Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [8]
“Just a roof and a couple of sides. Didn’t even have a front. No pews or chairs. Just things set up with long planks across them. They called ’em benches.” The congregation also met in an old movie house, ironic, since the Assembly of God frowned on picture shows, if not music.
“In all of our church services, music and singing were very meaningful parts,” recalled Reverend Frank W. Smith, who became pastor at the church about ten years later. “We would always begin our services with congregational singing. Not loud singing, but worship singing. We had a song leader, and everyone would join in and sing along together. Sometimes there would be no worshipful expressions during this part of the service, just singing.”
As in other Pentecostal churches, the Assembly of God revered speaking in tongues as evidence that the Holy Spirit talked through the parishioners. Both the speakers and the interpreters of the sounds, variously called “the barks,” “the jerks,” and “the Holy laugh,” were held in the highest esteem.
Four months after the horrific trauma of Rhetha’s death, Gladys attended yet another tragedy and demonstrated previously unseen emotional strength. Annie’s third baby, Barbara Sue, delivered at home, died eight hours after birth from asphyxiation from too much mucus in her lungs.
“Gladys was in and out all day, but she had been there from about five o’clock on that evening, because the baby was strangling pretty bad, and we called Dr. [Robert] Pegram about three times, and he wouldn’t come. By the time he got there, she was dead. Gladys was the one that took the baby out of my bed and put it over on another bed when she died. She stayed right with me.”
Annie, only nineteen, was too weak and distraught to go to the graveyard, so Gladys stayed with her then, too, while everybody else went. “Your belief in God will get you through,” Gladys told the devastated mother over and over. “Look to God.”
Gladys’s faith in a higher power brought her more than spiritual salve, however, for it was in that East Tupelo church in the spring of 1933 that Gladys Love Smith, who had just turned twenty-one and operated a sewing machine at the Tupelo Garment Company for two dollars a day, first laid eyes on Vernon Elvis Presley. He was blondish, fine featured, well mannered around women, and with full lips that curled into an easy sneer, he looked like a backwoods Romeo straight out of Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell’s classic novel of sex and violence among the rural poor.
They eloped two months after they met, on June 17, 1933, in Pontotoc County, where Vernon, barely seventeen but looking every bit a full-grown man, could pass as one. He borrowed the money for the marriage license, which spelled his name “Virnon,” either because the clerk made an error, or because Vernon, who was only semiliterate throughout his life, knew no better. Both he and his bride lied about their ages, Vernon adding five years, for twenty-two, and Gladys subtracting two, for nineteen. In a photograph taken of them about that time, they can hardly conceal their hunger for each other, their heads pressed together, Gladys snuggled up to him from behind, her arm around his shoulder.
Yet it was not precisely love at first sight. Initially, Gladys dated Vernon’s older brother, Vester, while her younger sister, Clettes, went with Vernon. “Gladys didn’t like my attitude much,” Vester said years later. “I was too wild in those days. So Gladys quit seeing me and we quit seeing the Smith