon?

  In truth, Gladys herself fulfilled the role of a husband in Southern white culture during the fifteen months that Vernon was in the county jail and Parchman. She was the “provider and protector” for the family. She had also marvelously fulfilled three of the four ideals prescribed for women. She was pious, pure, and domestic. But she was not at all submissive. She got her husband out of the Mississippi state prison.

  After serving less than nine months of a three-year sentence, Vernon was back home. Travis Smith and Lether Gable were not out, nor would they be out until 1941, when they had served their full sentences. Authorities might have decided that they were not hardship cases, or that they were primarily responsible for the forgery and Vernon had been seduced by them.

  Sentence Suspended

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p; By the time Vernon returned, Gladys and Elvis had left the little house in East Tupelo and moved in with her cousin Frank Richards, his wife, Leona, and their children on the south side of Tupelo. Gladys was working nearby at the Mid-South Laundry while Leona watched the children. The commercial laundry was another sign of modernity coming to the South and Tupelo. Many middle-class white people no longer boiled their clothes in black iron wash pots in their backyards or gave their business to African American washerwomen, who worked wash pots at their own homes. Instead, they “counted” out their wash on a “laundry list” at the beginning of the week, bundled it up, and sent it to the laundry, where large machines did the hard labor of cleaning; white men in delivery trucks brought it back before the weekend neatly folded and bundled.

  Vernon needed to go to work soon after he got out of prison, not only to earn a living for his family but also to prove himself worthy of his freedom. In 1939, as the Great Depression dragged on, anyone would have had trouble finding a new job quickly. Vernon had a reputation as undependable and lazy before; now he was also a convicted criminal. Any employer would regard him with a suspicious eye. Even his friends began to shun him. Billy Smith, his nephew, said, “No, he’s gone to jail. It’s best not to socialize because people might think I’ll get into trouble with him.”

  In the mid-1980s, there was a vague memory in the Tupelo community that Vernon first got a job helping build public outhouses. The memory is close to the truth. In fact, in early May, Vernon was enrolled as a WPA worker and assigned to the Sanitation Project in Lee County. He would work 140 hours each month for $30.10. By July, he was upgraded in skill to carpenter and cement finisher, and his pay was raised to $52 a month. In those terribly hard times, when the cost of food, housing, and clothing was minimal, this was high security indeed.

  The Presleys needed all the security they could get, and Vernon needed to show the authorities that he deserved the suspension of his sentence. On August 6, his suspension would end. Before that time, authorities would have to make a judgment. Would Vernon be sent back to Parchman or not?

  Some friends and relatives in East Tupelo discounted the seriousness of Vernon’s crime, chalking it up to Orville Bean’s mercenary and vindictive nature. Others did not, and across the creek in Tupelo proper the Lee County gentry was not likely to see his incarceration as a total miscarriage of justice. Certain members of the elite had endorsed his temporary release. Their judgment, reputations, and honor were at stake, and they would be aware of his performance. Most immediately, sheriff’s deputies and town police would be watching. His release had been based on his continued good behavior. One misstep and the authorities would send him back to Camp 5, where the sergeant would surely resent Vernon’s betrayal of his trust. His days of freedom were literally numbered and steadily dwindling. He did not have much time to prove himself worthy of an extension of the suspension of his sentence. It was almost a godsend that the WPA gave him a job in early May.

  The little family was under tremendous pressure, and it showed. They did things in their sleep—like moving their mattress and bedclothes from the bedstead to the floor in the middle of the night and waking up the next morning surprised to find themselves thus lowered. For a time, Elvis walked in his sleep, moving about at night with his eyes wide open.

  During this trying time, family and clan were vital to the survival of the Presleys, especially the Richards, with whom they lived. Apparently mother, father, and little boy all slept together in the same iron-work, wire-spring, tick-mattress bed. They had done so from the beginning in the little house on Old Saltillo Road. For people born to large families on tenant farms, there was nothing at all shocking about many bodies sleeping in a single bed. On cold winter nights, it was comforting to snuggle under layers of homemade quilts on a mattress filled with chicken or turkey feathers or freshly dried corn shucks surrounded by other family members. Smiths and Presleys had for generations considered themselves lucky to have any bed at all to sleep in and a roof over their heads.

  Little Elvis was profoundly affected by his father’s absence and made anxious by his return. Signs suggest, however, that Elvis was not resentful toward Vernon. The ordeal of his incarceration seemed to thicken the bonds tying the family together. The prime mover in that process was Gladys.

  Gladys loved Vernon and did not forsake him. In the crisis that he created, she became the provider and protector as well as wife and mother. Her smile, her touch, her approval were vital to her husband, and her relation to him was important to the community. Her virtue provided an umbrella under which Vernon could find a measure of protection in a larger world that held him in low regard as a man. Such consideration as he got from the community was largely the gift of Gladys.

  As spring passed into summer, the possibility of Vernon’s return to Parchman must have loomed before the family. Their fate was in the hands of the local gentry. An extension came through only on the day before the deadline. On August 5, Governor White authorized ninety more days of freedom for Vernon for good behavior while out on former suspension. The new date was November 3. Vernon had passed the six-month test; now he faced another countdown of days. On November 3, 1939, two years after he was first arrested, on the very day that Vernon’s three-month reprieve ended, he received an indefinite suspension of his sentence.

  The relief for the Presleys must have been tremendous. If Vernon behaved himself, presumably he—and they—would never have to see Parchman again. Yet he had not served out his sentence, and any misbehavior, any trouble at all with the law, would leave him vulnerable to a summary proceeding and two more years of prison. His future lay most immediately in the hands of the city and county police, before whose eyes he moved daily. They knew him—by face, by name, and by character. They knew what he had done, and they certainly knew they had the power to treat him in an arbitrary manner if they wanted. Vernon’s vulnerability must have weighed heavily upon Gladys, and the anxieties of both parents must have passed into the consciousness of their son, now almost five years old.

  On Becoming a Boy

  During his formative years, it is said, in order to become a man and a father himself, a boy needs a manly father as a model, and especially so in the early years of his life. Elvis’s mother had to fill the space left by his father’s absence in prison. Gladys, not Vernon, became the provider and protector. She became the model for that role in family life.

  If Elvis read the realities accurately, he understood that his mother—not his father—had such power. Her power was the limited but certain power that a lower-class white woman might muster in the cultural order of the Deep South. A good woman—pious, pure, and faithful to family—was entitled to maintenance and protection by chivalrous men, manly men at the top who had power. The formula was very clear. She needed to make them aware of her virtuous character, to make her hardship felt by them, to be deferential in her demeanor, and to manifest to her benefactors her gratitude to them for everything they did for her and hers. The very stuffing of a Southern gentleman demanded that he do his duty to good people of the lower orders in his community, to “deserving” people and to women in particular. Deference from them compelled maintenance and protection from the elite. Thus, Mr. Bobo, the owner of the hardware store in Tupelo, spent entire Sundays, his day off, driving Gladys and Elvis to Parchman and back.

  Elvis would understand early and clearly that he was born into the lower orders of society. He must have known that even in the Presley and Smith clans his father stood near or at the bottom. Vernon was not the man his father, Jessie, was, nor the public-spirited citizen his uncle Noah was. Among men at large, including criminals, Elvis’s father had little if any respect. Most importantly, Elvis knew from his mother’s example that in reaching up from the bottom one gained a modicum of respect and security only by making visible one’s best self along with one’s needs, by manifesting a distinctly deferential manner to people with power, and by clear and repeated statements of gratitude for any recogniti
on or gifts received. “Thank you. Thank you very much,” he would later say repeatedly to his audiences with a bow of the head and a bend of the body.

  Elvis as a child understood very well the realities of life for himself at the very bottom of the social order among whites. He learned to deal effectively with the disabilities he suffered because of his class, not in the way of his father, but rather in the way of his mother. Gladys played the game and survived; Vernon dumbly defied the hierarchy and paid the especially severe penalties imposed on a faulty white man of the lower orders—including the humiliation of Parchman, the unmanning that went with serving time there. During a significant portion of the period when Elvis was learning how to be a boy, Gladys, not Vernon, became the adult model for Elvis. Through her, he learned to appreciate and himself practice the ways of white women of the lower orders in Southern culture. In dealing with the world, he became a master at the game.

  PART III

  Comeback and Die

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE COMEBACK SPECIAL

  The sixties were mostly the movie years for Elvis. After his television appearance with Frank Sinatra in May 1960, he did not perform on TV again for eight years, until Elvis, his “Comeback Special” in 1968. Instead, he made one more or less bad but very lucrative movie after another. They were lucrative because so little money was invested in producing the films and so much was paid to Elvis and the Colonel.

  Elvis produced no hit records during most of this period. His last No. 1 hit was “Good Luck Charm,” which came out in February 1962. Even though that record reached the top in singles sales, it sold fewer than eight hundred thousand copies, nearly half a million fewer than his previous hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (1961). The songs that he did for the movies, such as “Do the Clam” from Girl Happy (1965), were often given to RCA to fulfill his recording commitments. They were mediocre precisely because no substantial effort was made to achieve quality. Over time, Elvis came to hate moviemaking, and he became less and less interested in producing records.