Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [25]
At first they settled on Commerce Street but then moved to Mulberry Alley, a tiny lane that ran near the Fairgrounds, the railroad tracks, the city dump, and—of incalculable importance to Elvis’s musical development—the black neighborhood of Shake Rag. Just as the whites divided their social strata by Highway 78, there was a similar split in the black section of Tupelo. The prosperous blacks dwelled “on the hill,” reports Roy Turner, while the rowdier, less fortunate lived “across the tracks,” in Shake Rag.
The sounds that young Elvis heard coming from the black porches—the wails, the bent notes, the low king snake moans of the blues, and the high-pitched gospel hosannas—meshed to form half of the bedrock of his musical education. But the nasal whines of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and of local country singer Mississippi Slim on radio station WELO also found a place in Elvis’s heart, especially as Slim, aka Carvel Lee Ausborn, whose music bridged the blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and the honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb, had encouraged Elvis’s own singing. He studied him, along with Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, and early crooner Gene Austin.
About that time, Mertice Finley Collins remembered, “Elvis would pick up and sing in front of the Tupelo Hotel, which was almost across from the radio station on South Spring Street. People would give him five cents, ten cents, or sometimes a twenty-five-cent piece. When he got a quarter, he would run down to the laundry where his mother worked and give the quarter to her, then hurry back to the hotel.”
The idea of making money from music, particularly so his mother wouldn’t have to work, became the engine of his dreams.
“Elvis’s biggest fantasy in Tupelo was to one day be big enough to have his own radio show on Saturday mornings on WELO, just like his idol Mississippi Slim,” said Bill Burk, who covered Elvis’s career for the Memphis Press-Scimitar and wrote extensively of Elvis’s roots in Mississippi.
But the records of the black Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who took the Lord’s songs from the choir and congregation to the nightclubs and cabarets, enchanted Elvis in a different way. It was Tharpe, with her sharp talk about “backsliding,” or sinning, and the calculated way she used her guitar that particularly ignited young Elvis.
Whether playing single-note solos as deftly as any male, or wielding the instrument as a prop, she used the guitar both as an extension of herself and as a vehicle for sexual innuendo (“Come on, daddy . . . plug me in,” she said once electric guitars became the vogue). Outrageous in every way, a spiritual cousin to Elvis’s future manager Colonel Tom Parker, she hawked perfume and stockings as well as records, and charged admission to her wedding. Musically, she also pioneered—crossing the lines from gospel to blues, to jazz to boogie, to big band to country—and she did it all with greasy aplomb.
“She would dye her hair flame-red, giving her the onstage appearance of a constantly exploding corona or a halo from hell,” Peter O. Whitmer wrote. “She would wear blue jeans and high heels, or wrap herself in fur boas and billowing caravan robes. And whenever she took the stage, she carried her guitar, slung over her shoulder, and perfected a style of bending notes and phrasing words that was inimitable.”
This original soul sister was, in short, Elvis’s most important musical role model, as influential for her personal style as for her genre-bending sound, her appearance setting up an androgynous ideal in a young boy’s heart.
In September 1946, Elvis entered the sixth grade at a new school, Milam Junior High. His classmates remember him as an odd boy in overalls who didn’t fit in anywhere, not with the “in” group with money, or even