Baby, Let's Play House Part 4

Regis took it that he didn't dance because of religion, and simply said, "That's all right." And so they sat out the entire night, talking and sipping on soda pop and watching all the other dancers, Elvis's dark blue suit, the color of heartache, further setting them apart. Finally, they lined up with all the other couples for the grand march, stepping through a mammoth heart as their names were called, and had their picture taken. In it, Regis manages a half-smile, but Elvis looks as stiff as a soldier, peering solemnly into the camera. Regis saw it as part of his humor, like the way he curled his lip into a sneer.

He made no attempts to socialize, and no one, not Buzzy, or George, or Red, approached them. But Elvis promised Regis they'd have more fun afterward at Leonard's Barbeque, where they were to meet some of his friends and go on to a party. They drove out and waited, but n.o.body ever showed. Regis could tell it bothered him, and finally, chagrined, Elvis took her home.

A few weeks after the prom, Elvis dropped by her house and found the family had simply vanished. Regis's mother, financially strapped, had decided to move in with a relative. And Regis had gone to Florida to help her older sister, who was expecting a baby.

"I jumped at the chance, because going to Florida and living in a stable home was a lot more inviting than staying in Memphis with this fractured family life." Yet she couldn't bring herself to tell Elvis how bad her situation was. They'd moved so many times, and she was embarra.s.sed. Besides, "girls didn't call boys in those days," so she never said good-bye. Like Billie, she just moved off and left. To Elvis, it must have felt as if he'd been spurned three times in a row-by Betty, Billie, and now Regis. He never learned any different.

"I've always regretted that. I just figured he'd find out I had left by driving by the house. I've often wondered if he knocked on the door and saw all these strangers, the other people who rented rooms, and wondered who they were."

In the move, Regis lost her photo of her prom date. But Elvis kept his, and a few years later, Gladys gave a copy to a fan magazine. By then Elvis was a teen heartthrob and a national sensation, with very specific dance moves all his own.

Dixie Locke and Elvis at her junior prom, May 6, 1955. Gladys bought her dress. "I was waiting for her to get out of school so we could get married," Elvis said years later. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia) (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)

Chapter Four.

Dixie's Delight.

In July 1953 Elvis was reading the afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, when he noticed a lengthy article that seemed to speak his name. Three years earlier, twenty-seven-year-old Sam Phillips had opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue. It was only about a ten-minute walk from the Peabody Hotel, where Phillips and one part-time a.s.sistant, a woman named Marion Keisker, worked for Memphis's top radio station, WREC. Phillips had become an announcer there in 1945, but he held a number of duties, including engineering the big-band broadcasts of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller on a network hookup from the Peabody Skyway each Sat.u.r.day night.

It was glamorous, mirrored ballroom kind of work. But in his new outlet, the Florence, Alabama, native who had grown up dest.i.tute 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 'n.i.g.g.e.rs.' "

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 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-b.u.t.ter 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 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 a.s.sembler 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." 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 a.s.sembler 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 divorcee 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 n.o.body. I don't sound like n.o.body.' 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 a.s.sembly of G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 Sat.u.r.day night. The next weekend, sure enough, he showed up, but in n.o.body'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 c.o.ke 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 antic.i.p.ation, as if he knew he was on the threshold of something wonderful and exciting." of us. There was a restlessness about him, an air of antic.i.p.ation, 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d'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 ba.s.s singer Jim "Big Chief" Wetherington, whose legs often shook inside his big loose pants when he sang.

Elvis just couldn't get enough of music, and he was discovering the wealth of what Memphis had to offer. On Sundays, he and Dixie would sometimes slip away from their own church services to go to the all-black East Trigg Baptist Church just a few blocks away. There they'd sit in the balcony and let the waves of black gospel wash over them, get baptized in the beat of the Lord. Already Elvis was thinking of a way to meld black and white gospel together. But there was no gospel like black gospel, with its near physicality, and East Trigg's pastor, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, was no ordinary preacher. A celebrated civil rights activist and fiery orator, he was also an accomplished gospel songwriter. Mahalia Jackson would record his "Move on Up a Little Higher," and Clara Ward his "How I Got Over."

By spring 1954 Elvis was driving a truck for Crown Electric, delivering supplies for $1 an hour, and training to be an electrician ("Sometimes they would let me help wire or something"), though, as he said in a 1956 interview, he worried if he were cut out for it. "You had to keep your mind right on what you're doing, you can't be the least bit absentminded, or you're liable to blow somebody's house up. I didn't think I was the type for it, but I was going to give it a try."

Things were looking up, on the whole, and he and Dixie were seeing each other almost every day. That May, they attended the Oral Roberts Crusade, though most of their dates were less serious-minded. They'd climb in the old Lincoln and head off to the movies two or three times a week, or go down to the WMPS Radio studios at the corner of Union and Main for deejay Bob Neal's "High Noon Round-Up" show, where the Blackwoods appeared regularly.

On the other end of the scale, they also loved Dewey Phillips's "Red, Hot, and Blue" radio show for its mix of blues, boogies, and spirituals. The couple would listen to it in Elvis's car, parked at McKellar Lake, or maybe over at his parents' house. Dixie was more a fan of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, but the WHBQ show was the hottest in town for black and white teenagers alike. Phillips, wild, wacky, and often hopped up on amphetamines, called himself "Daddy-O," and he struck fear in the hearts of legions of G.o.d-fearing Memphians. "So many of our Christian parents wouldn't even let [their children] listen to it," Dixie remembers.

Phillips's broadcasts often spurred Elvis to drop by Charlie's Record Shop on North Main to peruse the new R & B records, Dixie in tow. Elvis had gotten brave one day and talked the proprietor into putting his first acetate on the jukebox, and man, that was a thrill! Elvis needed a boost about then, too. He'd tried out for the Songfellows and was crushed at the rejection, hearing over and over in his head that they'd said he couldn't sing, sing, when what they had really said was that he couldn't sing when what they had really said was that he couldn't sing harmony harmony. And he was rejected as a vocalist with the Eddie Bond band at the Hi-Hat club, Bond telling him to go back to driving a truck. Years later, his words still stung. "Man," Elvis would tell George Klein, "that sonofab.i.t.c.h broke my heart."

It was a delicate period in all their lives. The more time that Elvis and Dixie spent together, the more Dixie sensed that Gladys felt slighted, even though she seemed like a second mother. The two shared recipes and went places together, once to a Stanley Products party (the Tupperware of the early 1950s), or simply spent hours talking. They never had cross words. But even as a teenager, it seemed to Dixie that Gladys was almost jealous of her relationship with Elvis.

"She and I were real close and enjoyed each other. But I think if she had been able to, she would have just kept him to herself. I felt that way myself. I would have kept him just for me, and not let the world have him."

Marion Keisker went to work one day in mid-1954 and found that Sam had pulled out the note she'd made months earlier: "Elvis Presley, good ballad singer." out the note she'd made months earlier: "Elvis Presley, good ballad singer."

"What's this for?" she asked him and smiled at the funny memo she'd made ("Timothy Sideburns") to remind her what Elvis looked like.

"Oh," Sam said. "That kid was in here again. I liked him, but I don't have time to work with him. I told him I would call him sometime."

As Marion told the story, every time a song would come up and Sam would say, "Who should we get?" she'd say, "The kid with the sideburns. Why don't we give him a chance?" But Sam would invariably say, "Oh, I don't think he's ready yet." Elvis still persisted, though, dropping by periodically.

Finally, in June 1954, he got his break. Sam had a new song from Nashville, a ballad called "Without You." Marion placed the call, and Sam got on the line and gave him the good news. The studio was ten or twelve blocks from Alabama Street, and Elvis ran all the way, Sam said. "I no more than hung up the phone, hardly, and he was there in no time flat." Without a doubt, Sam loved the plaintiveness in his voice, the yearning yearning for lost dreams. But no matter how many times Elvis sang "Without You," he never quite got it to Sam's satisfaction. "He sang it well, but I said to myself, 'We just can't do a ballad on Elvis.' " for lost dreams. But no matter how many times Elvis sang "Without You," he never quite got it to Sam's satisfaction. "He sang it well, but I said to myself, 'We just can't do a ballad on Elvis.' "

"We were taking a break," Marion remembered, "and Sam said, 'What can you do?' Elvis said, 'I can sing anything.' Sam said, 'Let me hear you.' So he just started playing s.n.a.t.c.hes-gospel, western, anything. Doing real heavy on the Dean Martin stuff. He must have been convinced if he was going to sound like somebody, he was going to sound like Dean Martin. The three of us stayed there far into the night, just Elvis playing and talking."

Elvis recalled the same thing to Bob Johnson of the Memphis Press-Scimitar Press-Scimitar in 1956. "I guess I must have sat there at least three hours. I sang everything I knew-pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered." in 1956. "I guess I must have sat there at least three hours. I sang everything I knew-pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered."

Sam prided himself on his ability to read people and to coax the best out of them. ("There is not a human being on the face of G.o.d's earth who could get more out of totally untrained musicians than me.") Now he looked out the control room window and locked eyes with Elvis, who searched Phillips's own for rea.s.surance. Elvis knew the whole thing was a disaster, but maybe they would hit on something.

"You're doing just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you," Sam said, trying to get the boy to communicate whatever was in his heart. "If you make a mistake of any sort, I don't care what it is, I want a big one. If you hold back, you'll kill the feel of the whole d.a.m.n thing."

Three days after Elvis's big audition, his world fell apart. R. W. Blackwood and Bill Lyles of the Blackwood Brothers quartet were killed in a plane crash in Alabama. Elvis drove straight to Dixie's after work, and they cried in each other's arms. To Elvis, Bill and R. W. were more than great singers-they were friends now, from church, but Dixie had known the whole family for years, and these were close deaths. She and Elvis held hands at the funeral on July 2, which was all the more emotional because the Lockes were leaving for a two-week family vacation in Florida the next day. It was the first time Elvis and Dixie would be separated. Lyles of the Blackwood Brothers quartet were killed in a plane crash in Alabama. Elvis drove straight to Dixie's after work, and they cried in each other's arms. To Elvis, Bill and R. W. were more than great singers-they were friends now, from church, but Dixie had known the whole family for years, and these were close deaths. She and Elvis held hands at the funeral on July 2, which was all the more emotional because the Lockes were leaving for a two-week family vacation in Florida the next day. It was the first time Elvis and Dixie would be separated.

They'd talked several times about eloping, and now they discussed it again before she left, since Dixie was scheduled to start her summer job at Goldsmith's department store when she returned. But she was so young, she knew it would break her parents' hearts if they ran away and got married. Of course, they were not intimate-the church frowned on premarital s.e.x-and they wouldn't have done it anyway. They were saving themselves for marriage.

The night Dixie left, Elvis got a phone call from Scotty Moore, a local guitarist whose band, the Starlite Wranglers, had just signed with Sun Records. Elvis had mentioned to Sam that he was looking for a band, and Sam had pa.s.sed the word along. The Starlite Wranglers already had a lead singer, Doug Poindexter, but Scotty, whose day job was cleaning and blocking hats in his brother's laundry business, had been working with Sam for several months, trying to come up with a record, an artist, a song-anything they could make a buck out of, as Scotty said. Elvis's name came up, and Sam gave Scotty his number.

He showed up at Scotty's house on a Sunday afternoon, the Fourth of July, wearing a black shirt, pink pants with white stripes down the leg, white shoes . . . and "just a lot of hair. I thought my wife was going to go out the back door."

Bill Black, who played ba.s.s for the Starlite Wranglers when he wasn't building tires at Firestone, lived down the street, and he came, too, for a few hours. The three sang everything they could think of, though they had little repertoire in common. They made an odd trio-Elvis, nineteen, with grease in his hair, looking like a s.p.a.ce-age garage mechanic; Scotty, twenty-three, quiet and una.s.suming, with sloping features that spoke to a country background; and the jocular Black, twenty-eight, whose soft body nearly ran to fat, and who held his ba.s.s together with baling wire.

Afterward, Scotty got on the phone to Sam. "Well, the boy sings pretty good, but he didn't knock me out."

"Well, what do you think? Do we need a song, or what?" Sam said.

Scotty thought for a minute and then replied, "Yeah, with the right song, I think he would be good on record."

The next night, they were all in Sam's little two-room studio for what was supposed to be basically a rehearsal. The first song Elvis put down on tape was the Leon Payne ballad "I Love You Because," and then he sang a couple of country numbers. They were all right but not special, so they took a break, and got some coffee and a c.o.ke while Sam monkeyed with the console.

Then Elvis remembered an old loose-jointed Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup song, "That's All Right (Mama)," that he'd heard on Dewey Phillips's show. Crudup was a man apart. His music didn't follow standard black blues patterns-a mile-wide hillbilly streak ran through it-which is probably what commended it to Elvis. Now he picked up a guitar and banged on it and started singing, keeping the primal energy of Crudup's recording but hopping up the vocal, jumping around the studio in a dance, just cutting up to break the tension. Bill picked up his ba.s.s and started slapping the strings, helping the beat along, and clowning, too, and then Scotty tried to get in somewhere with a rhythm vamp. They were just making a bunch of racket, as Scotty saw it, not realizing they were striking rock's seminal lightning bolt.

"The door to the control room was open, and about halfway through Sam came running out, saying, 'Wait a minute! What the devil are ya'll doing? That sounds pretty good through the door.' Everybody looked at each other, like, 'What were we doing?' We said, 'We don't know.' Sam said, 'Well, find out real quick and don't lose it! Run through it again and let's see what it sounds like.' "

"Sam," Scotty said, "it just flipped him. He thought it was real exciting."

They backtracked, playing it twice, once for Sam to get a balance. Elvis ran the words again in his head and changed Crudup's line, "The life you're living, son, women be the death of you," to, "Son, that gal you're fooling with, she ain't no good for you." Then they put it on tape.

That one simple action set the wheels in motion to make Elvis Presley the most important star of all time.

The following day, Sam called Dewey Phillips and told him he had an acetate he wanted him to hear. They sat together and listened at the WHBQ studios at the Hotel Chisca, and Dewey jumped out of his seat, wanting to know who it was. n.o.body would believe Elvis was a white boy, not sounding like this. Dewey played the song on the air July 8, and the switchboard lit up, so he spun it over and over, finally calling Gladys and Vernon and asking them to get Elvis into the studio. He wanted to interview him on the air. wanted him to hear. They sat together and listened at the WHBQ studios at the Hotel Chisca, and Dewey jumped out of his seat, wanting to know who it was. n.o.body would believe Elvis was a white boy, not sounding like this. Dewey played the song on the air July 8, and the switchboard lit up, so he spun it over and over, finally calling Gladys and Vernon and asking them to get Elvis into the studio. He wanted to interview him on the air.

Elvis had been too nervous to listen, so he went to the movies to try to take his mind off it. The Presleys went to the Suzore No. 2 and combed the dark aisles, peering into the long rows of faces until they found their son. Down at the station, Dewey could tell how rattled Elvis was, so he just made casual conversation with him, never telling him he was on the air until it was over.

Sam Phillips, awed by the reaction, knew he'd finally found a white man with the black sound, and called the trio into the studio the next night. He needed a second side to release a single, but the problem was finding something in the same vein, as Elvis seemed stuck on ballads. Again, the guys ran through every song they could think of, and then Bill took off on Bill Monroe's bluegra.s.s waltz, "Blue Moon of Kentucky." He rendered it as a kind of goof, souping up the tempo with a rhythm-and-blues feel, and mimicking Monroe's high-lonesome tenor as he slapped the ba.s.s. Elvis joined in, scrubbing the rhythm on his acoustic guitar, and then Scotty laid down his clean lines on the electric.

"h.e.l.l, that's different. That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout," Sam Phillips famously enthused.

"We just sort of shook our heads and said, "Well, that's fine, but good G.o.d, they'll run us out of town!" Scotty remembers. "I think we all knew immediately when this happened that this might be what we was looking for. So we just figured out where to start and stop, and that was it."

By this time, Dixie knew that Elvis had been recording at Sun Records, but she was shocked to get a telegram from him on vacation: shocked to get a telegram from him on vacation: HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT. Then, as the family drove back into Memphis, they heard "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the radio. It was one thing to hear three guys sitting in the kitchen practicing a song with a couple of guitars, Dixie said, but another to hear it on the airwaves.

"I was totally stunned. But I recognized him immediately. Everybody in the family was just ecstatic. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me."

Neither of them had any idea of the magnitude of it all ("It was almost disbelief that the disc jockeys would even play it," Dixie said), even though Elvis was thrilled to be playing the Bon Air club as an extra added attraction with Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers. "He was still just totally innocent and spontaneous," in Dixie's view. "There wasn't a conceited bone in his body."

In fact, he was still interested in doing the old things, like going to the Humes football games. One night, Charlie Fisher, who remembered him from ROTC, watched him come and sit in front of him at Crump Stadium, named for the congressman and former demagogue mayor E. H. Crump. Elvis was decked out that night, wearing a lavender Ike jacket and matching lavender pants.

"My wife, Steve, took one look at him and said, 'My G.o.d, who is that?' "

"I told her, 'I think that's Elvis Presley. He's supposed to be making records these days.' "

The whole town was talking about him, but few had actually seen him, and there was some confusion about what race Elvis was, as Dixie soon discovered. Her mother worked with a couple of young black girls, who mentioned how much they loved "That's All Right (Mama)." Mrs. Locke spoke up and cheerfully said, "My daughter dates him." The girls blinked, incredulous that Mrs. Locke's daughter dated a Negro. She set them straight, told them he was white, but "they couldn't believe it," says Dixie, "because the type of music that he was singing was typically related to a black musician."

Memphis would see for itself on July 30, 1954, when Elvis played the Overton Park Sh.e.l.l, an outdoor stage in the city's leafy park of the same name. Four days before, Sam Phillips, who had just formally signed Elvis to Sun Records, had gone to Bob Neal, the WMPS disc jockey whose noonday show Elvis and Dixie frequently attended. Neal, who also ran a little record shop with his wife, Helen, sometimes promoted country concerts. Now he was bringing in a "hillbilly hoedown," a package show starring Slim Whitman and Billy Walker from the Louisiana Hayride, the live radio show broadcast from Shreveport over KWKH. Since his own show was all requests, Neal was playing Elvis's two songs.