Library of Congress

Elvis: The First Sun Sessions

By Phil Sutcliffe

(Originally Published: 01/01/2004, Q)

It was a quiet week in Memphis. Monday, January 4, 1954. Everyone easing into the new year. Nobody paid any attention when, around lunchtime, a truck from Crown Electric appliances pulled up outside the Memphis Recording Service shop front at 706 Union Avenue and a teenager with greasy blond hair climbed out, carrying a battered acoustic guitar.

He went inside and told the man behind the desk -- the owner, Sam Phillips -- that he wanted to record one of those double-sided acetates they did for $3.98. Phillips said sure, waved him through to the tiny studio and set the machine running. The kid skittered through a couple of country-pop love songs "I'll Never Stand In Your Way" (a hit that winter from Joni Jones) and "It Wouldn't Be The Same Without You" (a late '40s success for Hollywood cowboy Jimmy Wakely).

Phillips said the kid's voice wasn't bad and asked for his name and phone number, just in case.

"Elvis Presley." He had to spell it. Phillips wrote it down and threw it in a drawer.

The start of rock'n'roll was still six months away. But the stage was set.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's post-War America looked busy, booming, bland, but under the surface it itched. Poverty beneath prosperity. Racial division beneath national unity. Youthful discontent beneath middle-aged complacency. And, inadvertently, music was preparing to become the voice of all that cloudy resentment.

On March 5, 1951, at Sam Phillips's studio, Ike Turner, a DJ from Clarksdale, Missouri, the heartland of the blues, produced ‘Rocket 88', sung by Jackie Brenston. Conventionally, it's regarded as the first rock'n'roll record, but it was heard only by R&B fans, a minority in every sense. It marked a change, though. During the next 12 months Ray Charles, Little Richard and Chuck Berry all signed their first record deals.

Then in March, 1952, Johnnie Ray, from Detroit, became the first white man to score an R&B Number 1 with ‘Cry'. Teenaged girls screamed for him. He was the Prince Of Wails and, come 1954, the great star of the pre-rock'n'roll era.

Meanwhile, Elvis Presley, in his own peculiar way, was getting ready. He loved music like a tuning fork. On the radio, he listened to R&B on both black-owned WDIA (top DJ Rufus Thomas) and white-owned WHBQ. He listened to country on WMPS. He'd spin the dial to find pop stations and Metropolitan Opera concerts. Unfathomably, this was a teenager who reckoned Big Bill Broonzy and Dean Martin, Hank Williams and Mario Lanza, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Kay Starr were all just great.

But in the Deep South of the '50s, Elvis's ultimate magic weirdness flowed from his ever-deepening immersion in black music. For which no pat nature/nurture explanations apply.

He was born into dirt poverty on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo. His father, Vernon, often unemployed, sometimes a milkman, sharecropper, carpenter and, for eight months when Elvis was three, a jailbird at Parchman Farm (for the pauper's crime of altering a $4 cheque to $14).

Elvis grew up as the only kid at his school who came barefoot and wore overalls like a field hand. At their lowest ebb, the family rented a shack on the edge of Shakerag, Tupelo's black slum, Elvis mingling freely although, by all accounts, he was a shy boy.

Yet with music he could always step out in front of a crowd. He'd sing at his Uncle Gains Presley's Assembly Of God church. At 10, he entered the Mississippi-Alabama Fair talent contest and won the $5 second prize with his rendering of sentimental favourite ‘Old Shep'. His mother, Gladys, bought a cheap acoustic guitar for his next birthday and he started singing during lunch breaks at school and haunting Tupelo radio WELO's weekly talent spots.

The Presleys' 1948 move to Memphis did produce a gradual rise in their standard of living. But, by then, material improvements could not shift Elvis's nature. He had become a quietly indefatigable outsider.

Through working after school as an usher at Loew's cinema, he could go down to Lasky's clothes store on 2nd and Beale and start to create his "Memphis flash" look with black dress trousers (a shiny stripe down the side), bolero jacket and pink shirt. He could grow sideburns and slick and darken his hair with rose oil and Vaseline. He could look 95 per cent of the boy the girls of the world were about to fall in love with. But he was still tongue-tied, he sometimes wore eye shadow, and his peers felt uneasy.

Where Tupelo tots used to mock him because he couldn't afford shoes, now Memphis rednecks ambushed him with barrages of rotten fruit because he chose to look different.

He sought consolation as he always had. He sang at school shows and parties (although he wouldn't dance) and in church. But the Pentecostals and their brilliant gospel harmony groups, the Blackwood Brothers and The Statesmen, no longer completely filled the bill for him. With his long-time girlfriend, Dixie Locke, Elvis would duck away to East Trigg Baptist Church to catch the town's leading black preacher, Rev. Herbert Brewster, and spirituals from Queen C. Anderson and The Brewsteraires. He always remembered how they "cut up all over the place, jumpin' on the piano, movin' every which way".

Then, equally curious about sacred and profane, he would wander down beyond Beale to a black club called The Flamingo. There he befriended Calvin Newborn, teenaged guitarist son of Finas who ran the resident band. "Daddy told me to let Elvis play my guitar," Calvin recalls in Andria Lisle and Mike Evans's Waking Up In Memphis. "He wrecked the house, tearing off strings and doing my moves. Elvis was the first colour-blind person I knew."

Evidently, Elvis really didn't think twice about it. He just enjoyed it. Like another white denizen of Beale, the more intellectual soulmate he still hardly knew. Sam Phillips, 41 in 1954, seemed to have been born to love black music. He started Sun, he reckoned, for "Negro artists in the South who wanted to make a record and just had no place to go". Though maybe also to find that "white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel" who might make him "a billion dollars".

It began on Saturday, July 3. As usual, Phillips, his right-hand-woman Marion Keisker and Scotty Moore were drinking coffee at Miss Taylor's café, next door to Sun.

Moore, now 71, the only survivor among this story's leading actors, agreed to guide Q through these sea-change events. At the time, he was the rather disenchanted leader of "honkytonk" band the Starlite Wranglers. A few weeks earlier, Phillips had recorded their debut single, "My Kind Of Carryin' On." It "sold 12" and Moore, who worked as a hatmaker in a factory, was looking for an escape.

So Keisker tickled his curiosity when she talked about a nameless young guy who, in summer 1953, had recorded a $3.98 acetate -- cheery standard "My Happiness" and black harmony quartet The Ink Spots' '40s hit "That's When Your Heartaches Begin." Moore, who, oddly, never heard mention of Elvis's January acetate, nagged her for a contact. Finally, Phillips told her to go and get it from his office. He asked the guitarist to give the boy a "pre-audition" -- "I think he wanted me to take the punishment," Moore chuckles.

He called and Gladys Presley took a message. Elvis rang back later that evening and Moore invited him round to his home the next day.

Alarmingly, Elvis walked in wearing "a pink suit, white shoes and a ducktail". But he sat down in the living-room, polite as could be. Ignoring the allure of the July 4 picnics down by the river, they started to play. Soon they were joined by Moore's close friend and Belz Street neighbour, Starlite Wranglers double bass player Bill Black.

"He knew at least part of every song I could think of -- Marty Robbins to Billy Eckstine, you name it -- and several I didn't know at all," says Moore. "Elvis impressed me because, with a few basic chords, he could play rhythm guitar with anybody -- and he had that same kind of rhythm in his voice."

In some ways it was a strange encounter for Moore and Black. Elvis, 19, a year out of high school, had hardly travelled beyond the city limits since moving to Memphis. Black, who worked at the Firestone tyre factory, was 27, a World War II army veteran, married with two children, while Moore, 22, also married, had joined the navy in 1948, sailed all over the Pacific and been shot at quite a lot. Still, despite the disparity in experience, they hit it off at once, with Moore developing "older brotherly" feelings for a man who, he believes, "died a teenager."

When Elvis left after a couple of hours, Moore rang Phillips: "I told him Elvis could keep time, stay on key and meter. Sam said, 'Why don't you and Bill come in with him tomorrow night?'"

The three showed up on the Monday evening after work -- no drummer, as per bluegrass tradition -- and started jamming, Elvis beating on the "bucket-lid" acoustic his mother gave him in 1946. The attitude was "audition" rather than "making a record", says Moore. Phillips suggested a couple of ballads. They tried ‘Harbour Lights' (a 1950 Bing Crosby hit) and ‘I Love You Because' (previously recorded by Gene Autry and Patti Page). Elvis was very keen on them but, come midnight, nothing had happened.

They took a break. Elvis was jumpy, fingers drumming. Then he remembered something he used to play at basement parties in Lauderdale Courts, the Memphis public housing project where the Presleys lived for years. A song by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.

"Elvis started into ‘That's All Right'," says Moore. "Bill and I had never heard it before, but we joined in, jamming. Sam stopped us and said, 'What are you doing?' We said, 'We don't know'. He said, 'Run through it again and find out'."

They climbed all over the old R&B warhorse. Phillips ran the tape. "We only did three or four takes and Sam didn't do anything to produce it except once in a while say, 'Elvis, move in a little closer to the mike' or 'Back up a bit'," says Moore. "After all, there were only three mikes in the room -- just one for Elvis's vocal and guitar. In those old studios, the sound was always changing because the air conditioning wasn't working and the temperature rose or you're in a different part of the room. But thank God when Elvis started to play, Sam's ear got it. Even though he didn't know what he was looking for. None of us did. But I realised it had to be natural, not contrived -- that was the brass ring with Elvis."

The outcome was described vividly, 40 years on, by Edwin Howard, of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, who in 1954 had been the first journalist to interview Elvis. He wrote that the wonder of "That's All Right, Mama" lay "in Scotty Moore's tight, precise but driving guitar lines; in Bill Black's galloping but perfectly timed bass; and, most of all, in Elvis's vocals, a witches' brew of gospel swoops, falsetto shrieks, growls, howls, and scat ... in Crudup's original, the predominant feeling is maudlin and dejected. Elvis's up-tempo version is instead an anthem to human cockiness, to the healing, transcendent powers of the life-force."

In the studio, spending some hours with Elvis for the first time, Phillips's view of the singer, rather than the record, was quite different: "He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior. He reminded me of a black man in that way."

After that, the rest of July blurred. Phillips pressed an acetate and invited his unrelated pal Dewey Phillips, WHBQ radio's star DJ, over to listen. Moore reckons they "got polluted" together and around 9.30pm on the Wednesday (probably) there was Dewey on his Red Hot And Blue show hollering, "And now we got somethin' new gonna cut loose! Good people, this is Elvis Presley!"

Moore and Black tuned in. They realised they'd done something "different from the norm". Specifically, something racially confusing. Black grinned and muttered, "I dunno, they might run us out of town."

But Dewey was inundated with enthusiastic phone calls. Supplying demand, he played the record another seven -- some say 14 -- times and rang Elvis's home to invite him to the radio station. As usual, his parents found him at the Suzore cinema. While they chatted, Dewey craftily let listeners know this was a white boy by mentioning his high school, LC Humes (education being segregated in the South).

The next day, probably, the threesome were back at Sun to record another side, again relying on spontaneous combustion. "It happened in identically the same way, only this time it was Bill started it," says Moore. "I was having a Coke. He was in the studio leaning on his bass and for no reason at all he started slapping on it and singing ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky', only uptempo, not the very reverent waltz-time that Bill Monroe wrote it in. Elvis sang it with him. We all looked at each other again ..."

Phillips added his patent "slapback echo", created via phasing between two reel-to-reel recorders. They had a single. At which they tumbled into getting their business affairs organised.

"All hell was breaking loose because of Dewey's show," says Moore. "Two or three people called Elvis right away wanting to be his booking agent or his manager. He told us, 'I don't know what to say'. So Sam suggested, 'Do a year's contract with Scotty, that will give us time we can all work with'."

On July 12 Gladys and Vernon signed their son to Moore's management. The contract gave him a then-standard 10 per cent commission on gross income, and quaintly stated that Elvis was "a singer of reputation and renown and possesses bright promise of large success" (phrasing devised by Moore's ancient attorney, a Mr. McCormick he believes). The trio agreed the in-band divvy at 50 per cent for Elvis, 25 each for Moore and Black. Then, on July 26, Elvis signed to Sun Records, the royalty rate three per cent compared to the contemporary norm of five -- and that was seven days after the single had been released and without a word of negotiatory input from Moore.

Something of a relief, then, for the band to play their first gigs. On July 17 and 24, Moore asked Elvis to come and perform their two songs during the interval at Starlite Wranglers' residency, the (all-white) Bon Air Club. Despite the conservative crowd's staid reaction, Moore and Black were pretty clear which line-up promised more. Then the month's electrifying crescendo convinced them.

Sam Phillips persuaded Bob Neal (who eventually replaced Moore as Elvis's manager) to add the trio to his "hillbilly hoedown" package show headlined by Slim Whitman and Billy Walker on Saturday, July 31, at Overton Park, a wooded area in the middle of town (whites only, except for Tuesdays which were blacks only). Out of nowhere, they were playing to 2000 people -- 500 of them on wooden benches facing a low stage sheltered by a concrete acoustic shell. Elvis was about to discover the startling effect of his new music -- on himself as much as the crowd.

Moore refers Q to the description of the event he gave to Elvis's most authoritative biographer, Peter Guralnick: "Here we come with two funky little instruments and Elvis, instead of just standing flat-footed and tapping his foot, well, he was kind of jiggling. Plus I think with those old loose britches that we wore, you shook your leg and it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild."

The old guitarist relishes the memory, then adds, "Still, I never saw him doing anything intentionally vulgar in those days. Later on he got a little more risqué, whatever the traffic would bear. But everything he did in the early days was natural."

Elvis did once manage to express how he felt onstage. "It's like your whole body gets goose bumps," he said. "It's like a surge of electricity going through you. It's almost like making love but it's even stronger than that."

No wonder the girls at Overton Park screamed.

"Sometimes I think my heart is going to explode," he said.

Within a couple of years there were hearts exploding at the mere mention of his name all over the world. Yet, in 1954, people still formed queues to tell Elvis he was no good.

It stretched back to Tupelo and a music teacher who told him he couldn't sing, and on through several others to WREC Memphis DJ Fred Cook who spun ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky' for 30 seconds before describing it as "the worst piece of shit I ever heard", and Grand Ole Opry boss Jim Denny who watched Elvis's first -- and last -- performance at the hallowed Nashville venue on October 2, 1954, then suggested he should go back to driving a truck. And that was before the critics got stuck in: "Popular music has reached its lowest depths in the grunt and groin antics of one Elvis Presley" (Daily News); "The biggest freak in show business history" (Miami News).

But he ignored the abuse as he always had. Shut it out and carried on. While Sam Phillips, his brother Jud and Marion Keisker plugged every radio station in the adjoining states to jack sales of "That's All Right, Mama" up to an eventual regional-hit total of 20,000, the band hammered Scotty Moore's old Chevy from Lubbock to Waco to Baton Rouge to Texarcana with hardly a day off. Even when they were home, the ever-restless Elvis would do his own guileless promotion, wandering into schoolyards at lunchtimes to sing solo and humbly request that "some'a y'all might buy my records."

Innocent as Elvis seemed -- before the commercial strategies of Colonel Tom Parker kicked in, at least -- Phillips always felt that, as a man, he was underestimated. "He damn sure wasn't dumb," he would insist. "And he damn sure was intuitive, and he damn sure had an appreciation for the total spirituality of human existence, even if he would never have thought of the term."

Reticent and rarely interviewed in any depth, Elvis left one vivid indication that he always understood his role and his gift. "The coloured folks been singing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know," he told the Charlotte Observer in 1956. "Nobody paid it no mind till I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw."

That he was. Although Scotty Moore probably covers the ground too when he drily suggests of rock'n'roll's big-bang creation moment that, "You know, it was basically just a rhythm thing."


Additional information: Andria Lisle; Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, ABACUS; Waking Up In Memphis: Discovering The Heartland Of Blues And Rock'N'Roll by Andria Lisle and Mike Evans, SANCTUARY; Elvis Day By Day: The Definitive Record Of His Life And Music by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, BALANTINE; Elvis by Dave Marsh, OMNIBUS