Last Train to Memphis Read online

  Dixie didn’t know what to say; of course she would go, but it was so completely out of the blue. If he had asked her to come see him sing with a professional quartet, now that would have been a shock, but at least it would have been in line with something she might have anticipated, something in keeping with what she and he both saw as a kind of spiritual gift. And what if someone saw them, what if one of her parents’ friends saw her going into the club or there was a Railway Express co-worker of her father’s sitting inside? It didn’t stop her, of course. Nor did she ever question Elvis’ judgment. “He was just so nervous, I was nervous, too. When we got there, there weren’t a lot of people, but there was a dance floor and there were drinks being served, because the man said something to us when we came in about our being too young to even be in there. I had a Coke. We sat at a table and drank Cokes.”

  The featured performer, Eddie Bond, was a seasoned veteran of twenty-one who had been playing around town since he was fifteen and had just gotten out of the navy. A confident entertainer and self-styled entrepreneur who twenty years later would run for sheriff of Memphis (in 1969 he composed “The Ballad of Buford Pusser,” around which the popular movie Walking Tall was constructed), Bond came over to the table to say hello. He asked Elvis what he did for a living, and Elvis said he drove a truck for Crown Electric, but Dixie was embarrassed for him because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the table. He had gotten a haircut especially for this performance, and he was wearing his bullfighter’s outfit with a pink shirt. In no time it was his turn to go onstage. He did two songs by himself, just strumming his guitar and singing; Dixie thought he was wonderful, but before she knew it, it was over. “It was almost like ohh-let’s-hurry-and-get-out-of-here, glad-it-was-over type of thing.” Before leaving he conferred briefly with Eddie Bond, but Dixie was at a distance and he never told her what was said. In later years Bond would boast jocularly that he was “the only person who ever fired [Elvis Presley] from the bandstand” and explain that it was the club owners who forced him to turn down the fledgling performer. Ronnie Smith was under the impression that Eddie wanted to book him into another, rougher joint across the street so that Eddie could have two bands working at the same time. Elvis for his part took it as a bitter rejection. Bond told him, he confided to his friend George Klein in 1957, that he had better stick with driving a truck “ ‘because you’re never going to make it as a singer.’ We were on a train going to Hollywood to make Jailhouse Rock, and Elvis said, ‘I wonder what Eddie Bond thinks now. Man, that sonofabitch broke my heart.’ ”

  The days went by. More and more, Dixie said, there was talk of marriage. “We came very close one day to getting in the car and driving to Hernando, Mississippi—anyone could get married in Hernando. We talked about it several times very seriously, about what we would do after we got married and where we would live. We were seriously talking about it, but I don’t know how, one of us always had the good sense to say, ‘But what if—?’ I was still in school, and it would have just broken my mom and dad’s heart.” Dixie was going to start her summer job at Goldsmith’s in the cosmetics department soon, but before she did, she and her family were going away on vacation, to visit relatives in Florida for the first two weeks of July. She was worried about that—it would be their first separation, and Elvis got so jealous, he hated for her just to be with other people, let alone other boys. Dixie enjoyed being with people, “but he couldn’t stand it if I was doing something that didn’t involve him, he was kind of possessive in that respect.” Sometimes Dixie thought the whole family was just too wrapped up in themselves, or maybe it was just in their dreams for Elvis; it was so hard to get inside that tight little circle. But then again, she knew that was just the way country people were sometimes.

  They picnicked in Overton Park, they went fishing together one time, though Elvis wasn’t much of a “nature boy”; he drove her around in the Crown Electric truck and got reprimanded by Mr. Tipler for getting off his route and running late. He always had his guitar in the truck with him, and he would play for his fellow workers at the drop of a hat. Mrs. Tipler told him to “put down that damn guitar, it’s going to be the ruination of you,” but she said it with an indulgent smile. He was no longer so sure himself that he had the makings of a good electrician, because, as he said in a 1956 interview, he didn’t know if he had the requisite attention span. “I was in doubt as to whether I would ever make it, because 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.”

  He was also going to continue to give recording a try. Marion Keisker saw his truck pass by the studio often, and once in a while he would stop in at 706 Union in his work clothes and cast about for a conversational subject, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. He was always asking her if she knew of a band, trying to assume an ease and a familiarity which he obviously did not feel, and her heart went out to him. Dixie, too, sensed that the tryout with Eddie Bond was not simply an isolated incident, though in this one area, evidently, he did not confide his innermost feelings to her. She had no doubt that if he wanted to make a record he would make a record, but she had no idea what making a record really meant—unless it meant getting on the radio. She knew he could never stand to make his living from playing dives and honky-tonks like the Hi Hat, she just wasn’t sure what the alternatives were, or how you got to be on Bob Neal’s High Noon Round-Up with the Blackwood Brothers and Eddie Hill.

  On Saturday, June 26, just a week before Dixie was scheduled to leave for Florida, Elvis finally got his chance. Miss Keisker called around noon. “She said, ‘Can you be here by three?’ ” he said in later years, whenever he recounted the story. “I was there by the time she hung up the phone.”

  What had happened was that, on his last trip to Nashville, in May, to record the Prisonaires, Sam had picked up an acetate from Red Wortham, the song publisher who had originally steered the Prisonaires to Sun. Phillips had listened to the song over and over, a plaintive lament called “Without You,” sung in a quavering voice that sounded like a cross between the Ink Spots and a sentimental Irish tenor. It was undeniably amateurish, but there was something about it, it had a quality of yearning to it, and Phillips felt with the right voice maybe it could be something. Its purity, its simplicity, above all the very amateurishness of the performance, put him in mind of the kid who had been stopping by—he was not a pest, exactly, but he kept turning up—for the last nine or ten months. What was his name? he asked Marion, who seemed somewhat taken with the boy, a shy, insecure kid (“He was beyond shy,” Sam thought) who had obviously never sung anywhere in his life. “Elvis Presley,” Marion said and made the call.

  They worked on the number all afternoon. When it became obvious that for whatever reason the boy was not going to get it right—maybe “Without You” wasn’t the right song for him, maybe he was just intimidated by the damn studio—Phillips had him run down just about every song he knew. He wasn’t much of a guitar player, but the world didn’t need any more damn virtuosos; what the world needed, Sam Phillips was convinced, was communication, and that was what he sensed in there somewhere, underlying everything, in this boy’s voice. “I guess I must have sat there at least three hours,” Elvis told Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson in 1956. “I sang everything I knew—pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered.” Sam watched him intently through the glass of the control room window—he was no longer taping him, and in almost every respect this session had to be accounted a dismal failure, but still there was something…. Every so often the boy looked up at him, as if for approval: was he doing all right? Sam just nodded and spoke in that smooth, reassuring voice. “You’re doing just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you now.” Soothing, crooning, his eyes locked into the boy’s through the plate glass window that he had built s
o that his eyes would be level with the performer’s when he was sitting at the control room console, he didn’t really know if they were getting anywhere or not, it was just so damned hard to tell when you were dealing with a bunch of damn amateurs, but it was only from amateurs, he firmly believed, that you ever got any real freshness of feeling.

  When it was over, Elvis was exhausted, he felt limp but strangely elated, too. “I was an overnight sensation,” he always told interviewers in later years. “A year after they heard me the first time, they called me back!” Everyone caught the boyish modesty, but they may have overlooked the understandable pride. Mr. Phillips had called him back—his perseverance had paid off. And while nothing was said about what would happen next, there was little doubt in Elvis’ mind that something would. He had finally gotten his break. He drove over to Dixie’s in a strange state of detachment—they went to the movies that night, and he mentioned in passing that he had made a record.

  ON THE EVENING of Wednesday, June 30, tragedy struck. Dixie came home the next day to find her mother waiting for her at the door with the gravest expression. She sat Dixie down in the kitchen and told her there had been a terrible accident—the Blackwood Brothers’ plane had crashed the night before somewhere in Alabama, it wasn’t all of them, it was just R.W. and the bass singer, Bill Lyles, but they had both been killed. Dixie stared at her mother, she couldn’t believe it at first, then her eyes filled up with tears. Bill? R.W.? Bill’s wife, Ruth, was her Sunday school teacher. She was inconsolable. She called some of her friends. Nobody could believe it. The Blackwood Brothers were their own; the most progressive and businesslike of all gospel groups, they had had their own plane since the fall of 1952. According to the news accounts they had performed at noon with the Statesmen at the Chilton County Peach Festival in Clanton, Alabama. Evidently, the sponsors had asked them to stick around for the afternoon festivities, and when it came time to leave, there was still a big crowd, with automobiles parked all around the field. R.W. wanted to take the plane up before it got dark, to see how much clearance they had for takeoff. When he made his landing approach, everybody thought he was just showing off, but then the plane didn’t straighten up, it just bounced and burst into flames, and you could see the charred figures in the plane. James Blackwood, a slight, slender man, screamed that he was going in and started for the plane, but Jake Hess wrapped him in a bear hug and didn’t let go until James finally subsided. On the ride back to Memphis that night James said to Jake that he would never sing again, but Jake said he owed it to the people to go on.

  Elvis came straight from work to Dixie’s house—he didn’t even bother to change. It was obvious from his tear-streaked face that he knew what had happened. They didn’t say anything, just threw themselves into each other’s arms, even with her mother there. They went to Gaston Park that night and sipped on milk shakes and cried and cried. What would happen to the Blackwood Brothers? they wondered. The quartet would just fall apart. Their poor families. It seemed like the world was coming to an end.

  The funeral the next day was one of the biggest in Memphis history—it was the first time that a funeral service had ever been conducted at Ellis Auditorium. The Statesmen sang, and so did the Speers and five other quartets. Governor Frank Clement, who had been present at the Blackwoods’ last Memphis appearance, on June 18, delivered a sincere and emotional eulogy; Clement, after all, was not only a friend to the quartets, he had presided over the growth of the Nashville recording industry and was one of the key factors in the Prisonaires getting their recording break. There were close to five thousand people present—they opened up the North Hall when the South Hall was filled, and so beloved were the Blackwoods, reported the papers, that “a number of negroes called the Auditorium asking if they could attend the funeral, and the galleries were reserved for negroes, Chauncey Barbour, Auditorium manager, said.” The Reverend Hamill preached the sermon, and Dr. Robert G. Lee of Bellevue Baptist Church delivered the prayer. Elvis and Dixie sat with Mr. and Mrs. Presley and held hands. Dixie couldn’t believe she was leaving for Florida the next day. She couldn’t leave—she didn’t want to leave—she wasn’t going to leave him, not now. They clung to each other through most of the night, and in the morning Elvis came over as the Lockes packed up for their trip. He left around noon, after an exchange of promises to be true. They would both write, they said, he would try to call—he took down all the numbers and places she would be staying. They could barely let go of each other. Her parents discreetly left them alone. It had been a highly emotional time. When she came back, Dixie reassured him, reassured herself through swollen, tearstained eyes, nothing would have changed, everything would still be the same, they would still have the summer, they would still have their whole lives in front of them.

  “THAT’S ALL RIGHT”

  July–September 1954

  JULY 28, 1954.

  (MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM / MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  THAT AFTERNOON a young guitarist named Scotty Moore stopped by 706 Union, ostensibly to find out how his record was doing. He had been coming by the studio for several months now, trying to get somewhere with his group, the Starlite Wranglers, trying to get a leg up in the business. The group, which had existed in various configurations since Scotty’s discharge from the navy in early 1952, consisted of fellow guitarist Clyde Rush, steel guitarist Millard Yow, and bass player Bill Black, all of whom worked at Firestone, and a variety of interchangeable vocalists. Scotty, who worked as a hatter at his brothers’ dry cleaning establishment at 613 North McClean, had recently brought in Doug Poindexter, a baker with a penchant for Hank Williams tunes, as permanent lead singer, and he had had a big star made up with Christmas lights that flashed on and off to advertise the band’s name on the bandstand. They had a few regular bookings through the spring—they continued to play the same rough club out toward Somerville where Scotty and Bill had backed up Dorsey Burnette—and they played a couple of clubs around town. They landed a radio spot on West Memphis station KWEM, and Scotty got them a regular booking at the Bon Air, which had previously featured nothing but pop. The next step, clearly, was to make a record.

  That was what led the Starlite Wranglers to the Memphis Recording Service. Doug Poindexter asked Bill Fitzgerald at Music Sales, the local independent record distributor, how they “could get on MGM like Hank Williams,” and Fitzgerald, who distributed the Sun label among others, suggested that they try Sam Phillips. It was Scotty, as manager of the band and prime instigator of their upward professional mobility, who did this, with some trepidation, one afternoon after he got off work.

  He and Sam hit it off almost instantly. Sam saw in Scotty an ambitious young man of twenty-two, not content with the limited vistas that lay before him—he didn’t know what he wanted exactly, but he wanted something more than a lifetime of blocking hats or playing clubs and eventually giving it up to go into some little retail business. Scotty was looking for something different, Sam sensed, and he was a good listener besides. Soon the two of them got into the habit of meeting several days a week at 2:00 in the afternoon when Scotty got off work—Scotty would just stop by, and they would go next door to Miss Taylor’s restaurant for a cup of coffee and talk about the future. To Sam, who at thirty-one had seen more than his share of ups and downs, it was an opportunity to expound upon his ideas to an audience that was not only sympathetic: Scotty clearly enjoyed plotting and scheming and dreaming about the changes that were just around the corner. To Scotty, who had grown up on a farm in Gadsden with the feeling that the world had passed him by (his father and his three older brothers had had a band, but by the time Scotty came along, fifteen years after the next-youngest brother, they had given it up) and who had joined the navy at sixteen, this was heaven. He was married for the second time, had two kids living out in Washington with his first wife, and aspired to playing jazz, like Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow, or country virtuosos Merle Travis and Chet Atkins. He was serious but self-taught, he had quit in the middle of his secon
d year of high school, and here was somebody in Memphis telling him, with a conviction that defied gainsaying, that there was a chance that something could happen, that change was on the way. “Sam had an uncanny knack for pulling things out of people that they didn’t even know they had. He knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it. I think that recording all those black artists had to give him an insight; he just didn’t know where that insight would lead. Sam came from pretty much the same background as the rest of us, basically. We were just looking for something, we didn’t know quite what it was, we would just sit there over coffee and say to each other, ‘What is it? What should we do? How can we do it?’ ”

  Eventually Scotty persuaded Sam to record the Wranglers, and on May 25, 1954, they recorded two sides, which Scotty wrote (he gave half of the credit for one song to Doug Poindexter because he was the vocalist and a third of the other to his brother for writing the lead sheet). The record was released at the beginning of June and never went anywhere—by the end of summer it had sold approximately three hundred copies—but Scotty continued to stop by the studio, knowing that the record wasn’t his ticket to the future, the Starlite Wranglers were just a hillbilly band, but feeling somehow that if he stuck close to Sam Phillips he would find out what the future was.