Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [53]
Before he knew it, he’d moved through both “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the audience connecting more with the latter tune, already knowing it from the Father of Bluegrass. And then he was offstage, staff fiddler Dobber Johnson and his “splinter-bustin” hoedown, “Black Mountain Rag,” in his place.
Ginny Wright had been watching from the wings.
“I thought he was going to get booed off the stage. Because he didn’t even hardly get any applause at all, and he was real worried. They didn’t ask him to come back out or anything.”
He saw the look on her face.
“Ginny,” he said, “is there anyplace we could go get some coffee?”
“Yeah, we got a little restaurant down here. You’ve got to go down the back steps of the building.”
They were on their way when Tillman Franks stopped him and took him by the arm, seeing how nervous he was.
“He really didn’t get much of a hand, and I know he and Scotty and Bill talked it over. But I told him, ‘Don’t worry about what you’re doing. They ain’t hired you yet. You do anything you want to. Just relax and get with it.’ ”
Down in the restaurant, Ginny bought him a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He was awful humble and sweet, she thought, and he talked about his mother. “He said, ‘Ginny, do you miss your mama and daddy?’ Because my mother and father were still in Georgia, running a grocery store. And I said, ‘Yeah, I really do. I try to call them once or twice a week.’ Then he fidgeted with the spoon, shaking his foot all the while.
“ ‘Ginny, I didn’t get no applause like you got,’ he said, his voice downcast. ‘Well, Elvis, the Louisiana Hayride is a country show. Why don’t you get out there sometime and do a country song?’ He said, ‘Well, I can do that. I can sing “Old Shep,” ’ and he sang for me there at the table, starting off in whisper: ‘When I was a lad and old Shep was a pup. . . .’ ”
Elvis didn’t realize it, but the audience that had given him such a light hand at first wanted more. “The acts they’d come to know as family now seemed distant and boring,” Frank Page wrote. “Slowly, they built their enthusiasm for the young trio from Memphis, and when Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were called back out later in the show, the reception was very different.”
Taking the stage for the second time, Bill primed the audience, jumping around, being silly, and egging Elvis on to move, to shake that leg and loosen up. The crowd seemed younger now, but whether that was true, as Scotty remembers, “They reacted. I mean they reacted!”
“On the second appearance, when Elvis started doing that, the roof come in,” said Tillman Franks. “They just went completely wild. After the show, Sam, Elvis, Horace Logan, and Pappy Covington, the Hayride’s booking agent, went in a room and started talking.”
When they walked out, Elvis had a twelve-month contract as a member of the Hayride cast.
From the beginning of his sixteen-month stint there, Elvis was a favorite of the women stars, though nearly each of them had a different relationship with him, from maternal to sisterly to romantic. Almost all of them found him strangely immature, if fun. Vocalist Jeanette Hicks, like so many women, noticed, “Those eyes! He liked to play peek-a-boo. He used to sneak up behind me backstage, cover my eyes and say, ‘Guess who?’ in a funny voice. Well, there was no mistaking who it was.”
But Betty Amos, a singer-comedienne, found him harder to take. He was always breaking strings onstage and would run up to her and say, “Betty, quick, can I borrow your guitar?” One night he returned it “absolutely thrashed to death, just the whole front busted out,” and he didn’t do anything about it.
“I was very fond of Elvis, but sometimes I didn’t like him very much. He could be sweet, gentle, kind, and thoughtful, but perplexing and aggravating, too. He was sexy, handsome, childish, and at times, downright cruel. He’d hit me and I’d hit him. Looking back, I suppose in all probability