Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [64]
All along, however, Parker saw it as a temporary arrangement. He was always looking beyond country music for the Next Big Thing, someone he could call, in carnival parlance, “my attraction.” He found him in 1955.
“When Tom was driving to New York to finalize what he needed to do about Elvis,” recalls David Wilds, whose father, Honey Wilds, made up half of the blackface comedy duo Jamup and Honey, “he and [his wife] Marie stopped and spent time with us. I was about eleven, and I remember sitting in our living room and hearing Marie tell Mother, ‘Tom’s found this wonderful boy, just the most remarkable thing. Honey, he sings sexy hillbilly.’ My mother looked kind of bug-eyed, and Daddy thought Tom had lost his mind, being gone over Elvis Presley. He thought it was the biggest mistake Tom ever made.”
By the time he hooked up with Elvis, Parker could brag that he was one of country music’s premier booking agents and advance men, even as many still saw him as a carny operator out for a quick buck. In addition to Pee Wee King, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, and Jamup and Honey, at one time or another his stable included Ernest Tubb, Benny Martin, Rod Brasfield, the Duke of Paducah, Clyde Moody, George Morgan, Slim Whitman, and the Carter Family. For a short spell, he also managed June Carter on her own. Now he was only too happy to get as many clients as possible on the Hank Snow Enterprises—Jamboree Attractions tours.
In February 1955, Elvis went back into the recording studio to cut his fourth Sun single, “Baby, Let’s Play House.” The Arthur Gunter song, heavy on playful innuendo and full of pent-up sexual energy, would be the first Elvis record ever to chart, climbing to number ten on the Billboard country and western chart, and number five on the country disc jockey chart, hanging on for a surprising fifteen weeks.
On February 6, three days after his recording session, Elvis realized a lifelong dream when he performed two shows at Ellis Auditorium, where he had taken his fantasy curtain calls only a few years before. He was at the bottom of a bill that included hillbilly star Faron Young and gospel great Martha Carson, but the posters boasted “Memphis’ Own Elvis Presley,” and he was proud to make good in his hometown.
After the first show, he looked up in the autograph line, and there stood Billie Wardlaw. A flood of emotions came over them both, and they laughed to cover them up. Elvis took one of his new Sun Records promotional pictures and thought a minute, finally writing across it, “To Billie, My Little Ex-.”
Between shows, Bob Neal arranged a meeting between Sam Phillips and the Colonel across the street at Palumbo’s Restaurant. Parker brought his right-hand man, Tom Diskin, and things started off friendly enough with the four of them as they discussed how to further the career of the act that brought them together. Then the Colonel looked at Phillips and dropped the bomb: The boy could not realize his dreams on a small-time label like Sun. In fact, Parker had already met with RCA Victor, where he’d done business for Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, to see about purchasing Elvis’s contract. When Phillips protested, the Colonel turned a deaf ear. The papers might not be signed yet, but it made no difference whether Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’s contract. The Colonel was now in control, and Elvis was changing labels.
On February 16, 1955, Elvis played the Odessa Senior High School Field House in Odessa, Texas, where fifteen-year-old Roy Orbison could hardly believe what he saw onstage. “His energy was incredible, his instinct was