Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [46]
By spring 1954 Elvis was driving a truck for Crown Electric, delivering supplies for $1 an hour, and training to be an electrician (“Sometimes they would let me help wire or something”), though, as he said in a 1956 interview, he worried if he were cut out for it. “You had to keep your mind right on what you’re doing, you can’t be the least bit absentminded, or you’re liable to blow somebody’s house up. I didn’t think I was the type for it, but I was going to give it a try.”
Things were looking up, on the whole, and he and Dixie were seeing each other almost every day. That May, they attended the Oral Roberts Crusade, though most of their dates were less serious-minded. They’d climb in the old Lincoln and head off to the movies two or three times a week, or go down to the WMPS Radio studios at the corner of Union and Main for deejay Bob Neal’s “High Noon Round-Up” show, where the Blackwoods appeared regularly.
On the other end of the scale, they also loved Dewey Phillips’s “Red, Hot, and Blue” radio show for its mix of blues, boogies, and spirituals. The couple would listen to it in Elvis’s car, parked at McKellar Lake, or maybe over at his parents’ house. Dixie was more a fan of Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, but the WHBQ show was the hottest in town for black and white teenagers alike. Phillips, wild, wacky, and often hopped up on amphetamines, called himself “Daddy-O,” and he struck fear in the hearts of legions of God-fearing Memphians. “So many of our Christian parents wouldn’t even let [their children] listen to it,” Dixie remembers.
Phillips’s broadcasts often spurred Elvis to drop by Charlie’s Record Shop on North Main to peruse the new R & B records, Dixie in tow. Elvis had gotten brave one day and talked the proprietor into putting his first acetate on the jukebox, and man, that was a thrill! Elvis needed a boost about then, too. He’d tried out for the Songfellows and was crushed at the rejection, hearing over and over in his head that they’d said he couldn’t sing, when what they had really said was that he couldn’t sing harmony. And he was rejected as a vocalist with the Eddie Bond band at the Hi-Hat club, Bond telling him to go back to driving a truck. Years later, his words still stung. “Man,” Elvis would tell George Klein, “that sonofabitch broke my heart.”
It was a delicate period in all their lives. The more time that Elvis and Dixie spent together, the more Dixie sensed that Gladys felt slighted, even though she seemed like a second mother. The two shared recipes and went places together, once to a Stanley Products party (the Tupperware of the early 1950s), or simply spent hours talking. They never had cross words. But even as a teenager, it seemed to Dixie that Gladys was almost jealous of her relationship with Elvis.
“She and I were real close and enjoyed each other. But I think if she had been able to, she would have just kept him to herself. I felt that way myself. I would have kept him just for me, and not let the world have him.”
Marion Keisker went to work one day in mid-1954 and found that Sam had pulled out the note she’d made months earlier: “Elvis Presley, good ballad singer.”
“What’s this for?” she asked him and smiled at the funny memo she’d made (“Timothy Sideburns”) to remind her what Elvis looked like.
“Oh,” Sam said. “That kid was in here again. I liked him, but I don’t have time to work with him. I told him I would call him sometime.”
As Marion told the story, every time a song would come up and Sam would say, “Who should we get?” she’d say, “The kid with the sideburns. Why don’t we give him a chance?” But Sam would invariably say, “Oh, I don’t think he’s ready yet.” Elvis still persisted, though, dropping by periodically.
Finally, in June 1954, he got his break. Sam had a new song from Nashville, a ballad called “Without You.” Marion placed the call, and Sam got on the line and gave him the good news. The studio was ten or twelve blocks from Alabama Street,