Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [45]
Yet even so, past loves were still on his mind. Billie Wardlaw, who had moved to Mississippi from the Courts, was back living in Memphis again and going to school at Tech High. Just as before, Elvis started showing up at places he knew she would be. “I came out of Tech one afternoon and there he was, under the trees on campus, picking his guitar.”
But Elvis could see Billie still didn’t care for him, not with the deep passion he held for her. He knew for sure now that it was time to move on. Two weeks after he and Dixie met, Elvis took her home to meet his parents, and soon after, the Lockes invited the Presleys for dinner.
Dixie was surprised at their family dynamics, at how Vernon, who was on disability a good portion of the time, was almost an outsider. If Elvis ever stepped out of line, she noticed that Gladys handled it, not Vernon.
“If it was okay with Gladys, then it was okay with Vernon. He was not a disciplinarian by any means, and he knew the bond that Gladys and Elvis had for each other—something I felt he was not allowed to be a part of. It almost seemed like Elvis and his mom made more of the decisions, and Mr. Presley just kind of went along. I think he knew that Gladys and Elvis really called the shots.”
When Elvis and Dixie first got together, Gladys took a more protective stance, as if to make sure Elvis didn’t get his heart broken like he did with Billie Wardlaw. She saw that Dixie was a quality girl, and as Elvis had suggested, potential marriage material, despite the five-year age difference.
Soon, when Dixie was at the house, Gladys began asking her probing questions about her family and “how high I was up in the church, and have I done this, and where have I gone . . . I felt a little like I was being interrogated.”
Dixie’s father did the same thing with boys who came to call on her three sisters, so she wasn’t offended. In fact, she and Gladys developed a deep friendship. “She told us several times that she would rather he married me than anyone else he had dated.” And Gladys wanted him married. She was gaining a lot of weight and not feeling well, and she wanted him settled and happy in case something happened to her.
But Dixie also saw that the bond between mother and son was formidable and not likely to be broken. The Bible teaches that it’s God’s plan to leave your father and mother. She was well aware of that. “But I don’t know that that would have ever happened with them.” In retrospect, she believes that had they both lived their full life spans, “They would have been together. I don’t think he would have ever left her, regardless of the situation. She would always have been with him.” In all probability, Dixie, Elvis, and Gladys would have had a living arrangement much like that of Gladys, Vernon, and Minnie Mae, together until death.
Nonetheless, the four of them, Elvis, Dixie, Gladys, and Vernon, began doing things together, getting a bite to eat and then going to the All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium. Gladys loved the Blackwood Brothers best, but Elvis preferred the more flamboyant Statesmen, thrilling to Jake Hess’s forceful lead stylings, and the lake-bottom low notes of bass singer Jim “Big Chief” Wetherington, whose legs often shook inside his big loose pants when he sang.
Elvis just couldn’t get enough of music, and he was discovering the wealth of what Memphis had to offer. On Sundays, he and Dixie would sometimes slip away from their own church services to go to the all-black East Trigg Baptist Church just a few blocks away. There they’d sit in the balcony and let the waves of black gospel wash over them, get baptized in the beat of the Lord. Already Elvis was thinking of a way to meld black and white gospel together. But there was no gospel like black gospel, with its near physicality, and East Trigg’s pastor, the Reverend Herbert Brewster, was no ordinary preacher. A celebrated civil rights activist and fiery orator, he was also an accomplished