‘Before Elvis hit it big, a bunch of us used to meet on Beale Street. We told him that he wouldn’t go anywhere with a name like Elvis Presley: he’d have to change it. In 1954, Elvis Presley couldn’t even spell Memphis: in 1957, he owned it.’
Ronnie Hawkins
In terms of size, Tennessee is a little bigger than Mississippi but it has twice the population with six million inhabitants and two particularly large cities – the capital Nashville (650,000 citizens) and Memphis (655,000). After them, it’s a significant drop to Knoxville and Chattanooga with around 180,000 apiece.
Tennessee is landlocked, surrounded by eight other states, and going clockwise from the top left corner: Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The state’s name comes from a Cherokee word for ‘river of the great bend’, a reference to the Little Tennessee River on the eastern side of the state.
The Mississippi River forms the western boundaries of the state and because the fertile Mississippi Delta reminded the office-bearers of the Nile, the name ‘Memphis’ was taken from Egypt. This link has never been forgotten as a 32-storey pyramid was built and opened in Memphis in 1991. Its principal client was the National Basketball Association but the standards for the arena were not met, and, in a bizarre turn of events, the NBA built another arena elsewhere in Memphis. The Pyramid was closed for several years but now it is having some success with shops and a hotel: there’s still a long way to go.
Unlike the state of Mississippi, there are great variations in the height above sea level and as a result, parts of Tennessee are shrouded in a thin haze, famously in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, another part of the Appalachians. The Smoky Mountains lie to the east with five mountains over 6,000 feet. Gatlinburg is the gateway to the mountain ranges and is the place for the showdown in Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’.
During the Napoleonic wars, the Tennesseans were particularly willing to volunteer and General Andrew Jackson used the recruits with great skill to win the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. The victory was commemorated by the country singer Jimmy Driftwood in 1959, and a cover version from Johnny Horton topped the US charts. A British outing from Lonnie Donegan was a UK hit but Lonnie changed the lyric and put the British commander, Colonel Pakenham (actually Sir Edward Pakenham) on the wrong side. He died in the battle and his body was returned home, preserved in a keg of rum.
In the 1840s when the USA was in conflict with Mexico, it again called for volunteers, hoping to recruit 3,000 men from Tennessee. Thirty thousand applied and so Tennessee was christened ‘The Volunteer State’. Mexico was vanquished with a considerable loss of land and prestige. However, the state’s greatest frontiersman, Davy Crockett was killed defending the Alamo.
Following the route marked by frontiersman Daniel Boone, European immigrants migrated from the Appalachian Mountains and further westward, displacing the native American tribes, which in less politically correct days were known as Red Indians. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and five tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) were forced to relocate to a newly-created Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. This journey was later named the Trail of Tears. Many of them didn’t make it, dying along the way. This inhuman behaviour defies rational explanation today but at the time it cleared the southern states for settlement.
One of those cities, Chattanooga, on the Tennessee side of the border with Atlanta was well poised for development. The city had the magical combination of river and rail – the Tennessee River and the ‘choo choo’, naturally – but its growth was stymied when the neighbouring Atlanta in Georgia built an airport.
Although Tennessee was to secede during the Civil War, the population was conflicted, leading some family members to support opposite sides. With the exception of Virginia, there were more Confederate soldiers from Tennessee than any other state, and yet at the same time, the state provided more soldiers for the Union than the other rebel states combined. There were over 1,400 battles or skirmishes within the state of Tennessee so clearly, the good people of Tennessee enjoyed a fight.
The Band brilliantly captured the times in ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, written by Canadian Robbie Robertson but partly based on what Levon Helm heard as he was growing up. During the Civil War, Virgil Cain’s 18-year-old brother becomes a Confederate soldier and is shot by a Yankee. The charismatic general Robert E. Lee comes by looking for more Confederate recruits and Virgil leaves his wife and his farm to enlist. They go to Richmond, Virginia and the city is soon in flames. The Civil War is over and the South has lost.
The individual southern states were readmitted to the union only after they had abolished slavery and given the black population the right to vote. Tennessee was quickly back in the Union, but giving democratic rights to all its citizens was a deliberately slow process as the politicians found ways of blocking their privileges through literacy tests. Indeed, it took 100 years for the legislation to be rescinded.
In the 1920s prohibition was in effect in many states including Tennessee – today, there are still some counties which forbid alcohol. One of them, unpredictably, is Lynchburg, the home of Jack Daniel’s. As this is a dry county, hard liquor can only be sold in souvenir gift packs at the distillery.
There were many tobacco plantations in Tennessee, so unwittingly they gave a deadly export to the world. Something more deliberate happened during the Second World War – the first atomic bomb was developed in Tennessee under the so-called Manhattan Project, and later used with devastating effect on Japan. Maybe the horrifying results of this were not grasped by the American public as in 1957, Wanda Jackson released a single, ‘Fujiyama Mama’, in the worst possible taste:
‘I’ve been to Nagasaki, Hiroshima too,
The same I did to them, baby, I can do to you.
I’m a Fujiyama mama and I’m just about to blow my top.’
Somewhat ironically, politicians and businessmen subsequently courted the Japanese and persuaded Nissan to build the world’s largest automobile assembly plant in Tennessee.
The introduction of nuclear warfare came to be known as the Big Bang but in a very different way, Tennessee was responsible for several Big Bangs in popular music, three major ones being ‘the Bristol sessions’, the first noteworthy country music recordings in Bristol in 1927, the development of the blues along Beale Street in Memphis, and the first recordings by Elvis Presley in 1954 at Sun Studio.
The first country recordings had been made in the early 1920s and most of them seem to be by Vernon Dalhart, a Texan recording in New York with an extraordinary number of aliases. In 1927, Ralph Peer of Victor Records went on a field trip to Bristol in East Tennessee and recorded Jimmie Rodgers (born Meridian, Mississippi), the Carter Family (from Virginia) and the Stoneman Family (also from Virginia) in what would later become known as ‘the Bristol sessions.’
Jimmie Rodgers was known as ‘The Singing Brakeman’, as he had originally worked the railroads until a chest condition forced him to resign. His songs include ‘The Soldier’s Sweetheart’ (recorded by Peer in 1927), ‘Muleskinner Blues’ and ‘T for Texas’ but he died from TB in 1933 when he was only 35. In May 1955, Elvis Presley performed at the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Day celebration in Meridian.
At the time of the 1927 recording sessions, Ernie Ford was an eight-year-old in Bristol; he went on to become a bombardier in World War II, flying missions in Japan. When the war ended, he became a popular TV entertainer as Tennessee Ernie Ford, the stage name proudly revealing his origin, although his hillbilly humour would be embarrassing to hear today. His many hit records include ‘Shotgun Boogie’ (1951), which can be seen as a forerunner of rock’n’roll, the class ballad ‘Give Me Your Word’ (1955) and ‘Sixteen Tons’ (1956), written by Merle Travis about his family experience of being paid in tokens for the company store and being fleeced twice. Ford was a religious man and Presley was impressed how well his spiritual albums sold: Hymns (1956) reached No.2 on the US albums charts and was on the listings for 277 consecutive weeks.
Nashville became the state capital in 1843, which did wonders for its growth. The Tennessee State Capitol building was built by a mixture of artisans, convicts and slaves. It was unusual for the state itself to employ slaves and this is the largest project on which they were used.
Being in the centre of the state, the central plateau around Nashville was seen as a strategic vantage point during the Civil War. It was location, location, location and after the war, the city prospered.
Bristol, although having a twin city in Virginia across the state line, didn’t have the infrastructure and Nashville became the self-proclaimed country music capital of the world; more latterly Music City USA, which is appropriate as so many genres of music are now recorded there, although country is still the main one.
Nashville has been at the centre of country music since the start of the weekly radio show, Grand Ole Opry, which began on WSM in 1925. It was originally called Barn Dance but following an opera programme, a witty announcer said that it was time for the Grand Ole Opry, and it stuck. Top performers were expected to forgo their Saturdays and play for reduced fees in order to put Grand Ole Opry on their billings, a brilliant move by the programme makers. The evening shows were split into segments hosted by a star performer and sponsored by an advertiser.
In Elvis’ time, the show was broadcast from the Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman had been built by local businessman Thomas Ryman, in 1890 and had originally been dedicated to spiritual music. The Opry was there until 1974 when it was moved to the new Opryland complex. The Ryman was shut for some years but it was revamped and reopened in 1994. They have a very impressive list of forthcoming attractions, mostly rock, pop and country, but for sure there wouldn’t have been World Music nights in the 1950s.
We will come to Elvis’ appearance on the Grand Ole Opry in the next chapter but he heard the show as he was growing up. He told Hank Williams Jr. that when he walked on stage, he knew he was standing where Hank Williams stood.
As Elvis listened to the show as an adolescent, he had no idea that its biggest star, the smooth balladeer Eddy Arnold, known as ‘the Tennessee Plowboy’, was managed by Colonel Tom Parker. While Eddy was singing his No.1 country hits like ‘Anytime’ (1948), ‘Don’t Rob Another Man’s Castle’ (1949) and ‘I Wanna Play House With You’ (1951), the penny-pinching Parker was doing business backstage, talking to other managers and running up WSM’s phone bill on calls he should have been making from his own office.
There was a fondness for mentioning southern states in country songs as it sold records. Eddy Arnold had a country No.1 with ‘Kentucky Waltz’ in 1951 and he had a hit with ‘Tennessee Stud’ in 1959, a song about a horse, not a well-hung gent, I might add. Indeed, the hit songs about Tennessee included ‘Tennessee Waltz’ (Cowboy Copas and Pee Wee King, 1948, a pop hit for Patti Page – and the State Song), ‘Tennessee Border’ (Red Foley, 1949), ‘Tennessee Polka’ (Pee Wee King, 1949), ‘Tennessee Saturday Night’ (Red Foley, 1949) and ‘Tennessee Flat-Top Box’ (Johnny Cash, 1962).
The word ‘Mississippi’ didn’t sing as well – too many sibilant s’s – but Red Foley with the Dixie Dons took ‘M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I’ to No.1 in 1950 and later there were pop successes called ‘Mississippi’ for John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas (1970) and Pussycat (1976).
Just as there are more caves in Tennessee than any other state, there is a higher proportion of professional musicians in Nashville than anywhere else. The so-called Nashville Cats were celebrated by the Lovin’ Spoonful in a hit single in 1967. Most could not read music but an alternative system was devised which circumvented the problem, no doubt helped by the observation that country music was described by songwriter Harlan Howard as ‘three chords and the truth’. The Nashville cats who played on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde in 1966 were back in the studio the following week playing standard country fare.
Much of that standard country fare was down to Chet Atkins who had been born outside Knoxville, Tennessee in 1924. He was country music’s greatest guitarist, often playing melody and rhythm at the same time, but he was also a key producer for RCA, devising the warm, much copied ‘countrypolitan’ sound for middle of the road artists such as Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold. Financially, it would be hard to question his judgement, though many saw it as the death-knell for country music.
Many outsiders saw Nashville as gaudy and tacky and certainly Webb Pierce’s guitarshaped swimming pool and Conway Twitty’s Twitty City (which is in Hendersonville) seemed ripe for satire. Who on earth told Hank Snow that his hairpiece was a good fit? Snow, a grouchy performer, had an argument with his fiddle player before a show one night, leading to the musician skilfully dislodging his wig with his bow. All they gotta do was not act naturally and when Buck Owens came to Liverpool Empire in the 1960s, he said backstage, ‘I want to see the Beatles and catch me some pussy’, possibility an indication of what he had heard about Maggie May in Lime Street.
When the satire came, it came hard. Robert Altman’s 1975 film, Nashville, was as funny as it was savage, blurring reality and fantasy and showing just how hypocritical some performers were. It was produced by Jerry Weintraub, who had delivered the $2m budget in three days, but there must have been concerns that they would need a lot more if they lost libel actions. Unquestionably, Henry Gibson as Haven Hamilton was playing Hank Snow for all it was worth, both personally and musically. Fortunately for them, Snow refused to see the film, saying, ‘I have better things to do than see a movie where somebody is supposed to be playing me.’ He must have been told about its contents as he added, ‘I’m not pompous at all. I’m just a quiet, bashful country boy.’
But salvation was around the corner. Willie Nelson had written hit songs but he had been trying to make it as a performer for years with his behind-the-beat vocals and Django-like guitar. He ditched his suit, grew his hair and moved to Austin, where he teamed up with another rebellious figure, Waylon Jennings, for Outlaw Country. Their records were honest and hard-hitting, without the inevitable sweetening of the standard Nashville product. Willie discovered that you didn’t have to look a million dollars to make a million dollars.
Other artists joined them and in the end, Outlaw Country became a brand like any other. Some magnificent performers and songwriters are associated with it – Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker, Kris Kristofferson and Steve Earle.
Singers and songwriters had come to Nashville to make it, which meant relatively few country stars had been born there. But times are changing, as Miley Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray, was born in Nashville, as was Hillary Scott, the daughter of Linda Davis and co-lead singer of Lady Antebellum. Antebellum, incidentally, is a generic name for the southern architecture seen in Gone with the Wind, a classic example being Graceland, although that was built in 1939.
These days, the more wayward folk and country artists are branded together as Americana, an odd name that somehow includes the very British Billy Bragg. Country music today is very slick, professional and usually soulless – a young audience has lapped up the TV series, Nashville, without realising it is a satire, or is it? It’s hard to tell especially as I’ve been so bored that I have never made it through one episode.
The most brilliant example of self-satire, self-promotion and indeed self-preservation has to be Dolly Parton who was born in Sevierville outside Knoxville in 1946. Her remarkable figure continues to defy gravity and amidst all the showmanship and jokes, she is an exceptionally gifted performer and songwriter. Her songs include ‘My Tennessee Mountain Home’, ‘Jolene’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’, which she wrote when she abandoned her singing partner, the ultra-tacky Porter Wagoner. Her Dollywood theme park attracts 2.5m visitors a year and is far more ambitious than the usual country star attractions.
Let’s go walking in Memphis, the name of which is an amalgamation of two Egyptian words meaning ‘enduring and beautiful’. The frontier town is now a very large inland port and is the barbecue capital of the world. It is famous for blues, soul, Sun Records and Elvis Presley. But Memphis had immense problems in 1878 when Yellow Fever claimed over 5,000 lives. The city was declared bankrupt and its charter was revoked until 1893.
Robert Church had been born in Memphis to a white, steamboat owner and a black mother. Following the epidemic, he bought property at greatly reduced prices and in turn, he used his profits to bring life back to the city. He opened a bank which lent to the community. In the process, Church became the first black millionaire in the South.
The heart of the black music scene was around Beale Street where workers relieved the boredom of picking cotton all day long. They played as hard as they worked, seeking out juke joints and getting drunk on cheap corn liquor. An evangelist commented, ‘If whisky ran ankle deep, you could not get drunk quicker than you can on Beale Street today.’
Prostitution was rife. The blues musician Sunnyland Slim recalled, ‘Memphis used to be a barrelhouse town. It was the greatest town in the world for pimps and hustlers. That’s where a whole lot of people got jailed.’
Most of the Beale Street musicians were singers and guitarists who would play house parties for a few dollars. There were jug bands where a musician would blow across the mouth of a bottle to create a bass sound. The best-known group was Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers who made the original version of ‘Walk Right In’.
When the politician Ed Crump was running for office in 1910, he had W.C. Handy write him a theme song. Handy wrote ‘Mr. Crump’, which was later given a lyric by George Norton that referred to Handy’s own band and showed Beale Street’s darker side. It is now called ‘Memphis Blues’ and the best-known recording is by Louis Armstrong.
Arguably the greatest female soul singer, Aretha Franklin, was born in Memphis in 1942, but she was raised in Detroit and mostly recorded in New York.
Although called Memphis Minnie, Lizzie Douglas came from Louisiana. Big Bill Broonzy told her ‘You play guitar like a man’ and indeed she married three male guitarists. Her tracks include ‘When the Levee Breaks’ (1930), ‘Bumble Bee’ (1930) and ‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues’ (1941).
A highly distinctive R&B singer known for the grunts in his vocals, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland was born a few miles outside the city in 1930 and he often sang while B.B. King played. His records were anything but bland.
Tina Turner was born 30 miles from Memphis in Nutbush. Sleepy John Estes was born close by in Ripley in 1899 and died in Nutbush in 1977. By then Nutbush was famous for its city limits, immortalised by Tina Turner in 1973 in one of the funkiest records ever made.
Among the many blues musicians associated with Beale is Peter Chatman, better known as Memphis Slim, who was born in the city in 1915. He was a fine boogie pianist. Post-war he recorded blues for black listeners but he found acceptance with white audiences and he moved to Paris in 1962 and became popular during the British blues boom. He was six foot six and he surely had the longest fingers of any blues pianist. When he died in 1988, his body was taken back to Memphis.
In 1916 W.C. Handy wrote ‘Beale Street Blues’ which was supremely recorded by Louis Armstrong on Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy (1954). Armstrong told Handy, ‘You wrote it so well that the notes play themselves.’ The expanded edition of the album, released in 1997, includes a vintage interview with W. C. Handy. It is an unexpected pleasure to hear him and he says of Armstrong, ‘There was something in that voice that appreciated the pride of race.’
‘Beale Street Blues’ celebrates the street but it doesn’t hold back on the details:
‘If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk
Married men would have to take their beds and walk
Except one or two, who never drink booze
And the blind man on the corner
Who sings the Beale Street Blues.’
Beale Street was redeveloped in the 1970s so it is not the same today, but A. Schwab’s Dry Goods Store is still there. It used to sell voodoo powder and you can still buy Mojo Hands for good luck, but who knows what the bags contain.
Piggly-Wiggly, the first supermarket chain in America was started in Jefferson Avenue by Clarence Saunders in 1916. He had developed a self-service system and he believed that if he were cheaper than his rivals, the public wouldn’t mind serving themselves. There was a turnstile entry which forced customers to move in one direction and it was hard to return to an item. In a highly innovative and much copied move, he put impulse purchases like candy by the cash registers.
The name came about because, whilst travelling on a train, he had seen some piglets pushing and wriggling to get under a fence. Maybe the ridiculous name went against him, but the chain store was declared bankrupt seven years later. There is now a homage to the store at the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis, illustrating the evolution of the supermarket, and possibly also the evolution of shoplifting.
One of the quirkiest (and quackiest) traditions in America continues to this day. Twice a day at the Peabody Hotel in Union Avenue, five ducks waddle across the lobby, accompanied by their Duckmaster and watched by tourists with their mobile phones. The ducks spend their day in the fountain and at night they live on the roof. Are they wondering if one day they will be on the customers’ plates?
Songs about the city include Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ where Chuck wants to make contact with his young daughter and the Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’ which has an exceptional opening line, ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis.’
Rosanne Cash, the daughter of one of Sun’s leading artists, was born in Memphis in 1955 but her place of birth was not the main reason for her considerable talent.
The instrumental act, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, is famous for ‘Green Onions’ and organist Booker T. Jones, bass player Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn and drummer Al Jackson Jr were all born in Memphis. Indeed, M.G. stood for Memphis Group. They became the studio band for another local label, Stax, and when they recorded their take on Abbey Road, they called the album, McLemore Avenue, which was the studio’s location, a few miles outside the city centre. Musicians who have recorded there include Otis Redding and Isaac Hayes (born 20 miles away in Covington, 1942) and a colourful example of the funkiness of the area is King Curtis’ single, ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ (1967). Dusty Springfield’s landmark album is Dusty in Memphis (1968), although the vocals we hear were recorded in New York. Stax Records went through some bad business deals and possibly its final blow was securing Lena Zavaroni’s contract, a sure sign that management had lost the plot.
The Box Tops, a group of white boys from Memphis made the single, ‘The Letter’, with a stunning lead vocal from 16-year-old Alex Chilton. The letter was a popular form of communication back in 1967 and the single topped the US charts for a month. Who knows, maybe it inspired FedEx to set up their headquarters in Memphis in 1971.
Because of the lack of employment opportunities for Vernon Presley in Tupelo, the family moved to Memphis, taking with them Elvis’ paternal grandmother Minnie Mae, in 1948 when Elvis was 13. Elvis, sounding like a Steinbeck creation, later said, ‘We were broke, man, and we left Tupelo overnight. Daddy packed all our belongings and put them on top and in the trunk of a 1939 Plymouth. We just headed to Memphis. Things had to be better.’ Well, it wasn’t that good. Vernon found work loading cans in a paint factory, but a bad back put him out of action. Gladys revelled in her job as a hospital orderly. This was ideal for her friendly and sympathetic nature. It was suggested that she train as a nurse, although she didn’t pursue this.
The Presleys lived on a housing project, sharing one room with a toilet down the hall. Again, many have said that it was unnatural that the growing Elvis should sleep in the same room as his parents, but what else could he do? Thousands of families were in the same position.
Although Elvis continued with his schooling, he was also working in a cinema in Memphis from 1950. Memphis was a city that was strong on blues music. He became infatuated with the blues, hanging out on Beale Street, soaking up the fashions. He was taken with Lansky Brothers, a gents outfitters, which opened in 1946. His first purchase was a white tuxedo for the school prom, but he loved bright colours. There is a photograph of him in a blue jacket with a brown collar and he loved the mixture of pink and black – this also applied to Cadillacs. Bernard Lansky, a master salesman, said of Elvis, ‘Everything suited him.’
Elvis received strange looks at school as he was different from the other boys. He was not mocked to his face as his friend Red West protected him. Everybody knew he could sing. He was still singing ‘Old Shep’ and he would perform solos in the Christmas carol concerts.
Elvis’ report card for 1951 has come to light and it is grim reading. He has failed in English, and American History (is there any other?) and his best subject is woodwork. A life of carpentry beckons: now who else was a carpenter? Vernon advised him to become an electrician as he didn’t know a guitar player who was ‘worth a damn’. This is identical to Aunt Mimi’s admonishment to John Lennon, ‘The guitar’s all right, John, but you’ll never make a living from it.’
Nevertheless, Elvis Presley did graduate from Humes High. He worked as a cinema usher and then for Precision Tools, eventually taking his father’s advice and working for a small electrical company in Memphis, Crown Electric. At first he was a deliveryman, driving the same truck that the singer Johnny Burnette had driven the year before.
Curiously, there is an article supposedly written by Elvis in the Radio Luxembourg Book of Record Stars, dated 1962, in which Elvis says that he got a job at a dollar an hour in a defence plant: I have no idea what this is about and whether the feature is genuine – it could have been a factory that was working for the military in Korea or could have been a tag that stuck after World War Two. In the same article, Elvis says of his relationship with Gladys, ‘I could wake her up in the middle of the night if I was worried about something. She’d get up, fix me a sandwich and a glass of milk and talk to me.’ That quote sounds genuine enough.
Samuel Cornelius Phillips was 12 years older than Elvis Presley although to Elvis, it would have seemed more. He had been born in Florence, Alabama on 5 January 1923 and it is fitting that such a famous record producer should have been born so close to Muscle Shoals. Sam worked as an announcer and radio engineer in both Decatur, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee and quickly became adept with recording equipment.
In January 1950 he started his own business, the Memphis Recording Service, at 706 Union Avenue, a block away from Beale. He started recording local artists singings blues and R&B and he leased the product to the Chess brothers (Chess label) or the Bihari brothers (Modern, RPM). He didn’t like the bland white music of the day and he wanted to capture the ‘gutbucket sounds’ of black musicians. He wanted the studio recordings to have the atmosphere of a cooking band on Beale. I don’t believe it myself but it is said that the uneven ceiling contributed to the unusual sound.
Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm band featured his cousin, Jackie Brenston. On 5 March 1951 they recorded a car song, ‘Rocket 88’ for Sam Phillips. It was largely instrumental with three short vocals: its energy level has made Phillips call it ‘the first rock’n’roll record’, but then the first rock’n’roll record would have to be something he’d made. The band damaged an amplifier in transit and although it buzzed, Sam thought it added to the sound. The record was released on Chess and topped the R&B charts, but there was internal friction as Ike Turner resented his subsidiary role. ‘I always liked that record,’ said Little Richard, ‘and I used the riff in my act. When we were looking for a lead-in for ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, I did that and it fitted.’
Sam Phillips recorded B.B. King, Rosco Gordon and Howlin’ Wolf. He was a white man who loved the blues and R&B. He felt that he was helping race relations and that he was doing God’s work.
Whether doing God’s work extended to his private life is uncertain. He had a wife and two children, but he also had mistresses and would regularly visit brothels. That apart, he could work an eighteen-hour day at the studio.
Phillips had set up his own Phillips International label in 1950 but he only released one single, ‘Gotta Let You Go’ by the one-man band, Joe Hill Louis. The song sounds like early rap and there is no melody to speak of. Only 300 copies were pressed for local sale and he didn’t know how to take it further.
By 1952 he was ready to try again. He was certain that the Chess brothers and the Bihari brothers were getting the better of him and he wanted to record, manufacture and release his own records.
He started his Sun Records imprint with a slow-burning instrumental, ‘Drivin’ Slow’ from the 16-year-old saxophonist, Johnny London. It’s good and atmospheric and it sounds as though London is playing his sax in the corridor, which gives it an eerie feel.
It’s odd that the first Sun record to be successful has an Elvis connection. Sam had recorded an answer version to Big Mama Thornton’s hit single, ‘Hound Dog’.
Willie Mae ‘Big Mama’ Thornton, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1926, had been recording without much success and was asked to work with Johnny Otis’ band in Los Angeles. Two young songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, were to supply the songs. Said Leiber, ‘She was the biggest, the baddest, the saltiest chick you could ever see. I had to write a song for her that basically said, ‘Go fuck yourself!’’ Hence, ‘Hound Dog’, which was recorded as a mid-tempo blues with novelty sounds. At first, Big Mama refused to growl because she didn’t like being told how to perform a song.
‘Hound Dog’ was a No.1 R&B hit. John Stewart, later with the Kingston Trio, recalled, ‘When I was at high school, I had to go to downtown L.A. to get the records I wanted from a black record shop and the radio stations called them ‘race records.’ I liked Big Mama Thornton who did ‘Hound Dog’. Rock’n’roll came from country and western, gospel and the blues. You English became great aficionados of the blues. Look at Eric Clapton, he is steeped in the blues, much more than a lot of the 1950s rock’n’rollers. They knew of it but they weren’t consumed by it like he and a lot of other English players were.’
Within a few days, Sam Phillips had come up with the answer version, ‘Bear Cat’, which joined it in the Top 10. It was recorded by a Memphis disc-jockey, Rufus C. Thomas Jr, billed as Rufus ‘Hound Dog’ Thomas Jr. He said, ‘It was a great song to do. It was a copy but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.’ Well, maybe not Mama Thornton, but Peacock Records was owned by a gangster, Don Robey. He didn’t find it amusing and claimed copyright infringement (which in a way was the point of answer versions) and Phillips had to concede. Phillips was a tough, stubborn individual but no match for Robey. Big Mama Thornton was to record her own answer versions with ‘I Smell a Rat’ and ‘Just Like a Dog (Barking up the Wrong Tree)’. She died of alcoholism in 1984.
Rufus Thomas’ follow-up single, ‘Tiger Man’ had more originality in that it ploughed the same furrow as ‘Hound Dog’ without copying it. It wasn’t a hit song at the time, but Elvis Presley was to see its potential.
Next, an inside story. When Johnny Bragg was 17, he caught his girlfriend making love to his best friend. She fought with him and in order to explain her bruises to her parents, she accused Bragg of raping her. The police beat him until he signed a confession. The girl retracted her story but not before Bragg had been charged with six other rapes. He was found guilty of them all. Bragg was given six 99-year sentences to run consecutively (594 years, should he live that long) and he was sent to the notorious Tennessee State Prison. He was assigned to make prison clothes and when the authorities thought he was not working quickly enough, the guards tied him to a ring suspended from the ceiling and beat him unconscious with their leather belts.
But Johnny Bragg had a lovely tenor voice and a natural ear for harmony and he had enjoyed singing in church. When he heard the prisoners singing spirituals, he did not understand why they could not be as well-ordered as the groups he had heard in church. He formed The Prisonaires vocal group with other convicts – their first performances were serenading prisoners before execution. Bragg would stay behind to loosen the straps on the condemned men and clear up the mess.
Bragg became known as ‘Bucket Head’ as he wrote songs with a bucket on his head to simulate echo. Nashville stars would sometimes perform at the prison and when Bragg met Hank Williams, he asked, ‘Do you ever sing songs written by other people?’ ‘Depends,’ said Hank, ‘Are you one of those other people?’ He sang him a song which he bought for $5. The song eventually became ‘Your Cheating’ Heart’, a country standard but Bragg had sold his copyright.
In the winter of 1953, Bragg was walking across the courtyard to his duties in the laundry with a burglar, Robert Riley. The rain was beating down and Bragg said, ‘Here we are just walking in the rain and wondering what the girls are doing.’ Riley said, ‘That’s a song.’ With a few minutes Bragg had written two verses and was convinced it was a hit. As he was illiterate, he asked Riley to write it down in exchange for a writing credit.
The Democratic politician Frank Clement became the nation’s youngest governor when he was 32. He appointed James Edwards as the new warden and ordered him to make the place tolerable. As soon as Edwards heard The Prisonaires, he informed Clement that this could help their reforms. In an unprecedented move, The Prisonaires were allowed to perform under armed guard at churches and civic functions and then on local radio. The audiences came out of curiosity.
In June 1953, Sam Phillips produced The Prisonaires’ first single, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’. The song’s elegant but simple arrangement ensured it sold well in Nashville and Memphis and made the nation’s R&B Top 10. It looked as though the whole prison had caught the bug of performing and writing songs. Sam Phillips possibly picked up two songs from white inmates, ‘Without You’ and ‘Casual Love Affair’, which he later rehearsed with Elvis Presley. Meanwhile, Johnnie Ray had picked up on ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’ and turned it into a No.2 US pop hit. It topped the UK charts in 1956, preventing Elvis Presley from having his first UK No.1 with ‘Hound Dog’.
In November 1953 Sam Phillips recorded Little Junior’s Blue Flames with an original song, ‘Mystery Train’, credited to Herman Parker, who was Little Junior, and Sam Phillips. It was probably only written by Parker, but then he had based it on ‘Worried Man Blues’ by the Carter Family from 1930.
Sam Phillips’ releases show his adventurous spirit but he was plagued with doubt and with debt. He said, ‘I drove 60,000 miles one year from Maine to California setting up distribution. I didn’t have any money, I’d sleep in YMCAs. I wanted to get first-hand opinions from each distributor and disc jockey and to get their feel for what we had done.’
One way to add a little income was to make local recordings. These were the days before mass-produced tape recorders and most Memphis residents had have heard their own voices. Sam Phillips had the slogan, ‘We record anything – anywhere – anytime’. A member of the public could sing two songs, given to them on a 10-inch 78rpm acetate, for $4 and he might also record church services (weddings and funerals) or other location work.
Sam Phillips felt that this cut down on the search for new singers. He knew the local talent would want to hear themselves. In essence, he would hear what they had to offer and charge them $4 for the privilege. He enjoyed helping them, encouraging them to believe in themselves.
This kind of facility was often seen at fairgrounds – see Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock – but it was rare for professional labels to offer this service. As it happens, another Mr. Phillips, Percy Phillips, offered this service, just outside the centre of Liverpool. The Quarrymen – who became the Beatles – recorded two tracks there in mid-1958 for under £1, actually 17s.6d.
Elvis had seen the sign and he wondered what his voice sounded like. He loved the music on Sun Records but he saw himself as Dean Martin. He loved Dean’s lazy, slurred delivery, especially on his 1950 hit, ‘I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine’. Sinatra was tremendous, but he worked on his technique while Dean sounded like he couldn’t care less.
It’s said that the record was made for Gladys’ birthday. She would have enjoyed the songs chosen, but her birthday was in April. However, why shouldn’t Elvis just give it to her as a present? The most likely explanation is that his friend, Ed Leek, whose father was a doctor, gave him $4 and thought he might be able to get the song played on local radio.
Regardless, this 18-year-old truck-driver carrying his guitar went through the doors at Sun Records on 18 July 1953 to hear his voice for the first time.
One way and another, Sam wasn’t always at 706 Union Avenue, but it didn’t matter as his secretary Marion Keisker knew how to work the equipment.
‘Who do you sound like?’ she asked.
‘I don’t sound like nobody,’ said Elvis.
What does that mean? Was Elvis being modest or bragging? Almost certainly he was being modest, but you never know. When he repeated this story to the Hollywood reporter, Dane Marlowe in 1956, he added, ‘I was a teacher’s pet at school and didn’t know how to be modest.’
There was a machine that cut the record as you sang so there were no facilities for correcting mistakes. No pressure then. Marion checked the level between voice and guitar. Elvis paid his $4 and the lathe swung into operation.
The hound dog man’s big start.
‘My Happiness’ had been a big song in 1948 for Ella Fitzgerald, the Pied Pipers with June Hutton, and John and Sandra Steele. Elvis’ voice is sweet and professional with a slight falsetto on ‘any place at all’. He sounds so plaintive, so assured and so unmistakably Elvis. Elvis had it all together before any record producer worked on him. If you have not heard this track before, play it on YouTube where it comes with the official video, made by Disney, showing pictures from the Presley archive.
He was never to record the song again, which is a shame as he sang it well. It was a hit for Connie Francis in 1959, which came at the right time for the songwriter Betty Peterson, whose finances were in a bad way due to family illness.
The other song, ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’ had been introduced in 1937 by Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra, but that version sounded too jolly for a song of lost love. The version that attracted Elvis was by the Ink Spots from 1941. This song was not so successful for Elvis as he starts too high and he sounds drunk in his deep-voiced narration. He ends by saying, ‘That’s the end’.
There was just the one copy of the record which was bought by Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, in 2015 for $300,000. Jack had played a cameo as Elvis in the Johnny Cash satire, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007).
Marion Keisker made a note ‘Good ballad singer’ and when Sam Phillips returned she told him about ‘the kid with the sideburns’.
Elvis had left the building.