chapter seven
The Teenagers: (left to right) Sherman Garnes, Frankie Lymon, Jimmy Merchant, Herman Santiago, and Billy Lobrano.
(Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy Stock Photo)
Colonel Tom Parker was unstoppable. He’d booked Elvis on package tours all over the South during the summer and early fall of 1955, and when the boy was on the road, he’d call the Presley household to assure them—well, mostly Elvis’s mother, Gladys—that things were well. Gladys didn’t much trust the Colonel. He was a smooth talker, and she saw through that. There was a while when he was pressuring the Presleys to sign a contract—Elvis was still twenty, too young—naming him as a “special advisor” to Bob Neal. Privately, he’d tell those close to him that he was just waiting for March 1956 when Elvis’s deal with Neal expired, and that he’d just swoop on in and take over. Meanwhile, Neal and Sam Phillips were letting out the rumor that Elvis’s Sun contract was for sale. Sam desperately needed money; the success of Elvis’s records put him in a classic position. The label took on the risk of pressing the records on credit, then shipping them to the distributors, who had ninety days to pay up on the ones sold, returning unsold records for 100 percent credit. A sudden run on a given title, a hit, would mean that the label owed the pressing plants and hoped that the distributors would pay up on time. And Sun was no longer a one-artist label. It never had been, but Sam was developing Carl Perkins, and there was a new kid from Arkansas, Johnny Cash, for whom he saw great promise in the country market. And it wasn’t just the pressing plants, either; Sam’s brother, Jud, had invested in the label a year ago, buying out Jim Bulleit’s share, and was hoping for some return. Given Decca’s success with Bill Haley, maybe a major label taking on a rock & roll artist made sense. Mitch Miller at Columbia called Bill Neal and asked what the contract was going for, and Sam told Bill to ask $18,000, to which Miller said, “Oh, forget it, nobody’s worth that much.” Decca, Capitol, Mercury, Chess, Atlantic (who offered a colossal $25,000—which was “everything we had, including my desk,” Ahmet Ertegun told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins), all of them made offers. None was sufficient.
Finally, in August, Parker got the Presleys and Neal to sign a document making him a “special advisor” to Elvis and Bob, and added a clause at the end that gave him the right to “negotiate all renewals on existing contracts.” Elvis then went back out on the road with a better fee for performances (although the band was only getting a pittance, further reduced when they added D. J. Fontana on drums at Elvis’s request), at one point touring with Bill Haley and playing as far away as Cleveland. Meanwhile, Parker and RCA were deep in negotiations, because that’s where the Colonel wanted Elvis to wind up. At the end of October, Sam and the Colonel and Tom Diskin met in Memphis, and Parker told Sam that RCA was offering $25,000 for the contract and would go no higher. Sam, knowing that he had to pay Jud back and that he also owed Elvis $5,000 in unpaid back royalties, dug in his heels at $35,000. By the time of Nashville’s annual DJ Week in November, Elvis was on everybody’s mind. He’d been named most promising young country star by Billboard and Cash Box, and he was there with his parents, meeting and greeting industry people. Bob Neal was there, realizing he was about to be consigned to history, at least in terms of Elvis’s story, and of course the Colonel was there; true to his roots, he’d tied a live elephant down at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, wearing a banner saying, “Like an elephant Hank Snow never forgets. Thanks Dee Jays.” Elvis also ran into Mae Boren Axton, who insisted that a song she’d written would be his first million seller once he signed with RCA. Some friends had shown her a newspaper article about a teenager who’d committed suicide, leaving a note that read only “I walk a lonely street,” and she’d populated that street with a hotel. Elvis really wasn’t interested in being pitched songs, but Mrs. Axton had been so good to him in Florida that he took a couple of minutes out to listen to it and then had her play it over and over, probably memorizing it as she did.
On November 21, they had finally solidified all the deals around the new contract, including Bob Neal’s payoff, and a gaggle of RCA folks, Sam, and Hank Snow (probably because he was the Colonel’s partner in Jamboree Attractions) gathered at Sun and did the deed. RCA took over the matter of the unpaid royalties, $35,000 was the price, Elvis’s royalty rate on records sold went from Sun’s 3 percent to 5 percent, and there was a complex publishing deal with Hill and Range Music, one of the biggest music publishers in the country. In addition to Sun, Sam now owned radio station WHER, whose gimmick was all-female air personalities, one of whom was Marion Keisker, and so from the signing, Elvis and his parents and Hank Snow and the Colonel all jammed into the studio there while Ms. Keisker moderated a chat celebrating the signing. And so, two days after his twenty-first birthday, on January 10, 1956, Elvis walked into RCA Studios in New York to record “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Nor was it just Elvis whose career was suddenly taking off. In early December 1955, Marty Robbins’s manager, Eddie Crandall, had seen Buddy and Bob perform and had also probably been at an all-night jam session after the gig with Robbins’s band and Holley and Montgomery’s band at the Cotton Club. He wrote a note to Dave Stone, owner of WDAV, where the boys had their show that “I’m very confident that I can get Buddy Holley a recording contract. It may not be a major, but even a small one would be beneficial to someone who is trying to get a break.” He then sent a telegram asking Stone to make a four-song demo on the boys, with the caveat “Don’t change [Buddy’s] style at all.” Then he went to work; he finally got Jim Denny, who had a long association with the Grand Ole Opry, to make some inquiries on behalf of Buddy, and, after getting turned down by Columbia, he got Paul Cohen at Decca interested. Cohen asked for Buddy to call him, and in the lead-up to that conversation, he asked Denny if Bob Montgomery was supposed to go with him. “He can’t sing on the records,” Denny said. “We want one singer, not two.” And when he sat down with Bob to see how he felt about it, Buddy’s mother remembered that he answered, “You’ve got your chance—now go ahead!” (Montgomery went on to become a very successful songwriter in Nashville and died in 2014.)
Buddy was good and ready to go, but first he needed a band, which, given his contacts around Lubbock, wouldn’t be hard. But he also wanted a first-rate instrument for himself—an amplified acoustic guitar had been fine for the country numbers with Bob, and he had a cheap electric guitar, but he wanted something better—so he approached his older brother Larry for a loan of $1,000. Larry had his own business and was doing well, although he was a bit shocked at the fact that his brother was actually going to spend $600 on a Fender Stratocaster guitar. Still, he, like the rest of the family, was caught up in Buddy’s absolute conviction that he was going to be a star, so he loaned him the money. Buddy got further into debt when the Holleys bought a new car and gave him the old one, provided he take over the payments. In late January, he loaded the band’s equipment (with the bass fiddle in the traditional place, atop the car), and Sonny Curtis, who was now playing guitar, and Don Guess, his new bassist, into the car and took off on the long drive to Nashville and, they all hoped, stardom. They had to leave their drummer, Jerry Allison, behind because he had to go to high school.
The problems—or, if you were thinking positively, as Buddy was, adjustments—started as soon as they got into town. Decca told Buddy that they were okay with him using his band, but they didn’t want him playing rhythm guitar because they were concerned about leakage into the vocal mike, so they called in Nashville session cat Grady Martin for that. They also didn’t want rock & roll drumming—which they wouldn’t get from Buddy’s band because Allison was still in Lubbock—so they enlisted Doug Kirkham to play percussion. The Lubbock crew all had to join the musicians’ union, too; the folks at Decca were shocked that they hadn’t. Overseeing the sessions was the studio’s owner, Owen Bradley, whose converted Quonset hut had legendary sonic properties and was known all over Nashville as Bradley’s Barn. The session on January 26 resulted in four songs: “Blue Days, Black Nights,” “Don’t Come Back Knockin’,” “Love Me,” and the only non-original, “Midnight Shift.” (For those who think of Buddy as a kind of cute, innocent kid, the latter tune, a third cousin to the “Annie” songs that begins with the words “If you see ol’ Annie, better give her a lift/Cause Annie’s been working on the midnight shift,” will give some insight into his dangerous side.) Having done their duty to Decca, they got back in the car and drove back to Lubbock. In April, a single came out: “Blue Days, Black Nights” b/w (backed with) “Love Me.” Neither side was particularly representative of what Buddy wanted to do, and, as an extra problem, they’d misspelled his name as “Holly” on the label. And despite having Bill Haley on their label, Decca had no idea what to do with Buddy. (Haley had been signed through the New York office, which was more used to dealing with pop music than Nashville was.) In retrospect, Owen Bradley admitted to Holly biographer John Goldrosen that “it just wasn’t the right combination; the chemistry wasn’t right. It just wasn’t meant to be. We didn’t understand and he didn’t know how to tell us.” And the record’s sales and radio play reflected just that. It was okay; there was still a contract, and there would be more sessions in Nashville later in the year.
Back at Sun, Carl Perkins had been awaiting his chance. He hung around as much as he could and became good friends with Elvis. Sam would rehearse him and hear the ideas he was working with, intrigued by his obvious talent with country tunes, but also his ability to rock. After all, he’d been doing it as long as Elvis had, and he wanted to get some recorded. One day, Sam suggested that because his music was so different, his stage clothes should reflect that, and mentioned Lansky’s, where Elvis and a slew of Memphis R&B acts got their clothing. They did their shopping, and Elvis found a blue shirt for his friend and then said it’d look good with black slacks. Carl, who’d been intrigued by the silk stripe on tuxedo pants, took them home and had his wife sew a pink ribbon on the legs, which blew Elvis away the next time they met; Carl had just upstaged the Hillbilly Cat! Now he just had to get some music to match the clothes; Sam had a label called Flip that he used for non-union musicians, and Carl’s first record had appeared there in February 1955. He switched him to Sun for a country release, “Gone, Gone, Gone” b/w “Let the Jukebox Keep On Playing,” in September, but perhaps because of all the drama around Elvis at that point, nothing much came of it, although “Jukebox” was excellent for a Memphis country record, and “Gone” was inching toward rock & roll. The summer of 1955 saw Carl, Elvis, and Johnny Cash, Sam’s latest signing, who had taken an instant shine to Carl, doing some small shows around Memphis, and one day in Parkin, Arkansas, they were hanging around in the dressing room when Cash asked Carl if he’d been writing anything recently. “Ain’t nothin’ worth writing home about,” Carl told him.
“Tell you what,” Cash replied, “I had an idea you ought to write you a song about blue suede shoes.”
Carl shrugged. “I don’t know nothin’ about them shoes, John.”
He had, however, noticed them showing up in places like Lansky’s. But surely there were more important things to write about than footwear.
Then, in October, Union University in Jackson, Carl’s hometown, asked the Perkins Brothers Band to play a show at a nightclub they’d rented, and they showed up and started rocking out, which the crowd appreciated. As performers will do, Carl fixed his gaze on a young couple who were dancing particularly well and watched them respond to what he was playing. At some point, between songs, he’d lost visual contact with them when he heard a threatening male voice say, “Uh-uh. Don’t step on my suedes!” It was the boy he’d been watching, and the girl, sounding terrified, replied, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Carl looked down, and the boy was wearing blue suede shoes, one of which now had a scuff mark on it. Good gracious, Carl thought as he packed up at the end of the evening. A pretty little thing like that, and all he can think about is his blue suede shoes.The trouble was, the memory of Cash’s suggestion then entered his mind, and as he tried to get to sleep that evening, blue suede shoes was all he could think about. With his wife and kids sleeping peaceably, he went into the kitchen and grabbed his electric guitar, not plugging it in. A song was forming. There was a paper sack of potatoes on the counter, and he emptied it to give himself something to write on as the song came to him. Finally, the song completed, he went to bed. As soon as he woke up, though, he headed straight for his guitar to see if he still had it straight. He was playing through it and his wife, Valda, perked up. “Carl, I like that,” she said. “I really like that!” Carl, who’d already mapped out an arrangement for the band, said, “Well, if you like it now, wait’ll you hear it when Clayton, Jay, and W. S. join in.” After breakfast, he got Jay from across the street, and they ran through the number. That Saturday, two things happened: Carl called Sam and told him he wanted to record this new song right away and even sang it over the phone to him. Sam was encouraging, but in no rush. That night, though, the Perkins Brothers played it at a dance in a honky-tonk and wound up playing it eight times—even better than rehearsing! But Sam was taking his time. The shows with Elvis and Cash continued to happen, and Carl’s confidence was at an all-time high, so much so that he stole the show from Elvis twice in a row that fall, and mysteriously, Elvis never worked with him again. Then, on December 19, Sam called a session and said, “Do me that ‘Shoes’ song.” Carl didn’t have to be asked twice. They did three takes, and Carl was in orbit. He didn’t even realize what he’d done and wanted to keep going, but Sam had already decided the second take was the one, and after a while, Carl realized he was right.
Now they needed another song for the other side of the record, and Carl whipped one out that the band didn’t much like because it had an odd chord progression in its first few bars. Carl was feeling very certain of himself by now—“Blue Suede Shoes” had invigorated him, and after a bit of yelling at the band, they went through three takes of the song “Honey Don’t.” It, too, was a rocker, but not as crazed as “Blue Suede Shoes,” and after three takes Sam figured they’d gotten it. Just to have some more Carl Perkins in the can, though, he got the band to record two more songs since they were all feeling pretty good by now. “Sure to Fall” was a duet with Jay, and a country ballad, expertly rendered, and next up was a very odd song Carl had written in tribute to his home state; “Tennessee” celebrated a number of things, with the chorus asking us to “give old Tennessee credit for music,” but concluding with a verse celebrating the atomic bomb, of all things, the first of which, the song claimed, was made in Tennessee. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory had, indeed, refined the uranium used in the first couple of bombs.) Then the band piled into their car and went back to Jackson, arriving in the early hours of the morning. Sam, for his part, had already gone to work, calling up Dewey Phillips and telling him that he had another smash hit. He mastered the tapes and sent out orders for stampers to be delivered to the pressing plant on two records, “Blue Suede Shoes” b/w “Honey Don’t” and “Tennessee” b/w “Sure to Fall.” He released the first one on New Year’s Day 1956 and stuck two 78s in the mail to Carl. They arrived broken. Carl was so anxious to have a copy to play everyone that he went into town to the music store where he got strings and where the owner had sold him a Gibson Les Paul guitar on easy terms, and asked for a copy. He didn’t recognize what he saw. “No, sir,” he told the storekeeper, “that ain’t my record. See, my record’s a great big one with a little bitty hole in it.” He’d never seen a 45 before, and he was devastated; everyone knew what a record looked like, and it didn’t look like that. The man told him that that’s what all the new records looked like, that jukeboxes were now stocked with them, but it didn’t matter to Carl; he had nothing to play it on at home. After his wife calmed him down, he drove back to the music store and got a multispeed record player and a copy of the record to play.
He was lucky to get one; it had taken off beyond anyone’s expectations. Sam got a call from his distributor in Cleveland; Bill Randle, a veteran disc jockey who was one of the few who got rock & roll right from the start and judiciously added some to his programming, had jumped on the record, and the distributor wanted twenty-five thousand copies right away. Bob Neal was booking the Perkins Brothers, and sent them out on the road with Johnny Cash, and got Carl bookings on the Big D Jamboree, an Opry-like show in Dallas, where he went over just great, and soon the band was playing all over Texas and New Mexico. This was helped by Texas’s long history of loving innovative and unusual forms of country music—which is what rockabilly, the term Carl used for what he was doing, was thought of at that point—and everywhere they went, he and Cash used Sam’s advice and promoted their records by showing up at radio stations to thank them for playing them. Cash’s record, “So Doggone Lonesome” b/w “Folsom Prison Blues,” was also doing well, and Neal was able to ask more and more for gigs as January turned into February. And by the end of February, something major was happening: “Blue Suede Shoes” entered the pop charts—as did Elvis’s first RCA single, Mae Boren Axton’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” Elvis was in a recording frenzy in the New York RCA studios, and was preparing to release an album as soon as he could. One of the songs he had in the can was “Blue Suede Shoes.” Not that either he or RCA was going to release it as a single. It was just there. He played it on his second TV appearance, on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show, but then, he’d played “Tutti Frutti,” another song he had in the can, on his first appearance in February.
March was a blur of recording and performing for Carl, and in April he did the Ozark Jamboree television program, and Sam told him he’d gotten booked on a national show, Perry Como’s show out of New York. What Sam didn’t tell him was that he was going to surprise him by giving him the gold record for “Blue Suede Shoes” on the show: a million dollars’ worth of records sold and certified by the Recording Industry Association of America.
On March 21, the band, which was by now traveling in a Chrysler limousine that Sam had rented so that they’d hit New York in style, stopped in Norfolk, Virginia, to play the Norfolk Auditorium. The promoter wanted Carl’s opinion on a kid he’d just signed and was going to produce, Gene Craddock, who’d been mustered out of the Navy after a motorcycle accident had damaged his left leg. Carl watched the kid and his band and heard them do the song they were going to cut. Carl told the promoter that it was sort of like “Blue Suede Shoes,” in that “there ain’t a lot to it, but it’s an effective ol’ song.” Then, after they’d sown pandemonium in a sold-out house once again, the boys got back into the limo and headed to New York. As the sun rose the next day, the limo’s driver fell asleep at the wheel and rear-ended a truck. The limo then rolled four times, took out a guardrail, and went off the side of a bridge into a creek. Fluke Holland, the drummer, was the first to wake up and found Carl wedged under the backseat of the car, head in the stream. He grabbed him and pulled him to safety. Jay had a broken neck and internal injuries, and the rest of the band was battered but not gravely injured. The driver of the truck was dead. Carl had a broken collarbone and a concussion, among other injuries. Perry Como would have to wait. So would Carl Perkins.
Not Johnny Cash. In 1954, newly out of the Army, he’d been selling appliances in Memphis and relaxed by singing gospel tunes with two other guys in the shop, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins (no relation to Carl). They thought they sounded pretty good, and so they auditioned for Sun. Sam was impressed, but he knew how many records gospel shifted, so he asked Cash to write some straight country material; at long last, maybe Memphis would prove a threat to the monolith of Nashville. Cash had the background for it; growing up dirt poor like Carl Perkins, only in Arkansas, with a penchant for getting into trouble, a couple of years in the Army and a turbulent marriage gave him material. But he wasn’t exactly mainstream country, either; there were no fiddles, no steel guitar, no drums. Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two were Cash, Grant on bass, and Perkins on guitar, and that was it. Still, beefed up a little with the famous Sun slapback echo sound, they had hits from the beginning, with “Folsom Prison Blues,” in which Cash nonchalantly admits to killing a man in Reno just to watch him die, also not your standard country fare. It was a top-ten country record in 1955, anyway.
Television had been slow to warm to rock & roll, mostly because there was so little of it and most people felt it was just a fad; there were enough good musicians to have on your show without giving any more publicity to these animals. But as variety shows became more popular, more slots opened up for acts to play. A New York newspaper columnist, Ed Sullivan, had one of the most-watched variety shows, and he would seemingly book anything: acrobats, magicians, puppeteers, weird instrumentalists. In 1955, he’d asked Tommy “Dr. Jive” Smalls onto the show to give his audience a look at the R&B talent he played on his radio show, and Smalls delivered the goods: LaVern Baker, Bo Diddley, the Five Keys, and Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson’s band to back them all. Unfortunately, one of Sullivan’s producers decided to get creative; one of the big songs in the country that week was Merle Travis’s tale of life in an Appalachian coal-mining town, “Sixteen Tons,” and he decided that that guy with the guitar would play it on the show. No matter that Bo Diddley hadn’t cut the tune or, for that matter, didn’t know the words and the changes; they rehearsed him on it, wrote the lyrics on some cue cards, and he was going to do it. But, like most television in those days, Ed Sullivan went out live, and when Bo strolled onstage, he struck up his hit, ignoring the cue cards, and, when confronted by an irate production staff afterward, said, “Man, that might have been ‘Sixteen Tons’ on those cards, but all I saw was ‘Bo Diddley.’” Must’ve been those glasses of his.
We don’t hear as much about that show as we do about Elvis’s appearances on Sullivan, but they were preceded by the Dorsey Brothers’ shows, the first on January 28, 1956, where Elvis was introduced by Bill Randle and played a medley of Big Joe Turner songs and Ray Charles’s current hit, “I Got a Woman,” and then got off. The theater was only about half-full, and the audience reaction was confused, with laughter being heard during some of the performance and the engineer turning up the applause to make it sound like there were more people in the house than there were. There were two more to come, though, and on the second one there was a bigger audience, and Elvis did a couple of other people’s hits. The third and final show saw him introducing “Heartbreak Hotel” and his version of “Blue Suede Shoes,” and was pretty much of a flop, since the Dorsey Brothers’ orchestra just couldn’t figure out the “Heartbreak Hotel” arrangement, which screwed up Elvis’s ability to work the stage. It was, however, the first time that the girls in the audience started to go wild. The Dorseys’ producer sent the Colonel a contract for three more shows. After the last show, on March 28, the band drove back to Memphis, stopping off in Dover, Delaware, to see Carl Perkins in the hospital. Elvis stayed in New York to do press and to get ready to fly to Hollywood for a screen test and to do Milton Berle’s TV show.
The world of American popular music had clearly gone insane; both “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Heartbreak Hotel” were chasing each other around the top tens of the pop, R&B, and country charts, the first time that had ever happened. The term rock & roll was making its way into public recognition, as proven by Kay Starr’s hit record “Rock and Roll Waltz,” a record that, its title aside, had not the slightest thing to do with rock & roll—it was a waltz, for heaven’s sake! No, except for Bill Haley’s reworking of Bobby Charles’s hit, “See You Later, Alligator,” the only sign of rock & roll in the pop top ten besides those two records in early 1956 was a telling one: “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Its appearance was due to a kind of mistake. The Teenagers were from a nice neighborhood in Harlem known as Sugar Hill, home to such black celebrities as Duke Ellington. The Teenagers had something of a gimmick: they were integrated. Herman Santiago and Joe Negroni were Puerto Rican, and the rest—Sherman Gaines, Jimmy Merchant, and Frankie Lymon—were black. They actually weren’t even known as the Teenagers; they’d been calling themselves the Premieres, or the Ermines, or the Coupe deVilles. Santiago was the lead singer, and at some point Richard Barrett, who was scouting Latin bands for George Goldner, a guy downtown who owned a couple of labels recording New York’s salsa bands, Tico and Rama, heard them and thought that not only were they good, but a lead singer with a Spanish accent was a great gimmick. Barrett got the kids to come downtown to audition for Goldner, who was confused because they didn’t have any instruments like a real Latin band should, but Barrett convinced him to listen to a song called “Why Do Birds Sing So Gay,” which they’d gotten from some friend of theirs whose girlfriend had written the lyrics. (It was not, as a story current at the time had it, written by Frankie out of unrequited love for one of his schoolteachers.) There are a lot of unclear details about what exactly happened, because for good reason Goldner was a fairly secretive guy, but somehow Frankie wound up singing lead, even though he was still a kid at thirteen. He was an instantly charismatic figure, and his voice was perfect, unlike a lot of children whose voices need a lot of work to keep them on pitch. Goldner was wowed, and, after changing the title of the song, cut it. He kept on with the Latin music and made a lot of important records in that field, but when he formed Gee Records to put out the Teenagers’ stuff, he pioneered New York–based labels specializing in vocal groups.
Talent notwithstanding, it was smart of Goldner (or Barrett, it’s not certain) to rename the group the Teenagers. For one thing, they were teenagers, unlike a lot of the new performers. For another, that’s who was buying this music, so Frankie and his friends were just claiming the name. So were the Teen Queens, a one-hit group on RPM who scored early in the year with “Eddie My Love,” and, in New York, the Six Teens, whose “A Casual Look” made full use of their boy-girl harmonies.
The guys who had driven from Georgia to Cincinnati on February 4 to do a session were more typical; all in their early twenties, the Flames had their genesis in a juvenile detention camp in Toccoa, Georgia, where their lead singer was doing time for stealing cars and joyriding, and Bobby Byrd, a Toccoa kid whose mother had a religious turn of mind that she’d passed on to her son, a gospel singer and piano player, who played the detention camp as part of his church outreach. Bobby kept running into this kid, who was called Music Box by the other inmates, singing gospel at the camp, and finally Mrs. Byrd agreed to sponsor Music Box in her home, with the hope of turning him toward the light. It was a textbook case; all the kid needed was people who loved and paid attention to him, and soon Bobby Byrd and Music Box, whose name was James Brown, were assembling a group to play local gigs. They were completely unlike anything anyone had seen, with the showmanship of gospel and the energy of young men having the time of their lives, and after three years of paying dues all over the South, they came to the attention of King Records’ talent scout, Ralph Bass. Bass was particularly taken with a tape the group had cut at a local radio station, and was determined to make a professional dub of it. So when Bass showed up for work on February 4 and saw the car with Georgia plates, some guys asleep inside, and the bass tied to the top, he figured the Flames had made it. A few hours later, they went into the studio with musicians King often used on sessions and got to work. Syd Nathan walked into the control room and, after taking in what was happening, said, “What is this shit?” It wasn’t just Syd, who was notoriously abrasive; the musicians hated it, too. Eventually, though, they finished the session—four songs, including the one everyone hated—and Bass went back on the road in search of more talent. One day, a King salesman told him to call the office. “You’re fired,” were Syd’s first words to him. “He’s just singing one word! You’re fired.” Ah, Bass now knew what was happening; it was the Flames’ record of “Please, Please, Please,” a gospelly remake of Big Joe Williams’ classic “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Bass pleaded for Syd to test-market it in the South, at least, give the record a chance. “Fuck it,” said Syd. “I’m putting it out cross-country just to prove what a piece of shit it is.” And on March 3, he did. It took a while to catch on, with John R. and Hoss Allen down in Gallatin the first to get on it, but soon it was selling like mad, and by the end of April it was a certified R&B hit. The only downside to the whole thing was that when the Flames got a copy of the record, they noticed that it was credited to “James Brown and the Famous Flames.” How had that happened? What’s ironic is that King had another group drenched in gospel, one that would have passed inspection with the studio musicians, under contract at the same time; the “5” Royales had jumped from Apollo, where they’d had several hits, to King in late 1954, and although they were putting out plenty of great records, they weren’t selling. The Royales were touring and doing well—the Flames had seen them during this period and been wowed—but on the radio and on the charts, it was like they didn’t exist. And the most gospel-flavored vocalist out there, Ray Charles, was enjoying success, but not with teenagers; his #1 R&B smash “Drown in My Own Tears” was a dramatic performance, but way down-tempo, and (although nobody bothered to monitor this kind of thing in those days) probably selling mostly to adults.
The kids preferred zippier fare, apparently; Little Richard was riding a two-sided smash in April, “Long Tall Sally” b/w “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” which was not only frantic but weird. The lyrics to the A side could very well have come out of Richard’s gay-bar act, with Uncle John carrying on and hiding from Aunt Mary with a woman who was “built for speed.” He followed that with two more blazers, “Rip It Up” b/w “Ready Teddy” (on which he declares that he’s ready to rock and roll). Fats Domino had finally cracked the upper reaches of the top ten with “I’m in Love Again,” which was about as up-tempo as the Fat Man got, but it was the record’s other side that portended his future: the old standard “My Blue Heaven,” which was also a substantial hit. Fats rode a succession of standards to year’s end, first “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” and, in the fall, “Blueberry Hill,” which became so identified with him that few realize that the song dated to Glenn Miller’s 1940 record of it. The Platters were another act who fell back on standards for material; their early 1956 hit “Great Pretender” had been written by their Svengali, Buck Ram, but their next hit, “My Prayer,” was from decades earlier. But Chuck Berry knew what was really needed; at the beginning of the summer Chess released a record he’d recorded in April that was both sweet and defiant, and claimed a piece of turf for teenagers only. “Roll Over, Beethoven” described the rock & roller’s world of 1956 perfectly: impatient to hear a song you loved on the radio, very impatient with all that old-people’s crap that stood between you and it while wanting everyone to acknowledge your music. True, it was “rhythm and blues” he wanted everyone to dig, but kids knew what he meant. Although he wasn’t one of them, he had a way of tapping into their world; his next record, “Too Much Monkey Business,” expressed the frustrations of the kind of lowly jobs teenagers had. His next record, though, which had been recorded at the same session as it and “Roll Over, Beethoven,” was quite different. “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” idealized the man of the title, an irresistible type for whom Venus de Milo had lost her arms trying to win in a wrestling match, women crawled across deserts to reach, and the judge’s wife begs to be let off his vagrancy charge. It was lyrics as usual for Berry, comic, direct, and sharp: the man had been arrested “on charges of unemployment.” And, although nobody came right out and said it, was it the man’s brown eyes that made him irresistible?
More and more kids wanted to do this themselves, but some had advantages others didn’t have. If you wanted to be a vocal group, that was fairly easy, assuming you and your friends had talent and someone was listening. But for young white kids, the desire was to be Elvis. That was much harder. Out in west Texas, Roy Orbison, son of an oil well worker, had been in a band for several years, the Wink Westerners, named after his hometown. As soon as they saw Elvis, they became the Teen Kings. In 1955, Roy was attending North Texas State College in Denton, north of Fort Worth, and one of his classmates, Pat Boone, started making records, but he’d married into country music royalty; his wife was the daughter of Randy Woods of Dot Records, for whom Pat recorded. At a free concert at school, Roy heard two students, Wade Moore and Dick Penner, do a song, “The Ooby Dooby,” and taught it to the Teen Kings. In early March 1956, they went to the nearest recording studio, which was Norman Petty’s in Clovis, New Mexico, and cut it. The Teen Kings had a thirty-minute television show each week that was followed by a country show headed by Weldon Rogers, and one day someone suggested to Rogers that he should put out the tape the Teen Kings had made in Clovis. He formed a label, Je-Wel (for Jean Oliver and Weldon Rogers, Oliver being the daughter of the guy who cofinanced the record), and it became the rage of west Texas; one Lubbock store was selling 250 copies a week. The Teen Kings’ show also hosted visiting teen-appeal artists, and Johnny Cash had appeared on it. After hearing Orbison and his band, he suggested Roy get in touch with Sam Phillips, who, in true Sam style, said, “Johnny Cash doesn’t run my record company” and hung up. But when he heard the Je-Wel single, he recanted and invited Roy and his band to Memphis to record. He also got an injunction against Weldon Rogers to enforce Roy’s contract with Sun, but the judgment didn’t include not making more records, so Rogers had a chat with Norman Petty, and Petty financed a new pressing. Sam was re-cutting the record at his own studio, though, with something called “Go! Go! Go!” on the other side, and, in May, he released it. It took off immediately, and Sam, who had formed Stars Incorporated, a booking agency for his artists, with Bob Neal, told the Teen Kings to get ready to tour. Tour they did, with someone leading Roy up to the microphone (he was nearly blind, but wouldn’t wear his thick glasses onstage). They finished the tour in Memphis on June 1 at the Overton Park band shell, and Elvis made a surprise appearance. The package they toured with included Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins (out of the hospital at last, finally appearing on the Perry Como TV show and with a new single, “Boppin’ the Blues,” making noise), and Warren Smith, a promising newcomer whose Sun record “Rock and Roll Ruby” was enjoying some action at the time.
“Ooby Dooby” would be Orbison’s last hit for a while, and its lyrics were pretty silly, but silly lyrics have always been a part of American popular music. Take, for instance, that kid Carl Perkins had been introduced to in Virginia the night before his accident, he of the “effective ol’ song.” Eugene Vincent Craddock was almost as unlikely a teen idol as Roy Orbison, with his crippled leg and gaunt face, and his first record, inspired by his love of Little Lulu comic books, was entitled “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” which was right up there with “Tutti Frutti” for nonsense. But not quite nonsense: it was simultaneously rocking (although seriously down-tempo), and threatening (there was an ominous shudder in the vocal), and reeking of sexual longing (since Be-Bop-A-Lula was the girl who gave him “more, more, more”). Gene Vincent, as Craddock was re-christened for Capitol Records, was everything people thought Elvis was: a twenty-one-year-old hillbilly thug who was developing an alcohol and pill problem and whose escapades with women were both numerous and lurid. He was also the leader of a superb rock & roll band, the Blue Caps, guys like him who’d been working in the bars that catered to sailors in Norfolk, and featuring a truly great guitarist in Cliff Gallup. Between Vincent’s instability and Capitol’s getting caught flatfooted by his first record being a hit and then having absolutely no idea what to do with him, he gets overlooked a lot, and the Blue Caps even more.
It’s all very well and good for guys to want to be Elvis, but what about girls? Someone eventually came up with Alis Lesley, “the female Elvis,” who wore her hair in a kind of Elvis pompadour adapted for females, and more hair combed down to look like sideburns, but Capitol had nineteen-year-old Wanda Jackson, just the kind of double-barreled threat they had no idea what to do with. She’d been born in Oklahoma, and, guided by her very savvy father/manager, had been performing on the radio starting when she was thirteen. Her powerful, brassy voice could—and did—belt out country music, but she also could—and did—rock like crazy. She combined both in her stage act and in 1955–1956 she did a lot of shows with Elvis, with whom she shared Bob Neal’s booking agency. But her forwardness and her good looks worked against her; her first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry in 1955 was marred by Ernest Tubb refusing to let her onstage wearing the sleeveless dress she’d bought for the occasion, sending her back to the dressing room for a jacket to cover her shoulders. That was also her last Opry appearance. Her first sides for Capitol were rockers—Elvis had given her a crash course by playing her his record collection—but songs like “Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad” and “I Gotta Know” got very little action. Later records like 1957’s “Fujiyama Mama” (inexplicably a huge hit in Japan, but nowhere else) and “Let’s Have a Party” (recorded by both Elvis and the Collins Kids in 1957, and an album track on her first album in 1958, which became a mild hit in 1960) had to wait until later to be discovered by rockabilly revivalists, who caught Wanda at the end of her successful country career and gave her a new audience.
The thing is, although it was where the money was, not all popular music was aimed at teenagers, and nowhere was this more evident than the black community. B. B. King was doing fine without a teenage audience; his big hit of 1956 was the lovely “Sweet Little Angel,” a double entendre based around the angel spreading her wings. And the Chess brothers were making records teenagers wouldn’t discover for nearly a decade. Howlin’ Wolf had settled on a recording band that included Hubert Sumlin, a delicate-looking young man Wolf had hooked up with while still in Arkansas, and he proved to be the missing ingredient in Wolf’s band—Wolf would never admit it, but he himself wasn’t such a hot guitarist and didn’t handle lead guitar at all well. Sumlin did, and he also could play rhythm alongside Wolf to make an almost orchestral sound. Wolf’s big hit for 1956 was “Smokestack Lightnin’,” as overwhelming yet enigmatic a record as anyone had ever made. What is it about? Hard to say, but in its odd phrasing and off-kilter meter, it lurches through its three minutes with Wolf bellowing its lyrics and howling when there were no words, and finally finishing off with some harmonica playing that sounds like the old Memphis instrumental favorite “Cats Squirrel.” And just in case anyone thought you could mess with Wolf, his next hit of the year was “I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline),” which was every bit as evil as the title would suggest. Muddy Waters, too, continued his domination of Chicago’s South Side, with three hits in 1956, and his former harmonica player, Little Walter, was still doing well not only with instrumentals, but also singing such classics as “Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights).” Sonny Boy Williamson, although he was close to sixty, was killing them in the clubs and making the occasional hit record for Chess, and Bo Diddley was playing both the teenage and the adult markets, with “You Pretty Thing” having teenage appeal and the dark, threatening “Who Do You Love” being something else entirely. Nor did Chess have a monopoly on hard-edged blues; Vee-Jay had found Jimmy Reed, a guitarist who played harmonica in a rack and had minimal backing, but who was incredibly popular in Chicago and, soon, elsewhere: his hits in 1956 included “Ain’t That Lovin’ You, Baby” and “Can’t Stand to See You Go.” The label also had a visit from Detroit bluesman John Lee Hooker, who signed no contracts, but laid down one of his classic tunes, “Dimples.” And—not that anyone was—if anybody was worried that the blues would pass with this generation of South Side Chicago bluesmen, a rival scene of younger guys was rising on the West Side, and the biggest star there, the twenty-two-year-old lefty guitarist Otis Rush, chimed in with “I Can’t Quit You Baby” on Cobra, a brand-new label (Rush’s was its first single) run by a jukebox operator, Eli Toscano.
All of these artists were also of the age where they appealed to audiences in nightclubs serving hard liquor, where teenagers couldn’t go. That audience had more disposable income, and was more likely to buy records, which meant that there was a generational spread in the R&B market. Performers like Ruth Brown were discovering that they could extend their careers by recording more sophisticated or adult material, while some newcomers started there and figured if they could pick up teens along the way, so much the better. Probably the most powerful example of this was Little Willie John, who had been performing since childhood and who once, as a young teenager visiting New York with a couple of guys who’d released a Christmas single of his, had escaped their clutches while they were watching television together and Count Basie came on. Willie vanished, ran to the TV studio, and talked his way into a guest appearance in front of the Basie band on live television as his handlers watched in utter disbelief. His first record was a rhythm-and-bluesy one, “All Around the World” (better known in a later version by Little Milton as “Grits Ain’t Groceries”), but he settled into supper-club territory beautifully with his two 1956 hits, “I Need Your Love So Bad” and especially “Fever,” which would reignite Peggy Lee’s career two years later. He recorded for King, and it’s a safe bet that Syd Nathan liked his music better than James Brown’s, although the two performers later became fast friends.
Earlier that spring, the Colonel had gotten an offer from the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas for Elvis to play their Venus Room, and it turned out to be the first stumble of his career. The few people who came to see him couldn’t make sense out of what they saw, and Elvis was as nervous as he’d ever been. By the end of the engagement two weeks later, Elvis had learned to relax, although his core audience of teenagers—and there were teenagers in Las Vegas—couldn’t get in to see him. Probably the biggest thing that happened to Elvis was his opening act, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a hyperactive bunch who show up in some early rock & roll films. One of the songs they did was an arrangement of Willie Mae Thornton’s “Hound Dog” that was pretty much unlike the original. Elvis knew the song, but this new approach was right up his alley. “We stole it straight from them,” Scotty Moore admitted. Newsweek compared Elvis’s appearance to “a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party,” and Variety panned him. He’d be back.
Rock & roll, though, was definitely the flavor of the year, spearheaded by Elvis. His appearances on Milton Berle’s show seemed to trigger something. The first, on April 3, went off just fine, but in June, the critics, who’d ignored him till then, went after him, with the New York Journal-American’s critic, Jack O’Brien, saying that “he can’t sing a lick, makes up for vocal shortcomings with the weirdest and plainly planned suggestive animation short of an aborigine’s mating dance.” Ed Sullivan, reading the bad press, said that Elvis was too suggestive to appear on his show, which prompted his archrival, Steve Allen, to book him on his show, which aired at the same time on Sunday nights, for July 1. Allen didn’t even like rock & roll: one of his routines was reading—declaiming, really—lyrics like “Tutti Frutti” and “Be-Bop-A-Lula” as poetry for the gag effect. And he didn’t seem to much like Elvis, having him dress in a tuxedo and top hat and sing “Hound Dog” to a … hound dog. But for the first time in the two men’s rivalry, Allen wiped Sullivan out in the ratings. Sullivan swallowed his pride and offered the Colonel $50,000 for three appearances, starting in September. If you can’t beat ’em …
Meanwhile, though, it was off to Hollywood to start filming on Elvis’s first movie, Love Me Tender, and to record the soundtrack album. The Hollywood folks working on the film were impressed by his dedication to the work he had to do, although he did complain about having to spend all day one day on a scene that had him plowing behind a couple of mules. In the evenings, he hung with Nick Adams, a young actor who’d had a bit part in Rebel Without a Cause and was busy talking his way into Elvis’s film, Nick’s roommate, Dennis Hopper, and their friend, also a Rebelveteran, Natalie Wood. His cousin Gene was also around, and at one point Scotty and the band came out to audition for the soundtrack album. Meanwhile, there was the Sullivan show to get ready for. Unfortunately, Ed Sullivan himself couldn’t prepare for it because he was laid up in the aftermath of an automobile accident a few weeks earlier, so actor Charles Laughton handled the hosting. It was on this show, on September 9, that he introduced the theme of his forthcoming movie, Love Me Tender, and RCA, shortly thereafter, had orders for over a million copies. He then flew to Memphis to play a predictably wild homecoming show in the city of his birth, Tupelo, Mississippi.
By the time Elvis got back on the road—the film was now in post-production, scheduled to open over the Thanksgiving weekend—there was another film starting production that would put Love Me Tender in the shadows. Elvis’s movie was primarily a drama, without a lot of music, and it was shot in black-and-white. Frank Tashlin, an animator turned director, had taken on a quickie production for 20th Century-Fox based on Garson Kanin’s novel Do Re Mi. It was the story of an alcoholic press agent hired by a gangster to turn his girlfriend into a top singing sensation in six weeks—or else. This, of course, means that he has to immerse himself in the current world of pop music, with lots of opportunities for various currently popular artists to appear. Tom Ewell played the press agent, Jayne Mansfield the girlfriend, and Fats Domino, the Platters, Little Richard, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, and a few others, now largely forgotten (the Treniers, the Chuckles, Johnny Olenn), appeared as themselves, playing their latest records. One of Richard’s songs gave the film its title, The Girl Can’t Help It, and although on one level it’s a disposable screwball comedy, on another it’s a brilliant time capsule of rock & roll coming into its own. All the musical sequences are brilliantly shot (it also helps that the film’s in color), with Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps and Little Richard in particular turning in sizzling performances. There’s also a scene that shows the frenzy of the times in a particularly memorable way: Ewell’s housekeeper is working in a room with the television on when Eddie Cochran comes on, doing “Twenty Flight Rock.” This middle-aged black woman totally loses it, so excited by the music that she grabs Ewell to come look at the TV. There were no conventions, no market research, as to what rock & roll was or who its audience was. All anyone knew was that it was a fad, and they had to get this movie out before it peaked. Eddie Cochran hadn’t even released “Twenty Flight Rock” then, but it hardly mattered. He’d been hanging around Hollywood since he was in his teens, and he’d been recording since he was fifteen, initially as the Cochran Brothers with Hank Cochran, no relation, who later became a very successful country songwriter. Besides being a charismatic performer, Cochran was a studio whiz, often recording and overdubbing to make a whole band out of himself. Like Nick Adams, who was now on tour with Elvis and opening his shows with impressions and comedy, he was a young man using rock & roll to stand out from the Hollywood crowd.
Rock & roll may have been a fad, but it was definitely taking over at the moment. One sign of this was the release, that summer, of “The Flying Saucer, Parts 1 and 2,” by Buchanan and Goodman, a couple of colorful well-known New York music-biz guys. While waiting for work one day, they came upon the idea of putting out a record where snippets of other records were used in a pretend newscast, in this case about the landing of a flying saucer. Dickie Goodman played the role of John Cameron-Cameron (a reference to star newscaster John Cameron Swayze), reporting the alien craft’s visit to Earth. Naturally, the space visitors’ first words to Earth were “A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom,” and naturally, Buchanan and Goodman hadn’t applied for the rights to use anything on the record. It was probably done as a gag for disc jockeys initially, but teenagers immediately wanted copies for themselves, and so the two men had set up a label, Luniverse, and pressed some up. With some of the most feared copyright lawyers in the business looking for them, they weren’t making public appearances, but suddenly some odd things started happening. Dootsie Williams, for instance, noted that sales of “Earth Angel” by the Penguins, which had been cold for months, started picking up after it was quoted in the song. So did other not-current hits. Eventually, a judge ruled that the use was fair play under parody laws, and Buchanan and Goodman went on to make lots of other so-called break-in records, but for all its silliness (and it was 100 percent pure silliness), “Flying Saucer” proved an important point: nobody would have reacted to it if they hadn’t been familiar with the records being used, and familiar enough that they thought that the juxtaposition was funny. It spoke directly to, and only to, the rock & roll crowd.
Of course, novelty records had always been around, and rock & roll was spawning them aplenty in 1956. Nervous Norvus was James Drake, a forty-two-year-old truck driver who, as a member of the Four Jokers, released a fairly dumb song called “Transfusion,” which was picked up by Dot, home of Pat Boone, that summer and re-cut. The whole joke was that the guy was driving along and crashed his car, verse after verse, and ended up needing a blood transfusion, which he’d order with a quip like “Shoot some claret to me, Barrett.” The production sounded like it had been recorded in a closet, the sound effects were crudely inserted, and it was banned on lots of radio stations, which didn’t stop the record from reaching the top ten (or Norvus from following it up with “Ape Call,” which stiffed). Then there was Jay Hawkins, a mediocre blues singer who’d been recording for Okeh to no great success. He was given a song, “I Put a Spell On You,” to record, and, having troubles with the vocal, commenced drinking. Smashed out of his gourd, he managed to make his way through it, but interspersed the lyrics with weird whooping and gargling sounds. The label thought the rock & roll kids would like it, so they renamed him Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and sat back as it became one of those under-the-counter hits. Hawkins, whose career started at this point and continued to his death in 2007, claimed he didn’t even remember recording it. More professional (but not much more), and totally enigmatic, was “Rubber Biscuit,” by the Chips, which was written when one of the Brooklyn group’s members, Charles “Kenrod” Jackson, was in something called the Warwick School for Delinquent Teenagers—and sounds like it. Basically a polysyllabic one-chord chant from which English-sounding words occasionally emerge, it’s interrupted at times by the bass singer, talking of biscuits, buns, and sandwiches, and the record concludes with him saying, “What do you want for nothing: a rrrrrrubber biscuit?” Neither the pop charts nor the R&B charts would pay host to this confusing slab of wax, but it endured in the hearts of record collectors. (One member of the Chips, Sammy Strain, would go on to become a member of Little Anthony and the Imperials, and, even later, the O’Jays.)
The Chips were, putting it mildly, an outlier in the rush of vocal groups entering the market in the second half of 1956. Chicago in particular was hot, probably because both Chess and Vee-Jay were aware of how cheaply you could record this stuff. The Flamingos had their first two hits (for Chess) this year, the Moonglows also kept up their winning streak, and Vee-Jay introduced the Dells, who’d been recording for small labels unsuccessfully since 1953, with “Oh What a Nite,” starting a career that was to last until the ’90s. Modern was doing vocal groups now, too, with the Cliques (Jesse Belvin multitracking his voice, actually) and the Cadets had a summerlong hit with the novelty “Stranded in the Jungle.” Atlantic in New York, although its owners (particularly Jerry Wexler) didn’t like vocal group music at all, managed to score some great landmarks in the style. They’d been enjoying hits for some time by the Clovers, who released one of the classics of the genre with “Devil or Angel,” and the Drifters, who never seemed to be the same guys twice, were doing well, but the real kick for Atlantic came from Los Angeles, where Leiber and Stoller, looking for a group they could use for their most teenage material, took members of the Robins and the Cadets, moved them to New York, and invented the Coasters. Their first hit, “Down in Mexico,” set the template for the comic songs with which they’d make their name. Elsewhere in New York, small labels issued records by hopefuls, including the Cadillacs, led by Earl “Speedy” Carroll, who was so nervous making this record that he mis-sung his own nickname, and became known thereafter as “Speedo,” which was fine with him after the record spent fifteen weeks on the charts. The Heartbeats, whose “A Thousand Miles Away” was another classic, were led by James “Shep” Shepherd, who had the unique experience of having another hit four years later as leader of Shep and the Limelites, which was an answer record: “Daddy’s Home.” This was also the year the first integrated vocal groups appeared, most notably the Dell Vikings, who met on an Air Force base in Pittsburgh and had a big hit with “Come Go with Me.” And the Cleftones joined Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers on George Goldner’s Gee label with “Little Girl of Mine.” But vocal groups were just getting started.
Elvis owned the radio for most of the second half of the year, with the first two-sided #1 smash, “Don’t Be Cruel” b/w “Hound Dog” in August, which topped the charts until “Love Me Tender” came along in November to displace it. Two things are worth noting, especially in light of all the ridiculous charges aimed at Elvis over the years. First, his recording of “Hound Dog” sounds nothing at all like Willie Mae Thornton’s; the melody and tempo are wildly different. Second, “Don’t Be Cruel” features the vocal interjections and backup vocals of the Jordanaires, a white gospel quartet like the ones Elvis had admired in Memphis who would be featured on his records for some time.
Sam Phillips, flush with money from Elvis’s contract sale, was putting out some classic stuff, too; Carl Perkins had “Boppin’ the Blues” and “Dixie Fried,” two classic slabs of rockabilly, Sonny Burgess gave us “We Wanna Boogie,” and Warren Smith the borderline-racist “Ubangi Stomp,” which at least gave credit to Africans for rock & roll. A young man from Louisiana, fresh from a Texas Bible college, had been hanging around Sun wanting to make records, and he was a good enough piano player that Sam used him on a few country sessions, finally giving in and letting Jerry Lee Lewis make his first record, “Crazy Arms” (an old Texas shuffle by Ray Price) b/w “End of the World” and releasing it to total indifference in December. On December 4, Elvis, on a much-needed break from filming, recording, and touring, was back in Memphis for the whole month, buying his parents a pair of Cadillacs and stopping by Sun to see what was shaking. He walked in on Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis singing hymns and joined right in; they weren’t the Jordanaires, but they weren’t bad! Sam saw what was happening, got on the phone, and called a photographer and Johnny Cash, and soon the Million Dollar Quartet, as they were dubbed years later, were singing, catching up with each other, and generally having a great old time, and most of it was captured on tape by Sam’s new studio manager, Jack Clement. It was a fitting close to a great year for all concerned.