Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [14]
She told her family the same thing and believed it with all her heart. He was special, having the power of two people because of the dead twin. Elvis would be infused with all the positive attributes that Jessie might have had, as well as his own. That gave him twice the looks, twice the personality, twice the talent, twice the intelligence, and twice the spiritual connection.
Precisely what kind of charismatic services the Presleys attended at the new Assembly of God church is largely left up to the imagination, except for Annie Presley’s description.
“The services would start about seven, seven-thirty at night. Sometimes you got home long after midnight. They’d have the altar call and after that, they’d pray for two or three hours and shout and sing. You’d be praying and you’d just get so happy till you’d just jump up and go to shouting. Some of them would get to talking in tongues. There’d be shouting all over the building. ‘Praise the Lord!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Glory!’ ‘I love you, Lord.’ Anything like that.”
In the early 1980s, when Roy Turner assisted author Elaine Dundy in tracing Gladys’s path in Tupelo, Corene Smith, the wife of Reverend Frank W. Smith, who took over the church when Elvis was ten or eleven, suggested that if the researchers wanted to see religion the way Elvis experienced it, they would have to go to the county—the city churches had become too sophisticated. And so Turner and Dundy drove out to Pontotoc County.
“After about three hours of the service in hot, Mississippi, humid, July weather in a little church with ceiling fans whirling and windows opened, we left,” Turner recalls. “The service continued until way into the night. The people had danced around the entire sanctuary, shouting, writhing, fainting, wailing to exhaustion. Elaine remarked, ‘I feel like I have been to an Elvis concert.’ ”
Dundy was, in fact, witnessing the grassroots of the entire Elvis Presley phenomenon, from the music to the reaction of his fans. And it took hold early. Once Elvis became famous, Gladys would recall one particular Sunday in the Assembly of God church when two-year-old Elvis, normally a quiet and reserved child, squirmed off her lap to make his way up on the platform to try to sing with the choir. Soon it got to be his habit. “It was a small church, so you couldn’t sing too loud,” the grown-up Elvis said.
“Gladys used to laugh about it,” Harold Loyd, Rhetha’s son, remembered. “The preacher and all of ’em thought it was cute, so they got to where they would let him stand up there and sing with ’em.”
Psychologist Whitmer, an expert on twinless twins, or twins who have lost their mirror image, whether fraternal or identical, isn’t surprised. “While pregnant, Gladys spent hours every single day at the Assembly of God church. If you look at in-utero imaging, in the last trimester you see twins hugging, punching, kicking, and dancing to music. Sound is incredibly important.”
Elvis, then, instinctively began moving to music before he was born. He learned to communicate, to feel good, through instruments and voices. While he was still in the womb, music became a dynamic and primary way of expressing himself in his relationship with his twin, his mother, and all that defined his world.
At the end of 1937, just before Elvis’s third birthday, another seminal event occurred in the Presley family, one that had tragic consequences for all involved. On November 16, 1937, Vernon, along with Gladys’s brother Travis Smith and their friend Lether Gable, were criminally charged with “uttering a forged instrument.” The story goes that they had altered a four-dollar check from Vernon’s usurious landlord and part-time employer, Orville Bean, in payment for a hog. Vernon was enraged—the hog was worth at least fifty dollars, and he’d been expecting the much larger sum. Besides, he needed the money. And so the three talked it over.
Exactly what happened next has been muddied through the years. Aaron Kennedy always said