Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [52]
Marion had high hopes for her protégé’s appearance, and slipped over to Nashville on her own to see him. She sat in the audience for a while, and a woman in front of her asked who she’d come to see. “Elvis Presley,” Marion said. “Who?” “After the show,” Marion replied, “you won’t ask me again.”
Just before Elvis went on, Hank Snow walked up to him. “Well, kid, you ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Elvis said.
The diminutive star looked down at his paper and asked, “What was your name again?”
“Elvis, Elvis Presley.”
“No, what’s the name you used on your record?”
“Elvis Presley.”
Snow went out and introduced him as a bright, new, exciting star, but in Scotty’s view, “It was earth-shattering for all involved. They wouldn’t let us do but one song, and we had to do ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ because it was a country song. The audience reaction was very light, and in total, it was a bomb.” Elvis was so upset, he left his stage costume in a gas station bathroom and cried all the way back to Memphis.
He had a better shot two weeks later at the Louisiana Hayride, the Opry’s upstart cousin, broadcast out of Shreveport’s Municipal Auditorium over KWKH, another powerful, 50,000-watt station that beamed its signal across the wide expanse of the South. Known as “the Cradle of the Stars,” the Hayride had launched the careers of Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Slim Whitman, and Faron Young, boosting Williams, in fact, near the end of his life when the Opry shut him out.
Sam had again negotiated the tryout, but Elvis had an ally there already in booker/manager/musician Tillman Franks, who brought Elvis’s first single to the attention of Horace Logan, the Hayride’s producer. Tillman set up a phone call with Sam and Elvis (“Mr. Franks, I understand that you might get me on the Louisiana Hayride?”), and they settled on a fee of $125. Sam made the seven-hour drive to Shreveport with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, and Elvis was so nervous he could hardly sit still—twitching, drumming, shaking his foot. Their car broke down on the way in, which didn’t help matters, and none of them had any money.
Elvis was scheduled to appear after Hayride star Ginny Wright, whose duet with Jim Reeves, “I Love You,” spent twenty-two weeks on the Billboard country charts. The attractive blonde was sitting on a stool in the wings watching Johnny Horton’s performance when Elvis first walked by, a pacing blur in his pink shirt and black pants. She called him over and welcomed him to the Hayride.
“Ginny,” he said, biting his fingernails, “how in the world can you be so calm?” She felt sorry for the kid, and he brought out her maternal instincts, even though they were about the same age. “Well,” she told him, “you take a deep breath, and if you love it, you just go out there and sing.” He gave out a little laugh then and asked her if she’d like one of his new promotional pictures. It was dull and cheap-looking, not glossy like the real stars had, but he was proud of it, and signed it “To Ginny, love Elvis.” She put it in her guitar case so she wouldn’t bruise his ego.
Finally, after Ginny’s demure rendition of “Tell Me How to Get Married,” announcer Frank Page brought him on, building him as an artist whose record “has skyrocketed up the charts.” But the Hayride audience—an older, married crowd who needed a place to go on a Saturday night—couldn’t get past his outfit. With Scotty and Bill anchoring him on either side, and house drummer D. J. Fontana holding down the backbeat behind the curtain, Elvis stuttered when he talked, rocked forward on his feet, and “looked like he was about to leap right out into the audience,” as Page recalls. He shook his leg a little, more out of