chapter five
Sam Phillips, Elvis, and Marion Keisker standing outside Sun’s office/studio at 706 Union, Memphis.
(Courtesy of Tom Salva)
Or maybe not. Here’s what we know for certain. On June 3, 1953, Elvis Aron Presley graduated from Humes High School in Memphis. There was a musical program at the graduation ceremony, but he wasn’t part of it. For some years since moving with his family from his birthplace in Tupelo to Memphis, he’d been taking guitar lessons from the son of a woman his mother knew from church, and although he wasn’t too talented as a guitarist, he could come up with enough chords to accompany songs he liked, which were mostly pop songs he’d heard on the radio. Since moving to Memphis, his interest in music—as a consumer and as a performer—had grown to the point where he carried his guitar around with him, entered a couple of talent contests, and could be heard entertaining at informal get-togethers in the courtyard of the apartment complex where he lived, or, when the Presleys were evicted for making too much money to live in public housing, on the front porch of the house they rented subsequently. He was a weird kid: polite to his elders, an indifferent student, but dressing oddly in flamboyant clothes (black and pink was a favorite combination), wearing loud socks, and combing his hair in a complex, stacked-up way that echoed the complex dos of the black performers he may well have seen on the Sunday night shows at the Handy Theater, which were reserved for a whites-only audience. Like a lot of his friends, he listened to Dewey Phillips’s program Red Hot & Blue on WHBQ, a Memphis station that let this hillbilly madman (no relation to Sam) sing along with and speed-rap over the R&B records he played, as well as read out dedications and do free-form commercials. Elvis also hung out at a record store called Charlie’s, which had a jukebox featuring the records for sale in the store instead of listening booths (but it still cost a nickel to play) and attracted a lot of dedicated music fans. We know that the morning he graduated, Elvis went to the Tennessee Employment Security Office and got a job at the M. B. Parker Machinists’ Shop. He’d start the next day. We also know that he was looking for something that would involve his singing. He wanted, maybe, to make a record.
Here’s what we don’t know. It’s possible that he figured that Meteor would be a good bet. Sun was just getting on its feet, but it had had a hit, and with a black artist at that. He’d have wanted someone who was recording country performers, perhaps, and Meteor would fill that bill nicely, although they, too, had had only one hit, and that was with Elmore James. According to Jules Bihari, people were always dropping in at Meteor looking to audition, and most failed to impress Leonard. Elvis, he remembered, was one of them, and Leonard told him to go visit Sam Phillips; maybe he could do something for him. If this is what happened, Elvis may have considered it a failure on his part, and yet the Memphis Recording Service was, in fact, a better deal; they didn’t have to like you. All you had to do was have the money to cut your song: $3.98 plus tax for a two-sided acetate disc, and for another dollar you could have a tape copy made, too. So in August he figured okay, he’d try that. And we know that he did.
Much has been written and conjectured about what happened and who was there since then, but at the moment it happened, it was of so little significance that we pretty much have to take the word of the only one of the two people who were there to have been interviewed—Sam Phillips’s partner-cum-secretary, Marion Keisker. Interviewed by Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins for his 1971 book, she remembered that it was a Saturday afternoon and that, for some reason, she was the only person there except for a bunch of people wanting to use the recording service. (Sam may have been elsewhere in the building or at the café next door, which was the informal Sun business office.) She told this kid with his beat-up guitar that he’d have to wait, and he agreed. While he was waiting she got into a conversation with him, and as she remembered, it went like this: Elvis mentioned that he was a singer, and she asked, “What kind of singer are you?”
“I sing all kinds.”
“Who do you sound like?”
“I don’t sound like nobody.”
Her reaction, she said, was to think, Oh yeah, one of those. “Hillbilly?” she asked him.
“Yeah, I sing hillbilly.”
“Who do you sound like in hillbilly?”
“I don’t sound like nobody.”
Eventually they made it into the studio, and Ms. Keisker set up the disc for the acetate recording. Elvis’s first tune was the Ink Spots’ “My Happiness,” and halfway through, Ms. Keisker did something unusual: she threaded some tape into the tape recorder, despite the fact that he hadn’t ordered a tape copy. “Now, this is something we never did,” she told Hopkins, “but I wanted Sam to hear this.” She recorded part of the first song and all of another Ink Spots’ song, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” She took down his name, address, phone number (which belonged to the folks upstairs, Rabbi Alfred Fruchter and his wife), and noted on the tape box “Good ballad singer. Hold.” Which they did. For a long time. Elvis would drop in from time to time—his pretext was that he hoped Ms. Keisker would have heard of a band that needed a singer—but there was no news. In January 1954, he recorded another acetate, Joni James’s “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way,” and “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You,” an obscure Jimmy Wakely tune. He kept talking about trying out for a gospel group at his church, but he didn’t talk about the fact that when they finally auditioned him, they rejected him. He heard that an up-and-coming local country star, Eddie Bond, was looking for a singer, and he went out to the club where he was performing, did a couple of numbers, and never heard from Bond again. Then, on June 26, Sam—or Marion Keisker, to be exact—called. Elvis later joked that he was at 706 Union before she hung up the phone. Sam had found a song, given to him by Red Wortham, who’d discovered the Prisonaires, and he heard a hit in the demo. Who could do it? Ah, that kid, the kind of shy one. So Ms. Keisker phoned, Elvis arrived, and Sam played him the song, “Without You.” They spent most of the afternoon going over and over and over the song, but nothing clicked. Sam had him sing songs he was already familiar with, listening intensely. He still didn’t hear a record. So he sent the kid home but turned the events of that afternoon over in his head. There had to be something …
In New York, Atlantic was recording a lot with Ray Charles when he was in town. He was building up a reputation on the road, so he was touring, especially down South. One day in October 1953, he’d found himself in New Orleans, hired to do a session and provide an arrangement for the artist Guitar Slim. Johnny Vincent, an Italian American entrepreneur from Jackson, Mississippi, had been hired by Specialty’s Art Rupe to scout talent, supervise recording sessions, and generally take care of business for the label, which hoped for another “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”–sized smash from down there. Guitar Slim (real name: Eddie Jones) had the makings of someone who could deliver one. A regular at New Orleans’s notorious Dew Drop Inn, he was a flamboyant dresser, a virtuoso guitar player with a lot of the tricks T-Bone Walker had introduced like playing behind his back, picking with his teeth, and walking out of the club while playing, trailing a long cord plugged into his amplifier. He was also a bad drunk, so getting him through a session could be a problem, as Vincent knew, because he’d recorded him on one of the record labels he’d had before joining Specialty. Ray Charles threw the arrangement of the song, “The Things I Used to Do,” together on the spot, ran the band through it, and finally got a take they could use, with Slim’s stinging guitar punctuating the verses and, way back in the mix, you can hear Ray shout with delight just before the band plays the last two notes. It’s a great performance, even if Art Rupe snarled at Johnny Vincent for sending him such a sloppy record and threatened to fire him if it didn’t become a hit. Fortunately for Vincent, he watched it reach the top of the R&B charts at the start of 1954. Maybe all the talent in New Orleans hadn’t been signed up after all. As for Ray Charles, the record didn’t do much for him—he wasn’t credited on the label, after all—but Atlantic slipped out one of his new recordings in the spring and got some action. It was kind of a novelty item, but it did showcase Charles’s new voice, one that owed an awful lot to gospel singers, on the chorus, as he wailed “It Should Have Been Me.” Atlantic got it into the R&B top ten and started rooting around in its tapes for something to follow it with.
While that was happening, the Detroit vocal group that had just changed its name from the Royals to the Midnighters ignited a scandal that would have far-reaching repercussions. “Work with Me, Annie” was the record that white parents feared their teenagers were listening to—and they were. The lyrics were really something: the kind of work Annie was being asked to perform sounded a whole lot like … something else, and lead vocalist Hank Ballard’s begging her to “give me all my meat” was certainly lurid enough. Worse, it was catchy as could be. And after it had become #1, they followed it up with “Sexy Ways,” which was, well, something you just didn’t sing about, and Ballard’s vocal left little doubt about the effect those sexy ways were having on him. It got played on the radio, though, primarily on black stations, which tended to be low power and go off the air at sunset. By this time, the kids looking for dirty records knew what to ask for, so when “Annie Had a Baby” came out in the summer, airplay didn’t really matter, although, again, there probably was some, late at night.
Radio, though, was in an uproar—not so much about the Midnighters’ records, but about the fact that R&B was popular enough that stations wanting to attract teen listeners found themselves forced to devote airtime to it. Billboard ran a survey in 1953 that found that 25 percent of all radio stations had an R&B program on for an average of two and a half hours a week. The pre-recorded programs Hunter Hancock and Alan Freed were sending out were very popular, and some stations, like WNJR in Newark, New Jersey, had eighteen hours daily of jazz and R&B programming, including a taped Freed show, and that same issue of Billboard reported aggregate sales of R&B records had reached $15 million in 1953, the result, they felt, of teenage kids wanting dance music with a big beat, like the music that had given rise to the pre-war swing kids.
By the time the “Annie” records were in full swing, a correction was trying to establish itself. A club of self-policing R&B disc jockeys on the East Coast banded together to “combat smut and racial derogation,” with Billboard reporting that “tunes that the club hopes to stop play on are those that deal with sex in a suggestive manner, those that deal with drinking, and those that hold the Negro up to ridicule. The club is not against blues records as such, but it is against a record in which ‘rock,’ ‘roll,’ or ‘ride’ doesn’t deal with the rhythm and meter of the tune.” It was the white DJs, obviously, who were most offended. “I don’t like to feature blues,” said Bill Laws of KLX in Oakland, “but the requests keep coming in.” And, tellingly, in Lynn, Massachusetts, WLYN’s Don Sherman told Billboard that “I’ve found it necessary to start including some of the less offensive R&B records on my pop show. The teenage crowd seems to know nothing else.” In Memphis, the police cracked down, confiscating jukeboxes with offensive records on them.
One of those records was soon going to need a little explanation. Bull Moose Jackson’s “Big Ten-Inch Record” is a masterpiece of double entendre and timing, and it sold well enough under the counter, but its subject was changing. Not sex: records. The ten-inch 78 was on its way out. Between 1948 and 1950, Columbia and RCA each introduced a new kind of record. Columbia’s was the long-playing record, which ran at 33⅓ RPM and was issued in both ten-inch and twelve-inch sizes. (The 78s were also available as twelve-inchers, but for classical repertoire almost exclusively.) RCA, on the other hand, had a seven-inch record with a much larger hole in the center, and it played at 45 RPM. Each had its advantages, and both sounded better than 78s. This was becoming an issue to higher-end consumers (most of whom had never heard of Bull Moose Jackson), especially jazz fans, who for the first time could buy records with full-length, uninterrupted recordings of extended performances. Classical fans, too, welcomed a medium where you could get over twenty minutes of music before having to turn the disc over; it revolutionized listening to opera, for one thing. The long-playing record, or LP, was also a great medium for collecting singles by popular artists, as Capitol soon realized by putting out Frank Sinatra albums. In 1955, Billboard would inaugurate a chart for long-players.
The 45, however, was ideal for singles; using the latest mastering technology, they could sound vastly better on even a jukebox’s primitive sound system, and if one took care, it was possible to put two songs on each side, thereby giving birth to the extended-play record, or EP. This format was endorsed immediately by the pop music industry, which loved the lighter weight, improved sound, and reduced manufacturing costs, and both 45 singles and EPs were soon available in addition to their larger, clunkier cousins. EPs were also ideal for artists who couldn’t fill up an entire twelve-inch album; country and R&B artists were especially popular in the EP format, and jukebox operators who’d converted to 45 were happy to charge more for selected discs. One of the classic EPs from this era was the Midnighters’ entire “Annie” trilogy—“Work with Me, Annie,” “Sexy Ways,” “Annie Had a Baby,” and their first hit, “Moonrise”—all on one Federal EP. And another thing the 33 and 45 had in common was that they were made of polyvinyl chloride, which stood up to wear better and could be dropped without shattering. (The 78 hung on a good long while, though, especially outside the United States; Indian Odeon issued a 78 of the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” in 1966.)
* * *
Alan Freed was a major beneficiary of all this interest in R&B (it would be interesting to know if he played the “Annie” records), and had been putting on “Moondog Ball” shows in Cleveland to sold-out audiences. He expanded to other Ohio cities, offering two or three headliners and an orchestra backing them that would play pepped-up pop jazz. Then he started growing and moving out of town. In May 1954, he put on a show at the Newark Armory with a sky-high ticket price of two dollars, which drew around ten thousand paid admissions and a few thousand disappointed kids who were too late to get into the sold-out show. Billboard reported that the audience was largely between fifteen and twenty years old and 20 percent white. His next show was at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, with the Clovers, the Dominoes, the Orioles, Fats Domino, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Count Basie’s Orchestra, and Buddy Johnson’s Orchestra. One reason Freed may have been spending so much time in New York was that he was deep in negotiations to move his show there, and in July, he announced that he’d signed a contract with WINS, 1010 AM, for an astronomical $75,000, which included his keeping his syndicated show. He returned to Ohio, put on one more “Moondog Ball” in Akron, broadcast it live over WJW, and went home to pack his bags. About the only major change he had to make was to drop the “Moondog” handle, because it already belonged to a blind, bearded giant whose real name was Louis Hardin, who hung around Sixth Avenue dressed in Viking regalia, performing his percussion compositions to anyone who’d pay him.
Vocal groups were popping up everywhere. Atlantic had the Clovers (whose “Your Cash Ain’t Nothin’ but Trash” was a hit this year), the Drifters (who made their contribution to the smut crisis with “Such a Night”), and, over on their newly formed Cat label, the Chords, with “Sh-Boom,” a song loaded with nonsense syllables, expertly harmonized. In the Midwest, King’s Federal label had not only the Midnighters but the Charms, a Cincinnati group fronted by the charismatic Otis Williams, who delivered “Hearts of Stone” to the charts, and they’d also signed a group from Los Angeles called the Platters who didn’t seem to have much sense of what they were doing. In Chicago, a new label called Vee-Jay had made the wise decision not to compete with Chess for blues artists (they had offices right across the street for a while) and put their toe in the water with a local group called the Spaniels, whose “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite” was a perfect slow last-dance number that put the group and the label on the map. They also grabbed a local group, the Flamingos, from whom great things would be heard, but not in 1954. Realizing that Chicago was a center for gospel music, they also signed up a couple of acts, most notably the Staple Singers, a family act held together by Roebuck “Pops” Staples, who, in his pre-saved days, had been among the young blues musicians who had followed Charley Patton around, and whose electric guitar playing, the only backing the group had, featuring deeply reverbed and oddly voiced slow ostinati, gave an ominous backing to the family’s songs of hope.
Chess was more interested in finding more blues artists than vocal groups, but you couldn’t deny their popularity, and their picking up the Moonglows, the Chicago group that had moved to Cleveland to be near Alan Freed, was a very good move, as “Sincerely” became a hit late in 1954—and the group’s connection to Freed couldn’t hurt the label’s relations with him.
Out west, the fledgling Dootone label (owned by Dootsie Williams, whose other income source was Redd Foxx’s party comedy records) put out “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, as primitive a slab of harmonizing as had ever had success, but it was a national hit nonetheless. And a couple of out-of-nowhere classics, songs that would be used as audition pieces by innumerable vocal groups to come, also made their appearance in ’54: “A Sunday Kind of Love” introduced the Harptones, at least locally in New York (the record never charted), slowing down a pop hit co-written by Louis Prima, the better to showcase their lead singer, Willie Winfield, while the Cadillacs, also from New York, took “Gloria,” which had been recorded by both Charles Brown and the Mills Brothers, to vocal group heaven with lead singer Earl “Speedy” (or “Speedo,” as we’ll see) Carroll reaching into falsetto territory in praise of the girl of the title. It, too, joined the pantheon without charting. And the Drifters closed out 1954 with a version of “White Christmas” that owed more than a little to Clyde McPhatter’s former employers the Dominoes’ arrangement, except that Clyde took over from the bass lead to exercise his own kind of drama on the tune, leading to grumbles from Irving Berlin’s lawyers. Berlin shouldn’t have bothered; not only was the group on firm ground by rearranging the song, but it also managed to chart over the next two Christmases and earn him lots of money.
One of the biggest successes with the teenagers was forty-three-year-old Big Joe Turner, of all people. He’d finished out 1953 with “Honey Hush,” a classic boogie-woogie tune, and started 1954 with “TV Mama,” which featured Elmore James doing his thing on the slide guitar, something completely unlike the Kansas City–style jump blues Turner was known for. But those records were overshadowed by one that was on the charts for most of the year (thirty-two weeks!): “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” It, too, was part of the smut crisis, as Joe admired his girlfriend’s “dresses, the sun comes shining through” and compared himself to a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store. It also swung like crazy, making it one of the first rock & roll classics. Turner’s version never made the pop charts, but you’d better believe white teenagers knew about it. So did a twenty-nine-year-old Western swing bandleader in Pennsylvania who’d been recording hot records with titles like “Rock This Joint” for regional labels, and had done a cover of “Rocket 88.”
Bill Haley and the Saddlemen were pretty popular around the Philadelphia area, and Haley had no doubt been listening to some of the R&B records that were sent to him in his day job as a disc jockey at WPWA. In mid-1953, he recorded a hot tune called “Crazy Man, Crazy,” that almost made the top ten, and made enough noise for Decca to sign him, changing the name of his band to the Comets. His version of “Shake, Rattle and Roll” did make the pop top ten, although of course he cleaned up the lyrics and his band wasn’t close to the caliber of the jazzmen Atlantic had enlisted to back up Big Joe.
Still, Haley’s success pointed out one solution to the smut crisis and the problem of white youth buying black records: cover versions. This was an industry term for a re-recording of another person’s record, and it had a long and venerable history reaching back to the 1920s, before records were even how most people accessed a song. The Chords’ “Sh-Boom” was a great, catchy, tricky tune, so Mercury had a white group, the Crew-Cuts (formerly the Canadaires) record a cover version that almost killed the Chords’ version. Almost—both went into the top ten, but the Crew-Cuts made #1. Ruth Brown had a pretty little number called “Oh, What a Dream” riding the charts in the summertime. Patti Page grabbed it, but didn’t have much luck with it. So far, cover versions weren’t much of a threat. That would change soon. And, of course, there was another way to deal with some of the unruly performers; Clyde McPhatter was drafted in May. Fortunately, there was stuff in the can, and the Drifters were unaffected, because Atlantic had pulled Clyde from the group and started recording him as a solo artist, replacing him in the group with a near soundalike, Little David Baughan.
The real crisis was brewing in Memphis, however. A guitarist from a local country band called the Starlite Ramblers was hanging out at the Memphis Recording Service, and Sam Phillips took a shine to him. Scotty Moore had ambitions of playing jazz, although he was completely self-taught, and, like Sam, had an intuition that something new was on the horizon, which they’d discuss over coffee. Sam did a single on the Starlite Ramblers, and it didn’t sell, like most Memphis country music, but Scotty kept hanging around. Eventually, someone mentioned the kid who’d been looking for a band, Elvis Presley, and Scotty offered to take a listen to him. The Ramblers’ bass player, Bill Black, lived a couple of doors away from him, and Scotty invited him over to work with the kid. On July 4, Elvis showed up at the Moores’ house and Bill came over and they stumbled through some tunes together. Between songs, Bill discovered that Elvis knew his brother Johnny, who had moved to Texas. They ambled through some more songs, and finally Elvis left. Scotty called Sam and said he wasn’t much impressed, but the kid did have a good voice. Sam thought it would be a good idea to record him, because sometimes people sound different on tape. They made an appointment at the studio—Bill Black agreed to come, too—and so at 7:00 P.M. the next day, Scotty, Bill, Elvis, and Sam convened, and, after a little conversation, rolled the tape.
They went through several takes of an old Ernest Tubb hit, “I Love You Because,” a ballad with a recitation in it, and although the voice was there, and Sam was convinced that Elvis was a ballad singer, it wasn’t exactly what he was looking for. Hours passed, and then something happened. Elvis, out of sheer nervous energy, perhaps, started whanging away on a tune he’d been playing for some time, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right (Mama),” which the bluesman had recorded for Bluebird in the 1940s. Scotty told Jerry Hopkins that Elvis was “jumping around the studio, just acting the fool. And Bill started beating on his bass and I joined in. Just making a bunch of racket, we thought. The door to the control room was open, and when we was halfway through the thing, Sam come running out and said, ‘What the devil are you doing?’ We said, ‘We don’t know.’ He said, ‘Well, find out real quick and don’t lose it. Run through it again and let’s put it on tape.’ So to the best of our knowledge we repeated what we just done and went through the whole thing.” Now, this was interesting. All they had to do was record another song and they’d have a record.
It took four more sessions. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill sitting around the studio, tossing around songs to do, doing them, and coming up with nothing. Finally, they were between songs, just like the last time, and somehow Bill Monroe’s name came up. The bluegrass master was known for not having much of a sense of humor, and at the moment the country stations were playing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” his latest record, in an attempt to make it a hit. Elvis started mocking him, jumping up “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and, laughing, the other two joined in, making up the arrangement as they went along, trying not to crack up too much. When it was over, Sam walked into the studio and said, “Fine, man, fine. Hell, that’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout. That’s good.” Not good enough to use, so they did one more take. Sam gave the two-sided curiosity the number Sun 209.
Then, after everyone had gone home and Sam sat alone in the studio, Dewey Phillips stopped by. Dewey and Sam had a history going back before Sun; they’d briefly had a record label, It’s The Phillips!, that flopped, and of course Dewey was essential to exposing the blues records Sam was cutting. The two men sat up, drinking beer and listening to “That’s All Right (Mama),” a song whose original Dewey had played many times on his show—perhaps that’s where Elvis had heard it. Sam was just a bit tentative about playing it at first; Dewey was known to prefer non-local performers, rhythm and blues stars from faraway Strolls like Central Avenue or 125th Street. But he liked this record. In fact, he called Sam the next morning and told him that he wanted two copies for his show that evening, and Sam warmed up the acetate-cutting lathe. After taking the records to WHBQ, Sam told Elvis, Scotty, and Bill that Dewey would be playing it that night, and Elvis, nervous as he could be, turned the family radio on to WHBQ after dinner that evening and ran off to the movies. At about ten o’clock, Dewey announced that he had a record that Sam would be putting out next week, and here it was, by a local boy, Elvis Presley. Back at the Presley house, his mother, Gladys, was so shocked by hearing his name on the radio that she couldn’t pay attention to the record. No matter; Dewey played it again. And again. And again. Something like eleven times in a row. Then the phone rang at the Presleys’. It was Dewey, demanding that they find Elvis and bring him down to the station for an interview so that the phones would stop ringing at the station. They went down to the theater and pulled Elvis out of his seat and out onto the sidewalk and down to WHBQ, where Dewey greeted him warmly and told him to hang on because he was going to interview him. Elvis, scared to death, said he didn’t know anything about being interviewed, and Dewey just told him not to say anything dirty. He kept talking, and “I asked him where he went to high school,” Phillips told Stanley Booth, “and he said, ‘Humes.’ I wanted to get that out, because a lot of people listening thought he was colored.” They continued to chat, and finally Dewey thanked him and Elvis asked when he was going to get interviewed. “‘I already have,’ I said. ‘The mike’s been open the whole time.’” Now Dewey had to deal with the phones; they’d been jammed since he played the record the first time and weren’t letting up. Elvis, no doubt a bit preoccupied, slowly walked home. In teenage Memphis, though, the word was out. That weird-looking guy? The one who dressed funny and was obsessed with his hair? He’d made a record. And what a record!
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Back then, Billboard ran regional charts for R&B and “hillbilly” records, which are fascinating because individual geographical areas have very specific tastes in both genres. Sun 209 showed up fairly quickly on the Memphis chart—it should have, because Sam had had to change his order with the pressing plant from whatever his usual testing-the-waters quantity was to five thousand copies to seven thousand copies right off the bat, so it was selling. Promoting the record was hard; if the singer was white, why was he singing Arthur Crudup, and if he was black, what in the world was he doing with Bill Monroe, of all people? The first place to get it was Texas; a promotion woman named Alta Hayes at Big State Distribution in Dallas managed to get it some airplay, and then it showed up on the Dallas charts. Emboldened, Sam called in a favor at the Grand Ole Opry, and in September, Elvis got to sing his record on the show. Contrary to legend, Opry manager Jim Denny did not tell Elvis not to quit his truck-driving job—in fact, he was slightly impressed, according to eyewitnesses—and Elvis’s worst fear came and went when he bumped into Bill Monroe backstage and Monroe told him how much he’d liked “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” which he was re-cutting the next week to turn it from a waltz to a 4/4 arrangement. Elvis got to introduce Scotty Moore to Chet Atkins (his idol), and later, at The Midnight Jamboree at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, a popular post-Opry show, he had an encouraging conversation with Tubb. Sometime after the Opry appearance and his appearance on the Louisiana Hayride (the second-most important live country music radio show), he went back into the studio to record the next single, “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
At some point after the release of the single, but before the Opry, Elvis played Bethel Spring, Tennessee, and three brothers who had a band went to see him. They’d heard of him, and at least one of the boys had heard him on the radio. His wife had made him listen: “It sounds like you!” she’d said. And, he thought, as “Blue Moon of Kentucky” played, it did. The Perkins Brothers had been playing music that way since 1946, when they talked their way into a gig at a place called the Cotton Boll. Carl Lee Perkins was three years older than Elvis Presley, was married, and had kids. But he and his brothers Clayton and Jay were working their way up out of the cotton fields by playing music in the honky-tonks at night. He’d begged his parents for a guitar when he was six and learned to play from “Uncle” John Westbrook, a black man who worked with the Perkinses in the cotton fields. In fact, the Perkins house was in an area that wasn’t so much integrated as a place where poor people who sharecropped cotton lived in terrible conditions. Some of them happened to be black, some white. Carl was determined to play the Opry, which his father listened to religiously each week, but his attempt to replicate the music he heard didn’t go so well. He liked Uncle John’s approach too much, and it infected a lot of what he played. Of course, that had been the key to the Perkins Brothers’ success; they were more rhythmic than a lot of other bands, and they got people dancing. Part of this happened when Carl convinced Clayton that he should switch to bass, and then demonstrated a playing technique in which the strings bounced off the neck, providing a rhythmic clicking as well as the bass note. Bit by bit, the Perkins Brothers got better, and eventually acquired a guy named “Fluke” Holland, who’d beat on the side of Clayton’s bass with drumsticks, enhancing the rhythmic impact they made.
They all had day jobs, though, and Carl didn’t like that. After the Bethel Spring show, Carl had approached Elvis in the parking lot to tell him how much he’d enjoyed the show. (Elvis needed some cheering up; after his last number, he’d tripped over a cable onstage and landed on his butt.) He asked if Sun Records was looking for artists, and Elvis said he didn’t know. And that was that. Okay, only one way to find out. As Perkins told his biographer, David McGee, years later, “Presley nailed it. He jumped right in the middle of what I was doing, and the minute I heard it I knew it. I started knowing I had a shot then, because, you know, if you record ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ by Elvis, you might record it by me too, because I sang it. I was a big enough fool to think if I’d go down there and sing it, [Sam Phillips] might like me singin’ it too.” So in October 1954, the Perkins Brothers loaded their stuff into Fluke Holland’s car and headed to Union Avenue. The minute Carl walked in to ask about recording, Marion Keisker blew him off. They had their hands full with Presley and didn’t need any more acts. He protested that they sounded like Elvis, and she countered that that wasn’t going to help them. Furthermore, Mr. Phillips wasn’t there, so auditioning wouldn’t do any good. Carl went back out to the car, and just as they were about to drive away, a large blue Buick drove up in front of the studio, and a guy they reckoned was Sam got out. Carl leaped to intercept him and begged him to listen to them. Impatient, Sam said he had a couple of minutes, but no more, and ushered them into the studio. (Years later he told Carl he thought the boy’s world would end if he said no, and from what Carl has said, that wasn’t too far off.) Jay, who did a mean Ernest Tubb, stepped up and started one of his original tunes, but Sam cut him off. He then began singing a Tubb number, and Sam informed him that Ernest Tubb already existed. Carl immediately launched into a song he’d written years ago—the first one he’d ever written, in fact—called “Movie Magg” and Sam listened. He listened all the way to the end. And then he asked Carl if he could do it without jumping around, and he did, although by now he was nervous. Sam agreed the second time wasn’t so hot, but he liked the song. “You come in with another thing like that and we’ll talk about a record deal. But right now, man, this guy Elvis’s got my hands tied.” Well, okay, Carl figured. He could do that. Carl and Sam made an appointment for a couple of weeks later, and Carl and the band returned to Jackson to wait the time out. When they came back, Fluke Holland had a drum kit, which gave Sam a bit of a start, but it was his car they were driving in, so he let him set up. They recorded “Movie Magg” in an all-new version Carl had worked up, and then “Honky Tonk Gal,” a newer song. Sam didn’t like that for a B-side for “Movie Magg,” so they did another, “Turn Around,” that was more country. Carl had a bunch of them, though, and he was ready to record them all.
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Up the Mississippi River from Memphis, in St. Louis, something of the opposite phenomenon was happening. Charles Edward “Chuck” Berry, a preacher’s wayward son, had done time for armed robbery and car theft while fresh out of high school, and by 1952, he was playing in the Tommy Stevens Combo, a small band that fed versions of popular black hits to the crowds at Huff’s Garden, a relatively sophisticated nightclub for black patrons. One night, possibly out of boredom, Berry struck up and performed a country tune for the crowd, which went wild. Stevens encouraged him; a little showmanship couldn’t hurt, and soon the whole group was acting nutty, with Berry’s country tunes and novelties a highlight of the show. Observing from the sidelines was Johnny Johnson, a boogie-woogie pianist two years older than Berry, who’d been working with an act called the Sir John’s Trio in a considerably less sophisticated venue, the Cosmopolitan. At the end of December, Sir John’s saxophonist got sick and wasn’t going to be able to make the New Year’s Eve show, and Johnson (who, after all, was the Sir John of the band’s name) asked Berry if he’d like to do his country act as part of the evening’s entertainment. By the end of the night, the club’s owner insisted that Berry join the band and incorporate this part of the entertainment permanently. This arrangement lasted until Tommy Stevens called Berry one day in 1954 and told him that his band was going to become the house band at the Crank Club, working more and each getting over twice what Berry was making with Sir John. Berry was back with them in a heartbeat. Not long after, a local label owner called to ask if Chuck would play guitar on a record he was making with a guy he was writing songs for, Calypso Joe. The experience of recording energized Berry to the point where, when the Cosmopolitan’s owner begged him to come back, he said he would on three conditions: he would be bandleader, he would have a contract, and the band would actively pursue a record deal. Done, done, and done, although who would record them, St. Louis not being awash in rhythm and blues labels, was a good question.
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And while Sam Phillips was discovering that talent would come to him, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler were having to travel to record their talent; determined to get another hit out of Ray Charles, they went to Cosimo Matassa’s studio in August 1953 to record two numbers (one of them by Guitar Slim), radio station WDSU, also in New Orleans, that December, and, in November 1954, to WGST in Atlanta to record him. He was making money on the road, not via his records, so all but the first New Orleans date featured his road band, which shifted personnel but had picked up its first core member, a young saxophonist from Fort Worth, David “Fathead” Newman. The results were all fine tunes, but it was the last session that produced a two-sided hit that Atlantic released in December. “I’ve Got a Woman” was a quick rewrite of a gospel house-wrecker, “I’ve Got a Savior,” and Ray put everything into it. The B side, “Come Back Baby,” had a gospel piano underlying a breathtaking blues vocal punctuated by falsetto hoots. The A side went to #1 on the R&B charts in short order, and the B side got to #4. It looked like Ray Charles had finally found his audience. The hooting was probably influenced by Professor Alex Bradford, who’d had a gospel smash for Specialty in 1953 with “Too Close to Heaven,” where he took flight with it a couple of times. That song was no doubt noticed by a young blues singer who’d been doing the Southern circuit and recording for RCA. Richard Penniman—or Little Richard, as he billed himself—was known for a high-energy stage show, but his records were undistinguished blues. After RCA dropped him, he recorded a session for Duke-Peacock in 1953, since Don Robey knew the kid had drawing power and got Johnny Otis’s band to back him. Robey didn’t even bother to release the records. But Penniman wasn’t through yet.
Nor was Otis. On an engagement at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, he was confronted by a brash, light-skinned fifteen-year-old named Jamesetta Hawkins who wanted to audition for him right there and then. He let her try out and then got her parents’ permission to take her with him when the band returned to Los Angeles. They gave her the stage name of Etta James and cobbled together an answer record to Hank Ballard’s “Annie” records called “Roll with Me, Henry” and presented it to Modern, who insisted on a title change to “The Wallflower.” It shot up the R&B charts, and suddenly Etta James was a touring member of the Johnny Otis Revue.