Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [49]
“Hell, that’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout,” Sam Phillips famously enthused.
“We just sort of shook our heads and said, “Well, that’s fine, but good God, they’ll run us out of town!” Scotty remembers. “I think we all knew immediately when this happened that this might be what we was looking for. So we just figured out where to start and stop, and that was it.”
By this time, Dixie knew that Elvis had been recording at Sun Records, but she was shocked to get a telegram from him on vacation: HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT. Then, as the family drove back into Memphis, they heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the radio. It was one thing to hear three guys sitting in the kitchen practicing a song with a couple of guitars, Dixie said, but another to hear it on the airwaves.
“I was totally stunned. But I recognized him immediately. Everybody in the family was just ecstatic. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to me.”
Neither of them had any idea of the magnitude of it all (“It was almost disbelief that the disc jockeys would even play it,” Dixie said), even though Elvis was thrilled to be playing the Bon Air club as an extra added attraction with Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers. “He was still just totally innocent and spontaneous,” in Dixie’s view. “There wasn’t a conceited bone in his body.”
In fact, he was still interested in doing the old things, like going to the Humes football games. One night, Charlie Fisher, who remembered him from ROTC, watched him come and sit in front of him at Crump Stadium, named for the congressman and former demagogue mayor E. H. Crump. Elvis was decked out that night, wearing a lavender Ike jacket and matching lavender pants.
“My wife, Steve, took one look at him and said, ‘My God, who is that?’ ”
“I told her, ‘I think that’s Elvis Presley. He’s supposed to be making records these days.’ ”
The whole town was talking about him, but few had actually seen him, and there was some confusion about what race Elvis was, as Dixie soon discovered. Her mother worked with a couple of young black girls, who mentioned how much they loved “That’s All Right (Mama).” Mrs. Locke spoke up and cheerfully said, “My daughter dates him.” The girls blinked, incredulous that Mrs. Locke’s daughter dated a Negro. She set them straight, told them he was white, but “they couldn’t believe it,” says Dixie, “because the type of music that he was singing was typically related to a black musician.”
Memphis would see for itself on July 30, 1954, when Elvis played the Overton Park Shell, an outdoor stage in the city’s leafy park of the same name. Four days before, Sam Phillips, who had just formally signed Elvis to Sun Records, had gone to Bob Neal, the WMPS disc jockey whose noonday show Elvis and Dixie frequently attended. Neal, who also ran a little record shop with his wife, Helen, sometimes promoted country concerts. Now he was bringing in a “hillbilly hoedown,” a package show starring Slim Whitman and Billy Walker from the Louisiana Hayride, the live radio show broadcast from Shreveport over KWKH. Since his own show was all requests, Neal was playing Elvis’s two songs.
“Why don’t you put him on the bill?” Sam said.
Bob, knowing that Sun was a nonunion label, asked if he’d been cleared with the musician’s union.
“No, but I’ll get him in the union.”
“I said, ‘Fine,’ ” Bob recalled two decades later. “ ‘Let’s put him on.’ It was his first big appearance in a commercial performance.”
But Sam hadn’t gotten him in the union, and when Elvis arrived at the park, the president of the local Federation of Musicians refused to admit him to the stage area. Sam quickly scrambled for the money to make Elvis a member, and then the boy mounted the stage.
Elvis went on before Slim Whitman, a big favorite at the time. He launched into “That’s All Right (Mama),” and whether from nerves or imitation of his hero, “Big Chief” Weatherington of the Statesmen, he suddenly began to shake, his legs a blur of rhythm and romance. Something like electricity zigged