My first show with Elvis was at the Cape Girardeau Arena Building, and was a benefit for the Southeast Missouri Chapter of the United Cerebral Palsy Fund. Tickets were only a dollar each. Dancing started at 8:30, with the stage show scheduled to start at 10:00. Several of us were on the bill, including Little Willie Bryan, Johnny Daume and the Ozark Ridge Runners, and Bud Deckelman. The building held a few hundred people, and it was pretty crowded by the time I took the stage. I went on just before Elvis closed the show. At the time, it was just Elvis on rhythm guitar, Scotty Moore on lead electric guitar, and Bill Black on the upright bass. This was before DJ Fontana joined them on drums. Based on his instrumentation I figured Elvis was probably just another good-looking country singer, even if his style was a little eccentric.
I wanted to hear Elvis’s set, but when I left the stage I headed back to the dressing area to freshen up and rest for a moment first. Daddy and I were alone back there when suddenly we heard all this screaming and carrying on. It was like the whole place was in upheaval, and it pretty well scared us half to death. Daddy said, “My gosh, Wanda. I wonder if there’s a fire? You gather your things up and sit tight, but get ready to go quick if we need to get out of here. I’ll check it out and be right back.”
A couple of minutes later Daddy came back with a grin on his face. He leaned against the wall and started laughing. “What is it, Daddy,” I asked, “Is there anything wrong?”
He shook his head. “Wanda, you are not gonna believe this. Come on, you’ve gotta see for yourself.”
I followed him out the door, but it seemed like the screams had gotten louder. Daddy led me to the edge of the stage, and I suddenly realized that there was, in fact, a fire. But it wasn’t a literal fire consuming the building in flames. It was the heat of Elvis Presley drawing the girls from that audience into the fiery furnace of rock and roll that he was inventing before their very eyes. Those girls were pressed up against the bandstand as Elvis moved and gyrated across the stage, keeping each and every one of them right in the palm of his hand. He knew how to flirt with his fans, and I was fascinated. On top of that, he had such a great voice!
I immediately understood why Elvis made those girls feel the way they felt, but it was still quite amazing to witness it in person. We hadn’t seen anything like that before. Frank Sinatra was a heartthrob, but the girls in his audience just fainted. They didn’t lose their minds and fling themselves in a hysterical fit toward the stage. My jaw dropped in awe of both Elvis’s performing style and the reaction of the crowd. I stayed on the edge of that stage and listened to every last note of the rest of Elvis’s performance. His uncanny and seemingly contradictory mix of swagger and shyness cast a spell on everyone. It was almost as if he knew his natural tendency to be bashful was attractive, so he mustered up the courage to harness it with confidence. There was nobody else like him. Performing with this guy is going to be really nice, I thought to myself. I couldn’t wait to get to the Silver Moon Club in Newport, Arkansas, where I was scheduled to appear with him again the following night. I glanced over at Daddy standing next to me. He didn’t look as excited as I felt.
The next day we set out on the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Cape Girardeau down to Newport. The radio was on and neither of us had said much. I was just beginning to doze off somewhere around the Arkansas-Missouri state line when Daddy’s voice jolted me awake.
“That boy’s got to get his show in order,” he stated confidently.
“What boy is that, Daddy?” Of course, I knew exactly who he was talking about.
“That Elvis. He’s all over the stage messin’ around. And he’s got to stop slurring his words, too. Nobody can understand him.”
I smiled. “Well, I can understand him.” Daddy just shook his head. I don’t think they had a term for it yet in those days, but it was on that car ride that I first understood the concept of a generation gap.
Newport, Arkansas’s Silver Moon Club was a honky tonk, but it was a nice one. They had an elevated stage that could hold well over a thousand people. The place sold out that night with a crowd that was even larger than the one we’d played for in Cape Girardeau. Once again the girls screamed, squealed, and swooned. It was almost kind of frightening to experience, but seeing what kind of power a performer could have over a crowd intrigued me. Something was stirring within.
When I got home after those first two appearances with Elvis, I was just like every other teenage girl in America who was quickly coming down with a severe case of Elvis fever. I immediately went out and bought his records, and started counting down the days until I’d see him again.
On the first day of August, I was back on the road playing a series of shows with Elvis that had been packaged by Bob Neal. Elvis fever was spreading rapidly. In fact, he had spent the previous week on a tour through Florida headlined by comedian Andy Griffith. There were several other country performers on those shows, including Marty Robbins, Ferlin Husky, Jim Reeves, Jimmy Rogers Snow, and my old boyfriend, Tommy Collins. There’s a line in that song Merle Haggard wrote about Tommy that says he once followed Elvis Presley. That’s the truth, but you can bet nobody wanted to follow Elvis by the end of that week!
Three days before I saw him again, Elvis was mobbed for the first time at a baseball stadium in Jacksonville. The audience busted through police barriers and chased him to the locker room, managing to get away with his shirt, coat, shoes, ring, and watch. All he was left with were his pink pants, and even those were pretty well ripped to pieces! The Andy Griffith tour wrapped up in Tampa the night before Elvis and I played together once again. That Tampa show was where they took the famous picture of him and his guitar onstage that you see on the cover of his first album for RCA. It’s the one that says “Elvis” in pink lettering down the left side and “Presley” in green letters across the bottom. If you can picture that image, then you know exactly what Elvis looked like the day after it was taken when we reunited once again. And if you can’t picture it, I’ll just tell you. He looked good!
The first show of our package tour was in Tupelo, Mississippi, which was Elvis’s hometown before the Presleys moved to Memphis. It was the first time he’d played there since his recording career began, but the headliner for the tour was actually country star Webb Pierce. Elvis received second billing, above Red Sovine and then me. There were a half-dozen or more additional performers on the bill, including Bud Deckelman, who’d been with us in Cape Girardeau, Charlie Feathers, and quite a few local and regional acts. Elvis was dressed in black pants and a light-weight pink coat. He was probably only on stage for about twenty minutes, but we were playing at the fairgrounds, and the crowd was enormous. By the time Webb Piece took the stage to close the show, most of them were gone. And the ones that were left were too excited to concentrate on anything else but what they’d just seen. Webb had been drinking and he was a little off his game that night. But it hardly mattered. He’d already lost that crowd before he started. When Webb finished his set, he made it clear that he would never follow Elvis again. As far as I know, he never did. The remaining four shows we played on that tour all concluded with the rising king of rock and roll closing the proceedings.
The next day, we traveled down to Sheffield, Alabama, to play a couple of shows, and a new artist named Johnny Cash joined us for those appearances. The audience didn’t seem too interested in headliner Webb Pierce, and that made Webb, a bona fide country legend, a little mad. I think he left before the show was over. We headed on to Arkansas to play in both Little Rock and Camden. I know most of the crowds were coming out to see Elvis, but I was getting a good reception, too. By the time we got to Camden, I was going on just before Elvis’s closing set, and we were both getting multiple encores.
It was after one of the shows on that tour that Elvis asked me out after a show to get a Coke. Of course, I had to ask Daddy. I didn’t like all his rules, but I knew he was looking out for my best interest. Daddy said that it would be all right and, after that, he was pretty good about letting me go on a drive with Elvis or catch a movie or something with him if we got to a town early for a show. Daddy didn’t mind if Elvis or any of the other guys ever rode with us, but of course I never could ride with Elvis from town to town.
Elvis, Scotty, and Bill usually rode in Elvis’s Cadillac. They were just starting to get air conditioning in cars at that time. Up until then we just had to roll the windows down and let it blow. I used to have an Uncle Henry who kept the windows up in the sweltering summer heat because he wanted to impress folks by making them think he had air conditioning! Elvis really did have it, but he wouldn’t use it at first because he said it closed up his throat. I don’t know if it was because his bandmates threatened to kill him, but I think he got used to it pretty fast.
We usually went out to eat after our performances. I still do that. I’ve never been able to eat right before a show. A lot of times a group of us would head out together for hamburgers or whatever. One night after a show we went out with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. The three of them were in the backseat, while Daddy was driving and I was in the passenger seat up front. Elvis liked to tease me, so he started horsing around in the backseat and flipping my ponytail back and forth. That’s when we girls were just starting to wear hair pieces. My hair wasn’t long enough at the time to make a pretty ponytail, so I got a fake one on a comb and set that over my real one. Of course, we didn’t let the guys know our beauty secrets back then, so Elvis thought he was just flipping my hair around. He started coughing and gagging and carrying on.
“Wanda,” he joked, “don’t you ever wash that ponytail?”
I reached up, yanked it off, threw it in his lap and said, “Here, you wash it!” That gave him a pretty good shock. He hadn’t ever seen anything like that before, and we all had a big laugh over it.
We finished up the tour playing for several thousand fans at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis. Most of the acts we’d been playing with all week were there, but several others joined us, including Sonny James and Carl Perkins. That afternoon, before the show, Elvis picked me up and took me to his house where he lived with his mother and father. I’m surprised Daddy let me go, but Elvis had pretty well won him over at that point. Though skeptical at first, Daddy had come to see that Elvis was a sincere and polite young man. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you were around Elvis for very long, he would win you over. He had a childlike innocence about him and was very respectful. He always said “ma’am” and “sir,” and had those Southern manners that fascinated people even back then. I think Daddy got to where he really liked Elvis.
When I arrived at the door of his house, Elvis introduced me to his mother before taking me down the hall to his bedroom. He had a record player and a lot of records stacked up next to it. He had been telling me all week that I should start singing this new kind of music he was doing, but I didn’t think I could pull it off. He began playing different records to help me get a grip on the feeling of what he was doing. He told me I needed to let loose and have more fun. That’s the same thing Hank Thompson had told me way back at the Trianon Ballroom. I didn’t realize I was being uptight on stage, but maybe I was.
Elvis would play an R&B record and then pick up his guitar and say, “Look, instead of playing country style by plucking each individual string, you need to strum all of them at once like this.” I had actually started out playing that way, but Daddy said not to do it like that. He taught me to pick the strings, and didn’t like me strumming them all at once. After the episode with the felt pick during my recording session in Nashville, I’d done my best not to play so heavy. Elvis wanted me to unlearn. That was my real introduction to how to play rock and roll. Elvis’s career was really booming, yet he was still concerned about me and my little career. He knew I loved it so much, and I think he sensed that I would be around for a while in the business. It meant a lot that he took an interest and encouraged something he saw in me that I couldn’t yet see for myself.
I’ve been asked several times over the years what the records were that Elvis played for me that day. Give me a break! I was a seventeen-year-old girl in Elvis Presley’s bedroom. Do you honestly think I was paying a lick of attention to remembering what exact records I was hearing? I was just trying not to jump out of my own skin or pass out on the floor like all those girls at his shows. You know how Elvis on stage could drive a young woman to hysterics? Try getting a private concert from him in his bedroom when the physical attraction between the two of you is palpable. I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. At one point we were interrupted when Elvis’s mother tapped on the door and poked her head in.
“Honey, I’m going to the store now,” she said. “What would you like for supper?”
Elvis thought about it for a second and said, “I think I’d like some weenies and sauerkraut.”
She nodded. “Okay, that’ll be fine. I’ll be back shortly.”
I kind of smiled to myself thinking about how much his family was like our family. The parents’ lives were wrapped around their child as they did all they could to support those musical dreams.
Suddenly Elvis and I were alone again. He ran his fingers nervously through his hair. Elvis always seemed to be full of kinetic energy and couldn’t stop fidgeting no matter where he was or what he was doing. His restlessness sometimes made me feel a little nervous. He got up from the edge of the bed and removed the needle from a record that was still playing. The room was suddenly silent. It was the first time we had ever been together with no distractions, and the thought of being alone with him made my heart pound so loudly in my chest I wondered if Elvis could hear it. He reached over and shut the door before slinking over to the chair where I was sitting by the record player. He took my hand, interlocking his fingers with mine as he leaned in close. You know what happened next? Well, I’m a lady, and a lady never kisses and tells.
I didn’t play with Elvis again until a week-long stint through Texas in mid-October. He was the advertised headliner by that point, and our traveling show included Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, Jimmy C. Newman, and Bobby Lord. After a show at the Memorial Hall in Brownwood, we went on to Abilene, Midland, Amarillo, and Odessa.
I wouldn’t see Elvis again until April of 1956. I met up with the tour in Denver, Colorado, and we played twelve cities in thirteen nights, usually two shows per day. By that point we were drawing crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 people per show. I remember the third stop on that tour was in Lubbock, Texas, where we staged two performances for a capacity audience at the Fair Park Coliseum. There was a local singer who opened the show, and someone said we should watch him because he was really good. Elvis thought he was just great. He seemed like a nice kid, but he wasn’t handsome. I have to admit I was into handsome in those days, so I didn’t really appreciate this young man named Buddy Holly until later on. Truth be told, I had eyes for Elvis and that was about it. I didn’t yet have the maturity to know what to look for in an artist, and I didn’t see the raw talent. I was still kind of boy crazy. Or at least pretty Elvis crazy!
I’m embarrassed to say that Johnny Cash didn’t make much more of an impression on me than Buddy did at first. Johnny always seemed like kind of a loner to me. Any time I saw him he was off by himself leaning up against a wall having a cigarette. I didn’t go out of my way to try to talk to him, since he was a bit older than me and was already married with a family. To be honest, I didn’t really care that much for him at first. Daddy and I both thought he was trying to copy Elvis because he had the same three-piece band configuration Elvis did with a lead guitarist and upright bassist behind his rhythm guitar and vocal. Elvis saw his talent before I did. Any time we were all playing a package show together, Elvis would find me and say, “Come here! We’ve got to watch Johnny!”
“Oh, I don’t even like him, Elvis,” I’d say.
He got on to me one time and said, “Johnny’s a great talent. I predict he’s going to be the biggest name in country music. He’ll be a legend.”
I would stand there and watch Johnny’s show from the side of the stage, while Elvis would squat down with a big smile on his face, just totally engrossed in what Johnny was doing. Maybe I was just too focused on Elvis to see it at the time, but of course he was right in his assessment of Johnny. I came to understand what a powerful entertainer he really was in later years, and we became great friends.
Early in the tour Elvis got word that “Heartbreak Hotel” had officially become his first single to sell more than a million copies. Everything was accelerating for him during that time, and it seemed as if he was on a merry-go-round that was spinning faster and faster with each day. Midway through the tour we played two shows in Amarillo, Texas. Late that night, Elvis and his band jumped on a plane and flew to Nashville for a recording session the next day. I believe they recorded “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” That gave us one night off, and Elvis and the boys returned in time for the next set of shows in San Antonio.
Somewhere along the way we played both a matinee and an evening performance. I remember it being a Sunday. Between the two shows Elvis asked me if I would step outside with him for a moment. We were in the parking lot next to one of his pink-and-white Cadillacs. “You know I really like you, Wanda,” he said as he leaned against the car.
“I like you, too, Elvis,” I smiled. He took my hand.
“I was hoping that maybe, if you want to, that you’d be my girl.”
Of course, I said “yes” right away. I don’t know if he’d even gotten the words out completely, but I wasn’t about to hesitate. He was wearing a ring with some itty-bitty chip diamonds in it. He pulled it off his finger.
“I’d be honored if you’d wear this,” he said.
Of course, the minute I got back to the motel room that night, I took a simple gold chain from my jewelry box and proudly put that ring around my neck.
I was thrilled to be Elvis’s girl, and I was thrilled when we had the chance to play in Oklahoma City near the end of the tour. Apparently, some city officials were warned that Elvis’s hip gyrations at the previous night’s show in Tulsa were vulgar. The Chief of Police dispatched dozens of officers with orders to stop the show if things got out of hand. That kind of thing really hurt Elvis. He would tell me, “They’re taking something fun and trying to make it into something dirty. That’s not what I mean by any of it.” It would make him pretty angry when he heard that kind of talk because, to him, what he was doing on stage was just dancing and feeling the music. He was angry that they couldn’t see that the young people just wanted their own music. Elvis told me what the headlines were in Tulsa. He said, “If they think Tulsa was bad, wait until they see what I do tonight.” But, fortunately, the show came off without incident.
The auditorium in Oklahoma City was on the second floor, and when Elvis was coming down the back stairs after the show, it seemed like girls appeared out of nowhere chasing him and trying to touch him. When he finally got in the car he was kind of rumpled up. He had to get his coat back on because they had been pulling at him. Later Mother said, “That poor guy! He’s not going to be able to go anywhere.” Daddy just shook his head. “Elvis is creating a monster, I’m afraid.”