Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [47]
“We were taking a break,” Marion remembered, “and Sam said, ‘What can you do?’ Elvis said, ‘I can sing anything.’ Sam said, ‘Let me hear you.’ So he just started playing snatches—gospel, western, anything. Doing real heavy on the Dean Martin stuff. He must have been convinced if he was going to sound like somebody, he was going to sound like Dean Martin. The three of us stayed there far into the night, just Elvis playing and talking.”
Elvis recalled the same thing to Bob Johnson of the Memphis Press-Scimitar in 1956. “I guess I must have sat there at least three hours. I sang everything I knew—pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] I remembered.”
Sam prided himself on his ability to read people and to coax the best out of them. (“There is not a human being on the face of God’s earth who could get more out of totally untrained musicians than me.”) Now he looked out the control room window and locked eyes with Elvis, who searched Phillips’s own for reassurance. Elvis knew the whole thing was a disaster, but maybe they would hit on something.
“You’re doing just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you,” Sam said, trying to get the boy to communicate whatever was in his heart. “If you make a mistake of any sort, I don’t care what it is, I want a big one. If you hold back, you’ll kill the feel of the whole damn thing.”
Three days after Elvis’s big audition, his world fell apart. R. W. Blackwood and Bill Lyles of the Blackwood Brothers quartet were killed in a plane crash in Alabama. Elvis drove straight to Dixie’s after work, and they cried in each other’s arms. To Elvis, Bill and R. W. were more than great singers—they were friends now, from church, but Dixie had known the whole family for years, and these were close deaths. She and Elvis held hands at the funeral on July 2, which was all the more emotional because the Lockes were leaving for a two-week family vacation in Florida the next day. It was the first time Elvis and Dixie would be separated.
They’d talked several times about eloping, and now they discussed it again before she left, since Dixie was scheduled to start her summer job at Goldsmith’s department store when she returned. But she was so young, she knew it would break her parents’ hearts if they ran away and got married. Of course, they were not intimate—the church frowned on premarital sex—and they wouldn’t have done it anyway. They were saving themselves for marriage.
The night Dixie left, Elvis got a phone call from Scotty Moore, a local guitarist whose band, the Starlite Wranglers, had just signed with Sun Records. Elvis had mentioned to Sam that he was looking for a band, and Sam had passed the word along. The Starlite Wranglers already had a lead singer, Doug Poindexter, but Scotty, whose day job was cleaning and blocking hats in his brother’s laundry business, had been working with Sam for several months, trying to come up with a record, an artist, a song—anything they could make a buck out of, as Scotty said. Elvis’s name came up, and Sam gave Scotty his number.
He showed up at Scotty’s house on a Sunday afternoon, the Fourth of July, wearing a black shirt, pink pants with white stripes down the leg, white shoes . . . and “just a lot of hair. I thought my wife was going to go out the back door.”
Bill Black, who played bass for the Starlite Wranglers when he wasn’t building tires at Firestone, lived down the street, and he came, too, for a few hours. The three sang everything they could think of, though they had little repertoire in common. They made an odd trio—Elvis, nineteen, with grease in his hair, looking like a space-age garage mechanic; Scotty, twenty-three,