Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [37]
That April Elvis learned that Red had a musical side, when they both performed in Humes’s annual Minstrel Show, a variety program featuring the school band and various soloists, from the Arwood Twins, billed as twirlers, to dancer Gloria Trout. A fund-raiser, the show was scheduled for a Thursday evening and was not expected to change anybody’s life. Elvis, listed sixteenth on the program, and identified as “Guitarist . . . Elvis Prestly” [sic], told only a couple of friends about it, and even then, they thought he might bow out. He’d sung once at a Christmas party in biology class, but that was about it. Now he was ready to go in Buzzy’s red flannel shirt. He’d accidentally torn a hole in it when he put it in the closet, and he’d rolled up the sleeves so it wouldn’t show.
Red, who played trumpet, had put together a little trio with a guitar and bass, and he’d just finished his act when he saw Elvis come out with his guitar. “I never thought he would have the guts to get out there in front of those people,” Red wrote. “I never even knew he sang.”
When Elvis first ambled out onstage, he looked the least prepared of all the performers. He seemed unsure of what to say or even do. He fumbled around with his guitar, and then with the lights bothering him, turned his head sideways, eyeing the audience through slits. He stood there too long for anyone’s comfort—at least a full minute, as if he might bolt. Finally, waves of talent and ambition crashed inside him, and he launched into his first number, Teresa Brewer’s new chart topper, “ ’Til I Waltz Again with You.”
Quietly, Elvis had been doing more than working on his ballads—he’d been experimenting with fast numbers, jumping around a little, just enough to put some pizzazz into it all. The teens in the Courts danced to a one-two-three bop beat, but Buzzy watched Elvis develop his own “crazy” rhythmic step, adding four-five-six to the one-two-three. He tried it out in front of eight or ten kids at the jukebox in the grocery store that Farley’s brother-in-law owned.
He also practiced in front of his family, Billy Smith remembers. “We got a piano that Christmas, and Elvis came over to our house. He started playing something fairly fast, what little he could play piano, and then he got to moving around a lot, and it was a sight to see! I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s weird to see him jump around like that and sing.’ He just done it for a few minutes, and he quit. He was trying to find something that fit him. And when he did, all at once, it just broke loose what was inside him.”
Now, onstage at the Minstrel Show, he started his second song. Nobody seems to remember what it was, but Frannie Mae Crowder swears it was the moment when the real Elvis was born. “He was moving all over that stage. And his movements didn’t start with his hips. They started with his knees and worked their way up.”
And then in a flash it was over. “At first,” Red remembered, “he just stood there, surprised as hell.” The audience, too, seemed stunned. Nobody had ever seen a guy move like that. What was he doing? And how did he do it, this dunce with the impossible hair? The place went crazy.
“It was amazing,” Elvis said later, “how popular I became after that.”
He performed every chance he got, toting his guitar to school. All the same, some of the girls thought he was just too over-the-top, and when he would start to sing, they’d whisper, “Not again!” He still had few real friends at Humes aside from Red and George.
In early 1953 he went to a birthday party a few blocks from the Courts and ran into Regis Wilson, fourteen, who was there with two girlfriends, Carol McCracken and Judy Gessell. Regis, a petite girl with blond hair and a big smile, had formerly lived at