Last Train to Memphis Read online

  In May of 1943 the whole family moved briefly to Pascagoula, Mississippi, near Biloxi on the Gulf Coast, with Vernon’s cousin Sales and his wife, Annie, and their children. Vernon and Sales had found work on a WPA project to expand the Pascagoula shipyards, but the two families stayed little more than a month, until Sales and Annie announced that they were heading home. Vernon bravely declared that he thought he and his family would stay, but he caught up with Sales on the road before Sales and Annie had gotten very far, and both families headed back to Tupelo together. Upon his return Vernon found regular employment as a driver for L. P. McCarty and Sons, a wholesale grocer, and the Presley family entered into a period of relative prosperity, with the First Assembly Church serving as their social as well as moral focus. On August 18, 1945, with the war barely over, Vernon used the savings that he had accumulated to make a down payment of two hundred dollars on a new home on Berry Street, once again owned by Orville Bean, and around the same time, with his cousin Sales’ sponsorship, became a deacon in the church. This was undoubtedly the high point of the Presleys’ life in East Tupelo.

  Obviously this is not the whole picture, but in the absence of time travel, what collection of random snapshots could provide one? One of the most common stories to have made its way down through the years is that the Presleys formed a popular gospel trio who sang in church, traveled about to various revival meetings in the area, and generally stood out in people’s memories as a foreshadowing of what was just over the horizon. It is not difficult to understand where the story would come from: the Presleys, like every other member of the small congregation, did sing in church; they did go to revival meetings; Vernon and Gladys most likely sang “quartet-style” with Sales and Annie in church and at home. But the story that they formed any kind of traveling trio is most likely not true. As Elvis himself said in a 1965 interview, “I sang some with my folks in the Assembly of God church choir [but] it was a small church, so you couldn’t sing too loud,” and he told Hollywood reporter Army Archerd that he “trioed” with his mother and father—but only as part of that same congregation. There is no mention on his part of anything resembling “professional” experience and no credible contemporary witness in the face of relatives (Corinne Richards), childhood friends and neighbors (Corene Randle Smith, whose mother was Elvis’ Sunday school teacher), and the minister who taught him to play guitar (Frank Smith, Corene’s husband) who recalled otherwise or found the suggestion highly implausible.

  What is not only plausible but clearly the case is that Elvis himself, on his own and without reference to anyone else’s dreams, plans, or imaginings, was drawn to music in a way that he couldn’t fully express, found a kind of peace in the music, was able to imagine something that he could express only to his mother. Still, it must have come as a surprise even to Gladys when Elvis Presley, her shy, dreamy, oddly playful child, got up and sang in front of an audience of several hundred at the age of ten at the annual Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show at the Fairgrounds in the middle of downtown Tupelo.

  It came about, evidently (though here, too, the story is unavoidably muddled), after he sang “Old Shep,” the Red Foley “weeper” about a boy and his dog, at the morning prayer program at school. His teacher, Mrs. Oleta Grimes, who had moved in two doors down from the Presleys on Old Saltillo Road in 1936 and was, not entirely coincidentally, the daughter of Orville Bean, was so impressed by his singing that she brought him to the principal, Mr. Cole, who in turn entered the fifth-grader in the radio talent contest sponsored by local station WELO on Children’s Day (Wednesday, October 3, 1945) at the fair. All the local schools were let out, teachers and children were transported to town by school bus and then marched from the courthouse lawn down the hill to the Fairgrounds, where they were guests of the fair. A prize was given to the school with the greatest proportional representation, and there were individual prizes in the talent contest, from a $25 war bond down to $2.50 for rides. The five-day-long fair included a livestock show, cattle auctions, mule- and horse-pulling contests, and poultry competition, but the Duke of Paducah and a Grand Ole Opry Company which included Minnie Pearl and Pee Wee King were advertised as well. Annie Presley, Sales’ wife, recalled the fair as the highlight of both Presley families’ social year, when the two couples would share a baby-sitter and go out together for the fair’s last night.

  The newspaper did not cover the children’s contest or even list the winner of the competition. Over the years there have been a number of claimants to the throne, but to Elvis Presley it mattered little who actually won. “They entered me in a talent show,” he said in a 1972 interview. “I wore glasses, no music, and I won, I think it was fifth place in this state talent contest. I got a whipping the same day, my mother whipped me for something—I don’t know, [going on] one of the rides. Destroyed my ego completely.” Gladys gave a more vivid account in 1956, minus the whipping. “I’ll never forget, the man at the gate just took it for granted I was Elvis’ big sister and sold me a schoolkid’s ticket same as him. Elvis had no way to make music, and the other kids wouldn’t accompany him. He just climbed up on a chair so he could reach the microphone and he sang ‘Old Shep.’ ” He probably had his picture taken in the western booth, too, just as he would two years later, complete with cowboy hat, chaps, and western backdrop. Although, somewhat surprisingly, there seems to have been little awareness of his triumph among friends and classmates, and he evidently did not sing at the fair again, Elvis always spoke of the event, without embroidery, as the first time he sang in public, and the whipping is a more convincing detail than the conventional story, which has Vernon listening in on the contest on his delivery-truck radio.

  It was not long after the contest that he got his first guitar. The chronology can be argued any way you like (and has been), but it appears likely that he got the guitar for his eleventh birthday, since in all of Elvis’ own accounts—and in most of the early publicity accounts as well—he sang unaccompanied at the fair simply because he did not have a guitar. In many of those same accounts he was supposed to have gotten the guitar as a birthday present, and the 1956 TV Radio Mirror biography has him getting his first guitar the day after a storm which frightened Gladys and him (the tornado of 1936 had been a traumatic event that literally flattened Tupelo, killing 201 people and injuring more than 1,000). In fact there was a small tornado on January 7, 1946, the day before his eleventh birthday. In any case Elvis wanted a bicycle, he said, and the only reason he ended up with the guitar was because his mother was worried that he might get run over, not to mention the fact that the guitar was considerably less expensive (he got the bicycle not long afterward anyway). “Son, wouldn’t you rather have the guitar?” Gladys concluded. “It would help you with your singing, and everyone does enjoy hearing you sing.”

  His uncle Vester, who played frequently in honky-tonks and at country dances and had a great appreciation for country music, and Gladys’ brother Johnny Smith taught him a few chords, but it was the new pastor, twenty-one-year-old Frank Smith, who provided the greatest influence. Smith, who had come to Tupelo from Meridian, Mississippi, for a revival in early 1944 and then returned to stay when he married the Presleys’ fifteen-year-old neighbor Corene Randle later that year, distinctly recalled the little boy coming to him with the guitar he had just acquired. “I always played the guitar, and I guess he picked up some from that, because a couple of years [after Smith’s arrival] he got a guitar and really applied himself. He bought a book that showed how to place your fingers in position, and I went over to his house a time or two, or he would come to where I was, and I would show him some runs and different chords from what he was learning out of his book. That was all: not enough to say I taught him how to play, but I helped him.” From his newfound knowledge Elvis started playing for the “special singing” portion of the service, although Smith had to call him up to get him to perform. “I would have to insist on him [getting up there], he didn’t push himself. At the special singings we might have s
omeone do a Blackwood Brothers type of quartet number, different ones in the church would get up or maybe somebody visiting would sing, but there were no other kids to sing with him at that time. He sang quite a few times, and he was liked.”

  Smith put no particular stock in music other than to glorify the Lord and never found it anything but painful to have to dredge up the memory of teaching an eleven-year-old how to play the guitar when this was scarcely relevant to his life’s work. Yet even to him Elvis’ commitment to music was clear-cut, not just from his singing in church but from the trips that he, the Smiths, and many other East Tupeloans would make to town on Saturday afternoon to attend the WELO Jamboree, a kind of amateur hour which was broadcast from the courthouse. “A whole crowd went down, grown-ups and kids. You got in line to perform, it was just something to do on Saturday. And he would go to the radio station to play and sing—there was nothing to highlight him, really, he was just one of the kids.”

  WELO HAD BEGUN BROADCASTING on South Spring Street, above the Black and White dry goods store, on May 15, 1941. There were a number of local talents involved in starting up the station, including Charlie Boren, its colorful announcer, and Archie Mackey, a local bandleader and radio technician who had been instrumental in establishing Tupelo’s first radio station, WDIX, some years earlier, but the hillbilly star of the station in 1946 was a twenty-three-year-old native of Smithville, some twenty miles to the southeast, Carvel Lee Ausborn, who went by the name of Mississippi Slim. Ausborn, who had taken up guitar at the age of thirteen to pursue a career in music, was inspired by Jimmie Rodgers, though Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb became almost equal influences in the forties. Probably his greatest influence, however, was his cousin Rod Brasfield, a prominent country comedian, also from Smithville, who joined the Opry in 1944 and toured with Hank Williams, while his brother, Uncle Cyp Brasfield, became a regular on the Ozark Jubilee and wrote material for Rod and his comedy partner, Minnie Pearl. Though Mississippi Slim never attained such heights, he traveled all over the country with Goober and His Kentuckians and the Bisbee’s Comedians tent show and even played the Opry once or twice, largely on the strength of his cousin’s connections. Just about every prominent musician who passed through Tupelo played with Slim at one time or another, from Merle “Red” Taylor (who furnished the fiddle melody for Bill Monroe’s “Uncle Pen”) to college-bound youths like Bill Mitchell (who in later life, after a career in politics, would win many national old-time fiddle contests), to weekend pickers like Slim’s uncle Clinton. “He was a good entertainer,” recalled Bill Mitchell, “put on a pretty good show, love songs with comedy (he came from a family of comedians)—it was a pretty lively show. The people really enjoyed it.” In addition to a regular early-morning program on weekdays, Slim had a noontime show every Saturday called Singin’ and Pickin’ Hillbilly that served as a lead-in to the Jamboree, on which he also appeared. This was where Elvis first encountered the world of entertainment.

  Archie Mackey’s memory was of a young boy accompanied by his father. “Vernon said that his boy didn’t know but two songs,” said Mackey, another Jamboree regular, who claimed that he had Elvis sing both, with Slim accompanying him on guitar. Some have suggested that Slim was reluctant to play behind an “amateur” and that announcer Charlie Boren practically had to force him to do so, while others have sought credit for first carrying Elvis to the station. It’s all somewhat academic. Like everyone else, he was drawn by the music and by the show. He was not the only child to perform, though according to Bill Mitchell most of the others were girls. And, it seemed, none of the others felt it like he did.

  “He was crazy about music,” said James Ausborn, Slim’s kid brother and Elvis’ schoolmate at East Tupelo Consolidated. “That’s all he talked about. A lot of people didn’t like my brother, they thought he was sort of corny, but, you know, they had to get a mail truck to bring all his cards and letters. Elvis would always say, ‘Let’s go to your brother’s program today. Can you go up there with me? I want him to show me some more chords on the guitar.’ We’d walk into town on Saturday, go down to the station on Spring Street [this was the broadcast before the Jamboree], a lot of times the studio would be full but my brother would always show him some chords. Sometimes he would say, ‘I ain’t got time to fool with you today,’ but he’d always sit down and show him. Then maybe he’d sing him a couple of songs, and Elvis would try to sing them himself. I think gospel sort of inspirated him to be in music, but then my brother helped carry it on.”

  Music had become his consuming passion. With the exception of a couple of playmates who shared his interest, like James, or who might have looked up to him for it, no one really noticed. His uncle Vester, who said that his mother’s people, the Hoods, were “musicians out of this world,” never noticed the transformation. Frank Smith saw him as one of the crowd, not really “eager” for music—“he just liked it.” Even his parents might have missed this development in their closely watched son: “He always knew,” said Vernon, as if he and Gladys had ever doubted, “he was going to do something. When we didn’t have a dime, he used to sit on the doorstep and say, ‘One of these days it’ll be different.’ ”

  If you picture him, picture someone you might have missed: a wide-eyed, silent child scuffling his feet, wearing overalls. He stands in line in the courtroom, waiting his turn to tiptoe up to the mike. His small child’s voice carries a quavering note of yearning—other children get up and do letter-perfect recitals, big burly men frail on their beat-up guitars, but Elvis cradles his like a bird. After the broadcast is over, as the crowd slowly dissipates, the little boy hangs around on the outskirts of the group, watching Mississippi Slim and the other musicians pack up. He walks out behind them onto the courthouse square, with the statue of the Confederate soldier facing the Lyric Theater, the movie house that he and his friends never go to because it costs fifteen cents, a nickel more than the Strand. He hangs around on the edge of the crowd, nervously shifting from one foot to the other, desperately sidestepping every offer of a ride back to East Tupelo. He is waiting for an invitation, and in his determination to wait he shows the kind of watchful perseverance that is the hallmark of his solitary style. Maybe his friend James will say something to his brother, will suggest that they go off and have a Nehi together. Meanwhile he hangs on every word that is spoken, every glance exchanged: talk of the music, talk of the Opry, what cousin Rod Brasfield had to say the last time he was in town.

  He soaks it all in. While others allow themselves to be distracted, his nervous attention never wanders; his fingers are constantly drumming against his pants leg, but his gaze bores in on the singer and the scene. Does he hang around with Slim? It’s hard to imagine where. He dreams of being Slim. He dreams of wearing a western shirt with fancy pockets and sparkles and a scarf around his neck. Slim knows all the Opry stars. He knows Tex Ritter—the boy has heard the story a dozen times, but he doesn’t mind if he hears it one more time from James: how Tex Ritter was making a personal appearance over in Nettleton with one of his movies, and Slim said to his little brother, “You want to go? You talking all the time about Tex Ritter, I’ll show you that me and him is friends.” So they went over to Nettleton, where Tex played a few songs before they showed his film, and then he signed some autographs. He had his six-guns on. Then all of a sudden he looked out and said, “I’ll be damned, there’s old Mississippi Slim sitting out there in the front row,” and he stopped everything he was doing and went out and shook his hand. Then he said, “You come on right up here, and why don’t you do a song for us.” When he shook James’ hand, James thought his hand was going to break, that was the kind of grip old Tex Ritter had. That was exactly the way it happened.

  “I took the guitar, and I watched people,” Elvis recalled, “and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it, you know.” Every Saturday night he would listen to the Opry. He and Gladys and Vernon, his cousin Harold (whose mother, Rhetha, has died and w
ho lives with them part of the time), maybe Grandma Minnie, too, now that Grandpa has lit out and she is living with them mostly—you had just better not run down the battery before the Saturday-night broadcast. The adults laugh and exchange glances at some of the jokes and tell half-remembered stories about the performers: Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb, the Willis Brothers and Bill Monroe, here’s that Red Foley to do “Old Shep” that Elvis sung at the fair. The music can carry you off to faraway places. But no one really knows. Daddy loves him. Mama will take care of him. There is nothing in his life that they do not know except for this. It is his secret passion.

  IN THE SUMMER of 1946 the Presleys moved from East Tupelo to town. Vernon was not able to keep up payments on the Berry Street house and sold it—or transferred the payments—to his friend Aaron Kennedy. They moved first to Commerce Street, and then to Mulberry Alley, virtually next to the Fairgrounds and opposite Tupelo’s teeming black quarter, Shake Rag, which abutted the Leake and Goodlett Lumberyard on East Main Street. The house was just a shack, one of three in the little alley, but it was moving into town that was the real comedown. In East Tupelo the Presleys had risen to a level of respectability that they might never have expected to attain. They were at ease among family and friends who shared the same background and experience. In Tupelo they were scorned, like virtually anyone from above the highway, as poor white trash. To Ernest Bowen, whose father’s woodworking shop was just across the alley and who had only recently gone to work as city salesman for L. P. McCarty and Sons, Vernon’s principal employer, the Presleys looked like the kind of family who moved every time the rent came due. In Bowen’s opinion, “Vernon had no ambition whatsoever. It didn’t bother him if they threw him out of his little house—he’s going to get another one. Many times the salespeople would get together and would give samples, canned food, to Vernon. He was a sorry sort, what we call a real ne’er-do-well.” Bill Mitchell, on the other hand, who got his first real job around this time, also driving for L. P. McCarty, and who, like Bowen, had tangential musical connections with Elvis (Bowen became the longtime general manager at WELO within a few years of the Presleys’ departure for Memphis, while Mitchell recalled playing fiddle behind the boy in Mississippi Slim’s band on the Jamboree), remembered Vernon’s kindness and taciturn nature as well as his evident lack of ambition.