NASHVILLE BABYLON: ELVIS The Pharoah Of Seas And Lips

[The following is excerpted from the book, COUNTRY: The Biggest Music In America by Nick Tosches, published by Stein & Day Publishers.]

Monday, July 5, 1954. Rock-and-roll exists. Sam Phillips, Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black are in Sun’s poky, 30-by-20-foot studio messing with “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a song Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys had cut for Columbia in 1945. Phillips has that weird bastard sound in the dampness of his brain, and he looks at Presley and hopes.

Finally the sound is in the air—materialized, magic—captured on magnetic tape. It’s a curious, physical sound. Rockabilly they would come to call it in a year’s time.

Sam Phillips grins. “Hell, that’s different,” he says. “That’s a pop song now, Little Vi. That’s good.”

Elvis Aaron Presley was 19 then (he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935). Six years earlier, in 1948, his family had moved to Memphis, and in the spring of 1953 Elvis was graduated from Humes High School. His picture in The Herald, the Humes High yearbook, shows a boy with sideburns, Corinthian pompadour, and a hint of acne. He had participated, the yearbook says, in R.O.T.C., Biology Club, English Club, History Club, and Speech Club. The summer after graduation, Presley went to work for the Precision Tool Company. He left that job after a brief time and began working at the Crown Electric Company, which paid him $42 a week to drive a truck.

On a Saturday afternoon in 1953 (Haley’s “Crazy, Man, Crazy” was on the air), Elvis made his first visit to the Sun studio. As a side-line operation, Phillips still maintained his Memphis Recording Service, administered by Marion Keisker, former Miss Radio of Memphis. It was to the Memphis Recording Service, not Sun Records, that Elvis came that afternoon. He paid Keisker the four-dollar charge, entered the studio with his acoustic guitar, and recorded two songs directly onto a double-sided 10-inch acetate disk. On one side Elvis cut “My Happiness,” which the Ink Spots had had a hit with on Decca in 1948. On the other side he did “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” a mawkish ballad written by Zeb Turner and recorded by Bob Lamb on Dot in 1951.

Struck by Presley’s voice, Marion Kreisker recorded the end of “My Happiness” and the whole of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” on a length of discarded tape. Seventeen years later, Marion Kreisker Maclnnes told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins, “The reason I taped Elvis was this: Over and over I remember Sam saying, ‘If I could only find a white man who had the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ This is what I heard in Elvis, this... what I guess they now call ‘soul,’ this Negro sound. So I taped it. I wanted Sam to know.”

Kreisker made a note of Presley’s address, 464 Alabama Street, and the next time she saw Phillips she played the tape of Elvis’s performance. Sam seemed mildly interested, but did not pursue the matter.

On January 4, 1954, Elvis returned to the Memphis Recording Service. Marion Kreisker was not in, but Phillips was. They spoke, Sam calmly and easily, Elvis nervously. He paid Sam four dollars and cut another acetate: “I’ll Never Stand In Your Way,” a 1941 country song written by Glint Horner, and “Casual Love Affair.”

In the early summer of 1954, about eight months after Elvis had first visited the Sun studio, Sam Phillips received a demonstration record of a song called “Without You,” cut in Nashville by an unknown black singer. Sam was so impressed by the demo that he wanted to release it to Sun. He called Nashville in search of the singer and to obtain permission to issue the record. He was told that no one knew who the kid was, that he was hanging around the studio when the song arrived and they let him demo it. Phillips decided to find someone else to record the song.

“What about the kid with the sideburns?” said Marion Keisker. Pause for commercial.

Elvis was called that same Saturday afternoon, and he rushed to the studio. Phillips played the demo for him. Elvis sang it, and it was ridiculous. He.tried again, then again, but it was still ridiculous. Phillips gave up on “Without You” and suggested that Elvis try “Rag Mop,” a song written by Johnnie Lee Wills (Bob Wills’s brother) and Deacon Anderson. It seemed an easy song (the lyrics are impressively dumb), but again Elvis was awkward and plain.

It is the sheer, superhuman tastelessness of Elvis that shakes the mind.

Sam, disturbed, asked Elvis just what in hell it was he could sing. Oh, anything, Elvis replied. So do it, Sam said. And then, we are led to believe by the grooms of history, it poured forth, a crazy rush of disparate sounds: gospel, hard-core country, R&B, pop. For hours it went on, not a cool Apollonian eclecticism, but fevered glossolalia.

Sam called Winfield Scott Moore, better known as Scotty, the 22-yearold guitarist who had recorded with Doug Poindexter several weeks before. On Sunday, Independence Day, Elvis and Scotty met at Scotty’s home, where they fooled with several recent country songs, such as Eddy Arnold’s “I Really Don’t Want To Know” and Hank Snow’s “I Don’t Hurt Anymore,” both recent hits on RCA-Victor, and a few of singer Billy Eckstine’s MGM sides. After a few hours, bass player Bill Black, Scotty’s neighbor, who had also played at Doug Poindexter’s session, dropped in. He was not impressed, but the next evening, July 5, Black found himself in the Sun studio with Phillips, Presley, and Moore. It was Sam’s idea for Scotty and Bill not to bring the rest of the Starlite Wranglers with them—no fiddle, no steel guitar. Sam had a different kind of country session in mind.

The first recording of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was never released legally. (In 1975 Bobcat Records, a Dutch label, bootlegged the tape and included it in the album Good Rocking Tonight.) The version that was issued was recorded either the same night or the next nightr Although this piece of history is clouded, it seems likely that the released version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was cut the same night as the version that caused Sam Phillips to utter, “Hell, that’s different. That’s a pop song now, Little Vi; That’s good.” (Those words can be heard in Good Rocking Tonight.) They were in the groove then, touching tongues with the philosophers’ stone Sam was seeking, and it’s difficult to imagine their calling it a night at that moment of celebration.

“Blue Moon of Kentucky” as released in Elvis’s first record, Sun 209, is surer' tougher than the earlier take. Like a young boxer after his first professional knockout, Presley is dizzy with the confirmation of his prowess. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” is daring to the point of mania. It is Elvis walking on steel blades, through orange-white flames, invincible with the knowledge he sees in Sam’s eyes, hears in his own voice, and feels in his own flushed skin; the knowledge that right now, this moment, he, Elvis Aaron Presley, is the greatest singer in Memphis and the universe. Nothing, not sex, not the eyes of bank-tellers, would ever again disarm with its mystery.

I think Elvis Presley will never be solved. It is strange enough that at the time of his first recordings, Elvis declared his idol to be Dean Martin, the 37-year-old Italian pop singer from Steubenville, Ohio, but to hear him at an August 22, 1957, press conference proclaim PahBoone to be “undoubtedly the finest voice out now,” and call Patti Page and Kay Starr his favorite female singers—this is modestly terrifying, a wild illogic.

Elvis never revealed himself. He died on August 16, 1977, at the age of 42. For all his fame and celebrity, he remains as mysterious and mythic as Homer. Possessed, estranged, then dead. Less than a month before Elvis died, a paperback book was published: Elvis: What Happened? by Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler (three former Presley bodyguards), as told to Steve Dunleavy. It’s an ill-written book, but a valuable one, shocking and ninety-percent correct.

The wonder will never die. There was more mystery, more power, in Elvis, singer of “Danny Boy,” than in Bob Dylan, utterer of hermetic ironies. It is the sheer, superhuman tastelessness of Elvis that shakes the mind. In 1965, as Western civilization lay on its tummy peeking over the brink at the rapids of psilocybin and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Elvis, for all the world to see, was hopping about singing “Do the Clam.” And the same week “Do the Clam” was released, Dean Martin came out with “Send Me the Pillow You Dream On,” a Hank Locklin country hit from 1958. A few years later people began speaking of the revolutionary pop-country fusion wrought by the Byrds and Bob Dylan. Could Bob Dylan do the Clam? I bet Dino could.

Elvis’s first record, “Blue Moon of Kentucky” c/w “That’s All Right,” was released on July 19, 1954. Sam Phillips took a copy of the record to Dewey Phillips, the disk-jockey who hosted the Red Hot and Blue show at WHBQ, and he broadcast “That’s All Right.” The record took off, and as the weeks passed, “That’s All Right” became the Number One country record in Memphis.

That is when rockabilly became fact and Elvis its avatar. On September 25, Elvis’s second record was issued, a coupling of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (the 1947 Roy Brown song) and “I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine,” written by Mack David, author of “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo” and “La Vie en Rose.” Elvis made his debut on the Opry, as a guest in Hank Snow’s segment. He sang both sides of his first single. After the show, Jim Denny, the boss of the Opry Artists Bureau (today he manages Cedarwood Publishing in Nashville), told Elvis he should go back to driving a truck. Elvis cried all the way back to Memphis.

On October 16, Presley played the Louisiana Hayride, where he went over so well that he was brought back the following week to become a regular performer.

There was more mystery, more power, in Elvis... than in Bob Dylan, utterer of hermetic ironies.

The third Elvis record, released on January 8, 1955, was “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” originally cut by Kokomo Arnold on Decca in 1935 and subsequently done by several country artists: Cliff Bruner (Decca, 1937), Johnnie Lee Wills (Decca, 1941), and Moon Mullican (King, 1946). The flip was “You’re a Heartbreaker,” a strong country weeper that was closer to a honky-tonk performance than any of Elvis’s other Sun sides.

In “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” it is obvious that Elvis is no longer innocent of commercial affectations. After a well-rehearsed false start, Elvis, in a voice that foreshadowed every blackand-white beatnik movie of the late fifties, says, “Hold it, fellas. That don’t move. Let’s get real, real gone.” It was the “Rock Around The Clock” syndrome, Elvis’s first plunge into schmaltz.

“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” written by Bill Taylor and Sun steel-guitarist Stan Kesler, and “Baby Let’s Play House,” recorded by Arthur Gunter on Excello earlier in the year, comprised the fourth single, issued on April 1, 1955. For the first time, one of Presley’s records hit the national country charts—“Baby Let’s Play House” rose to the Number Ten position. As “Baby Let’s Play House” was high on the charts, Elvis’s last Sun disk was issued: “Mystery Train,” an R&B song Junior Parker had cut for Sun in 1953, and “I Forgot To Remember To Forget,” written by Charlie Feathers and Stan Kesler. In “Mystery Train” Scotty Moore showed the influence of Merle Travis. His guitar break toward the end of the record is an echo of the licks used by Travis. in his 1946 “Sixteen Tons.” The record became a double-barrelled hit, rising to the Number One position on the country charts. Elvis Presley, rock-and-roll madman, had the best-selling country record in the nation: The year 1955 belonged to Elvis Presley and Blackboard Jungle.

Late in 1955, Elvis signed with RCA-Victor. On January 5, 1956, in Nashville, Elvis cut his first sides for his new label. Now, in addition to Scotty and Bill and drummer D.J. Fontana (who had joined the group early in 1955), Nashville cats were involved: guitarist Chet Atkins, pianist Floyd Cramer, vocal group the Jordanaires. Elvis’s first RCA-Victor recording, “Heartbreak Hotel,” was released in February 1956. It became the Number One song on both the country and the pop charts.

“Heartbreak Hotel” was a superlative rockabilly song, full of austerity, sex, and stone-hard rhythm. The story of “Heartbreak Hotel” is this: Mae Boren Axton, songwriter and Hank Snow’s P.R. lady, was shown a newspaper clipping by her friend Tommy Durden, another songwriter. The clipping reported a suicide by a young man who had left a one-line note: “I walk a lonely street.” Axton and Durden wrote the song around the line and made a tape of it within a half hour. The song was offered to the Wilburn Brothers, who declined it.

I think Elvis Presley will never be solved.

For the next two years, Elvis continued to cut strong rockabilly for RCA-Victor: “Hound Dog,” originally done by Willie Mae Thornton on Peacock in 1952 and covered by Tommy Duncan (formerly lead singer with Bob Wills) on Intro in 1953; “Don’t Be Cruel,” written for Elvis by Otis Blackwell; “Jailhouse Rock;” “Hard Headed Woman.” Elvis sometimes reached beyond the usual sources; “Love Me Tender” was taken from the traditional ballad “Aura Lee.”

With each new session, Elvis grew further from rockabilly. By the time he was drafted into the army in 1958, the golden days of rockabilly had passed.

As all things that contain more creativity than formula, more emotion than intellect, rockabilly cannot be precisely defined. As the word implies, rockabilly is hillbilly rock-and-roll. It was not a usurpation of black music by whites because its soul, its pneuma, was white, full of redneck ethos. When Elvis cut Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” he was no more usurping black culture than Wynonie Harris was usurping white culture when he cut country singer Hank Penny’s “Bloodshot Eyes” three years before. Presley’s version of “That’s All Right” is better than the original. Think about it. Elvis has had more Number One R&B hits than Chuck Berry.

What blackness there was in rockabilly in no way constituted an innovation in country music. The black enculturation in the music of old-timers such as Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills was far greater, far deeper. Nor* was there much of a technical nature in rockabilly that country music had not known before. The slap-bass technique, one of the watermarks of classic rockabilly, can be heard in country records of the pre-War era; for example, hear bassist Ramon DeArmon in the Light Crust Doughboys’ 1938 Vocalion record “Pussy, Pussy, Pussy.” The echo effect heard in many Sun rockabilly recordings had been used, less subtly, by Wilf Carter in his Victor records of the 1930s, and by Eddy Arnold in his 1945 “Cattle Call.”

What made rockabilly such a drastically new music was its spirit, a thing that bordered on mania. Elvis’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” was not merely a party song, but an invitation to a holocaust. Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train”* was an eerie shuffle; Elvis’s “Mystery Train” was a demonic incantation. Country music in recent years had not known such vehement emotion, nor had black music. Rockabilly was the face of Dionysos, full of febrile sexuality and senselessness; it flushed the skin of new housewives and made pink teenage boys reinvent themselves as flaming creatures.

Although Elvis was the avatar, the unforgettable boy-daddy of rockabilly, there were others. In Memphis, and across the South, burning-ever North, they drove country music berserk.