How The King Got His Start

By Tom Poland    
August 23, 2013

Part One: Remembering Elvis

Author’s Note: Last week marked 36 years since Elvis died. This excerpt from Save The Last Dance for Me, University of South Carolina Press, 2012, (Tom Poland & Phil Sawyer) recalls how Elvis got his start.

A shy, young truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, walked into Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in Memphis to record a song for his mom though some speculate he walked into Sun hoping to be discovered. It’s easy to see why he chose Sun Recording Studio. Its slogan helped dispel any nerves … We Record Anything, Anywhere – Anytime.

What kind of singer are you, asked Marion Keisker, the receptionist.

I sing all kinds, said the truck driver.

Who do you sound like, asked the receptionist.

Uh, I don’t sound like nobody.

This modest-but-prophetic reply lingered in the receptionist’s mind. In the summer of 1954 Sam Phillips, Sun’s legendary owner, needed a new kind of singer. The receptionist struck perhaps by the truck driver’s unusual looks, said, Why don’t you try that young truck driver.

The timing was good. Phillips was primed to move into new music territory. Said Phillips, Everyone knew that I was just a struggling cat down here trying to develop new and different artists, and get some freedom in music, and tap some resources and people that weren’t being tapped.

Phillips recognized the power of the blues and signed a lot of black musicians. They were great untried, unproven people with talent, said Phillips. It dawned on him that they had great talent and great potential but too few recording opportunities.

I knew of their poverty and background because I had lived it. The only difference between me and many of them was my white skin … It was up to me, he said, to listen to them.

Black Blues & A White Singer

Many years after his days at Sun, Phillips served up a telling perspective. There is nothing greater to do than the blues if you would be a musician. Whether vocally, instrumentally, there is nothing easier yet more difficult; there is no way for anybody to write the essence of the blues as a score. That has to come instantaneously. So much of what is here now is owed to the blues, both black and white. And if you listen to the blackest black cat or the whitest white hillbilly, you’re gonna hear something worthwhile. It’s a symphony of the soul. There is no question about it.

By the spring of 1954, Phillips had lost his symphony. With the old hard race lines softening, many of his successful black artists had jumped to larger labels. Undeterred, Phillips sought new ways to establish the Sun Records’ sound. Phillips talked about this musical fork in the road.

I’d been looking for a person, a white-skinned person that could put the feel of a black person into a phonograph record, knowing we grew up in the same fields, so to speak—cotton fields, corn fields, even before we grew soybeans, watermelon patches, whatever—blacks and white. I knew the power of the feel between the races, and I was not interested in forming another record company and trying to compete even with the bigger independents at that time—I had no interest in that if I couldn’t broaden the base of music and let white kids enjoy black music and black kids enjoy white music.

The late Sam Phillips’ words should resonate with shaggers. Men like him wanted to open the door to race music. In one of music’s great ironies, Phillips would be among the factors that led to the shag’s Dark Ages.

It started with Marion Keisker’s suggestion.

Why don’t you try that young truck driver? Suppose she had said, Well, damn Sam. What are you going to do? But she didn’t. And so in the summer of 1954, Elvis Presley, that truck driver for the Crown Electric Company walked into Sun Records yet again, this time to record Without Love. The reticent truck driver, however, couldn’t do Without Love justice, disappointing Phillips.

Phillips nonetheless asked the young singer to audition another time with Winfield Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. Again the audition wasn’t working out. Then one of recording’s seminal moments arrived on July 5, 1954. The musicians took a break and the duck-tailed singer loosened up while singing That’s All Right Mama, a song written by Arthur Pop Crudup, a delta blues singer and guitarist. Like fog off the Mississippi, the elusive sound Phillips sought materialized right in front of him.

Said Phillips, I heard this rhythm, just by himself and I said, ‘Jesus! Elvis have you been holding out on me all this time and have cost me this much time?’

Elvis, seeing Phillips’ reaction, said, You like that Mr. Phillips?

Man, that thing is a hit, said Phillips, that thing is a hit, and he hustled the musicians into the studio. By the second cut, Phillips knew what he had. Sun released That’s All Right Mama as a 78 RPM. Soon it was charting across the South, and the name Elvis Presley began to burn itself into the annals of history.

Elvis’s first number one pop record seared his name into the American consciousness. Heartbreak Hotel reigned as the number one tune on the Billboard Pop Singles Chart for eight weeks in 1956. Elvis was bringing a second dagger to shag’s heart.

By 1957, Elvis Presley was the world’s most famous entertainer. A PBS documentary described Presley as an American music giant of the 20th century who single handedly changed the course of music and culture in the mid 1950s.

How big was Elvis? Big enough to set events into motion that would derail the shag, and his influence would cast a long, long shadow, across the Atlantic.

And technology was an influence too. It gave a growing teen populace a way to hear the King. Throngs of American teenagers were scooping up transistor radios and listening to rock ‘n’ roll. In 1955, 100,000 units were sold. By the end of 1958 5,000,000 units had sold, but American teens weren’t the only ones listening to Elvis’s new brand of rock.

In Part Two of Remembering The King the British discover Elvis.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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