Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [74]
What impressed Wanda most was the fact that Elvis took such an interest in advancing her career. He kept telling her that a lot of girls could sing country—not that she wasn’t great at it—but no girl was doing rockabilly, and she should give it a try.
“He was just really eager that I try this kind of music like he was doing. I’d say, ‘But Elvis, I’m just a country singer. I can’t sing songs like that.’ He said, ‘You can, too. I know you can. You’ve just got to try.’ So he took me to his home, and we played old black blues records, and he sang to me and tried to show me the feel for it.”
Few performers of either gender ever got such specific musical advice from Elvis. The following year, Wanda signed with Capitol Records and took his advice, writing her own spitfire songs (“Mean, Mean Man,” “Rock Your Baby”) because “no other girls were singing rockabilly. I was the first one.”
In time, Wanda would become the preeminent woman of the genre, the Queen of Rockabilly. She fearlessly explored the cracks between country and rock and roll, and in such songs as “Let’s Have a Party,” she snarled with low-class abandon about female lust (“The meat is on the stove/The bread’s a gettin’ hot/Everybody run they got the possum in the pot . . .”). Like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis’s early hero back in Tupelo, she was ahead of her time, carving out a niche as “the first [white] girl to do raunchy rock and roll like the guys did.” Her “Fujiyama Mama” even hit number one in Japan.
However, not everyone was ready for such a femme fatale. On her one Grand Ole Opry performance, Ernest Tubb found her bombshell appearance so provocative he forced her to wear a coat over her spaghetti-strap dress.
“I didn’t consider myself a rebel at all,” she says. “I wasn’t even very familiar with the term.”
But Elvis, who saw her as his musical peer, if also another replacement for his lost twin, understood it perfectly. She would soon be known as “the female Elvis.”
Within a few months of meeting, he gave her one of his rings. “A man’s ring. It had little chipped diamonds. He wasn’t very rich at that point. We were in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he asked me if I’d step outside with him. We went over and stood by his car, and he asked me if I’d be his girl. I had a crush on him, so I said yes, of course, and I wore the ring for about a year. It was a precious time.”
But things were happening so fast for both of them, and by then, there were so many girls—and so many rings—it was almost hard for Elvis to keep them straight.
In the fall of 1955 Elvis was back in Biloxi, playing three nights there, two shows at the Biloxi Community House on November 6, and return engagements at the Airmen’s Club on November 7 and 8. He’d kept trying to get in touch with June Juanico, but without success—that same guy kept answering the phone, and Elvis kept leaving messages, but June never called back.
Elvis was not the only performer to be playing Biloxi twice that year. Over at the Biloxi Beach Club, a sticky strip joint, seventeen-year-old Tura Satana entertained the men—mostly sailors and winter tourists—with her exotic dance routine. “I had so much fun with those navy men,” Tura remembers. “I’d slide up to the end of the stage and say, ‘Okay, who’s first?’ ”
Her specialty was tassel twirling. She had such good muscle control she could twirl while lying flat on her back, and even twirl in opposite directions, one at a time, switching off. Sometimes she’d snatch the blushing sailors’ hats right off their heads and twirl them, too, and the whole place would go nuts. “Someday I’m gonna fly if I can get enough rpm’s!” she’d yell to whoops and hollers. She would eventually be rated the top tassel twirler in the world.
Tura may have been young, but she had already lived a lifetime. Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in 1938, she was the daughter of a silent film actor of Japanese and Filipino heritage and a Native American circus performer. She spent her childhood