Fifties (75 page)

Phillips was sure the record was a winner and he sent it to a local disc jockey named Dewey Phillips (no relation), who had a show called
Red, Hot and Blue,
on WHBQ. He was very big with the young white kids—Elvis himself had listened faithfully to him almost every night since he was fourteen years old. Dewey Phillips played traditional white artists all the time, but just as regularly, he played the great black singers, blues and gospel. “Dewey was not white,” the black blues singer Rufus Thomas once said in the ultimate accolade. “Dewey
had
no color.” Dewey and Sam, spiritually at least, were kin. If Sam was a man who subscribed to very few local conventions, then Dewey openly liked to flaunt them. He had ended up at WHBQ,
as much as anything else, by being very unsuccessful at anything else he tried. He came from Adamsville, in west Tennessee. As a boy he had loved listening to black music, although he had been assured by his elders that it was the work of the devil. He had visited Memphis as a boy once when he was ten to sing in a Baptist church choir. The lady in charge had taken them to their hotel, the Gayoso, and explained to them that there were two rules: first, they were not to order from room service, since they would eat at churches; second, they were not to wander over to Beale Street. Dewey immediately took a younger boy and went to Beale Street. It had not disappointed him, with its rich black life and music. Eventually, after serving in the army, he came back home and migrated to Memphis. There he had started out working in a bakery. He was fired when he convinced the other bakers that instead of making the regular bread, they should all make loaves shaped like little gingerbread men. Baking, obviously, was not his calling. He next went to work as a stockboy for the W.T. Grant store downtown. There he managed to get himself in the store’s music department and soon was beaming his department’s records over loudspeakers into the street at top volume. That, of course, stopped downtown traffic. He also accompanied them with his own patter by plugging a microphone into the store’s record player. He had invented himself as a disc jockey. All he needed was a radio station.

At the time Memphis had a radio show called
Red, Hot and Blue,
which consisted of fifteen minutes of popular music on WHBQ. Dewey Phillips often told friends that he would do the show for nothing if they would let him try. He went down to WHBQ, asked for a job, and miraculously got it. He was so different, so original, that the management did not know at first whether to fire him or expand the show; within a year he had three hours to himself. He was, in the words of his friend Stanley Booth, both brilliant and terrible as a disc jockey. He could not read a line of copy, and he could not put a record on without scratching it. But he had perfect taste in the music that young people wanted to hear. Soon he was the conduit that hip young white Memphis kids used to hear black music with its powerful beat. Political boss Ed Crump might keep the streets and schools and public buildings segregated, but at night Dewey Phillips integrated the airwaves. Daddy-O-Dewey, he was soon called. Phrases he tossed away casually at night on his show became part of the teenage slang of Memphis the next day. Stumble he might while doing the commercials (and he might even do commercials for people who had not bothered to buy time—he was
always suggesting that his listeners go out and buy a fur-lined Lincoln, even if Lincoln was not an advertiser), but he was wildly inventive.

There were always surprises on his show. He loved having contests as well, and all three of his sons were named during radio contests. He was a man driven by a kind of wonderful madness and an almost sweet desire to provoke the existing establishment, and to turn the world gently upside down. Memphis in those days still had a powerful movie censor, Lloyd Binford, and when Binford had banned an early teen movie, Phillips had played its theme song, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” and dedicated it to Binford: “And this goes out to Lloyd Binford.... How you
doin’,
Lloyd? ... Anyway ...” There he was in clean, well-ordered Memphis, tapping beneath the polite, white surface into the wildness of the city.

On one occasion he decided he wanted to find out how large his listenership was. Nothing as clumsy as demographic polls for Dewey Phillips, particularly since Memphis had just won an award for being the nation’s quietest city—instead, he just told everyone listening to him to blow their horns at 9
P.M.
If they were in their cars they could blow their horns, and if they were in their homes they should go out to their cars and blow the horns. At 9:05 the police chief called the station and told him, “Dewey, you just can’t do this to us—the whole city’s gone crazy, everybody out there is blowing horns.” So Dewey Phillips went back on the air and told his listeners what the chief had just told him. “So I can’t tell you to blow your horns at 11:30.” The faithful went back out and blew their horns at 11:30.

Dewey Phillips had, in his friend Sam Phillips’s words, “a platinum ear” and was connected to young listeners like no other adult. Therefore, he was the first person Sam Phillips thought of when he had Elvis’s first disc. Dewey agreed to play it. The night he did, Elvis was so nervous that he went to a movie by himself. The two songs were such a success that all Dewey Phillips did that night was flip the record back and forth. The switchboard started lighting up immediately. Finally the disc jockey decided he wanted to interview Elvis on the air, and he called Sam Phillips and told him to bring the boy in. The Presleys did not have a phone, but Sam called over to their neighbors and they got Elvis’s mother. Gladys and Vernon Presley had to go looking for their elusive son in the movie theater. “Mama, what’s happening?” he asked. “Plenty, son,” she answered, “but it’s all good.” Off they went to the station. There he was introduced to Dewey Phillips, who was going to interview him. “Mr. Phillips,” he said. “I don’t know nothin’ about being interviewed.” “Just don’t say nothing’ dirty,” Phillips
said. So they talked. Among other things, Phillips deftly asked Elvis where he had gone to high school, and Elvis answered Humes, which proved to the entire audience that yes, he was white. At the end Phillips thanked him. “Aren’t you going to interview me?” Presley asked. “I already have,” Phillips said.

Elvis Aron Presley was born in the hill country of northeast Mississippi in January 1935. It was a particularly poor part of a poor region in a nation still suffering through the Depression; in contrast to other parts of Mississippi, it was poor cotton land, far from the lush Delta 150 miles further west. Yet the local farmers still resolutely tried to bring cotton from it (only when, some thirty years later, they started planting soybeans did the land become valuable), and it was largely outside the reach of the industrial revolution. Presley’s parents were typical country people fighting a daily struggle for survival. Gladys Smith until her marriage and her pregnancy operated a sewing machine and did piecework for a garment company, a rare factory job in the area. Vernon Presley—a man so poorly educated that he often misspelled his own name, signing it Virnon—was the child of a family of drifters and was employed irregularly, taking, whatever work he was offered: perhaps a little farming, perhaps a little truck driving. He lived on the very fringes of the American economy; he was the kind of American who in the thirties did not show up on government employment statistics. At the time of their marriage Gladys was twenty-one, four years older than Vernon. Because they were slightly embarrassed by the fact that she was older, they switched ages on their marriage certificate. Elvis was one of twins, but his brother, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn, a death that weighed heavily on both mother and son.

When Gladys became pregnant, Vernon Presley borrowed $180 from Orville Bean, a dairy farmer he worked for, and bought the lumber to build his family a two-room cabin. The cabin was known as a shotgun shack—because a man could stand at the front door and fire a shotgun and the pellets would go straight out the back door. When Elvis was two years old, Vernon Presley was picked up for doctoring a check from Bean. It had been an ill-conceived, pathetic attempt to get a few more dollars, at most. Friends of Vernon’s pleaded with Bean not to press charges. They would make up the difference. But Bean was nothing if not rigid, and he held firm against their pleas. Vernon Presley could not make bail, and he waited seven months in the local jail before the trial even took place.
He was convicted and sent to Parchman prison in the middle of the Depression for two and a half years. It was a considerable sentence for a small crime, but those were hard times. When he came out times were still hard; he worked in a lumberyard and then for one of the New Deal aid programs for the unemployed, the WPA.

During World War Two he got a job doing defense work in Memphis, eighty miles away. That at least was steady work, even if he was away from home much of the time. After the war, returning veterans had priority for any jobs. Vernon had no skills and was soon out of work again. In the late forties the new affluence rolling quickly across much of the country barely touched people like Vernon and Gladys Presley. They were poor whites. Their possibilities had always been limited. They were people who lived on the margin. Religion was important to them, and when Elvis was nine he was baptized in the Pentecostal church. As a symbol of Christian charity, he was supposed to give away some of his prized possessions, so he gave his comic books to other children.

Because a city like Memphis held out more hope of employment, Vernon Presley moved his family to Memphis in the late forties. There he took a job in a paint factory for $38.50 a week. They had made the move, Elvis said later, because “we were broke, man, broke.” The family was still so poor that it had to live in federal housing—the projects, as they were known. The Presleys paid thirty-five dollars a month for rent, the equivalent of a week’s salary. To some whites, living in the projects was an unspeakable idea, for it was housing that placed them at the same level as blacks; for the Presleys, the projects were the best housing they had ever had.

Even in a high school of his peers, Elvis Presley was something of a misfit. He went to Humes, an all-white high school where he majored in shop. There was no thought of college for him. Not surprisingly, he was shy and unsure of himself. He was bothered by the way his teeth looked. He worried that he was too short. As an adult he always wore lifts in his shoes. He did, however, have a sense that his hair worked for him. Soon he started using pomade; his style, black clothes, shirt collar up in back, hair pomaded into a major wave, was an early form of American punk. His heroes—Brando and Dean—were narcissistic, so too by nature was he. His social life was so limited that he did not know how to slow-dance with a girl; rather, in the new more modern style, he knew how to dance only by himself. His peers deemed him effeminate and different. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a shot at him, particularly the football players. Years later he would tell a Las Vegas audience, “They would see me coming down
the street and they’d say, ‘Hot dog! Let’s get him! He’s a squirrel! He just come down outta the trees!’” His one friend was Red West, a more popular Humes student and a football player. West stopped about five other boys from cutting off Elvis’s hair in the boys’ room one day. “He looked like a frightened little animal,” West said.

The one thing he had was his music. He could play a guitar and play it well. He could not read a note of music, but he had an ear that, in the words of Chet Atkins, the guitarist who supervised many of his early RCA recordings, was not only pure but had almost perfect pitch. He could imitate any other voice he chose. That was his great gift. Some of the other kids suggested he play his guitar at a school picnic, and he did, with surprising success. His homeroom teacher asked him to play it at the school variety show. He did, playing the Red Foley country favorite “Old Shep,” about a boy and his dog. When the dog dies and goes to heaven, the boy does not feel too badly, for “old Shep has a wonderful friend.” For the first time he gained some popularity.

On the surface, the Mississippi he grew up in was a completely segregated world. That was seemingly true even in music. Among the many musical subcultures that flowed across the Mississippi Delta were black rhythm and blues music (called race music in the trade), black gospel, white gospel, which in no small part was imitative of black gospel, and country, or hillbilly, music. Because whites were more influential and affluent than blacks, the last was the dominant strain in the region.

For Elvis Presley, living in a completely segregated world, the one thing that was not segregated was the radio dial. There was WDIA (“the Mother Station of the Negroes,” run, of course, by white executives), which was the black station, on which a young white boy could listen to, among other people, the Rev. Herbert Brewster, a powerful figure in the world of Memphis black churches. A songwriter of note, he composed “Move On Up a Little Higher,” the first black gospel song to sell over a million copies. What was clear about the black gospel music was that it had a power of its own, missing from the tamer white church music, and that power seemed to come as much as anything else from the beat. In addition there was the immensely popular Dewey Phillips. When Elvis listened to the black radio station at home, his family was not pleased. “Sinful music,” it was called, he once noted. But even as Elvis Presley was coming on the scene, the musical world was changing. Certainly, whites had traditionally exploited the work of black musicians, taking
their music, softening and sweetening it and making it theirs. The trade phrase for that was “covering” a black record. It was thievery in broad daylight, but black musicians had no power to protect themselves or their music.

As the decade began, there were signs that young white kids were buying black rhythm and blues records; this was happening in pockets throughout the country, but no one sensed it as a trend until early 1951. In that year a man named Lee Mintz who owned a record store in Cleveland told a local disc jockey named Alan Freed about this dramatic new trend. Young white kids with more money than one might expect were coming into his store and buying what had been considered exclusively Negro music just a year or two before. Freed, something of a disc jockey and vagabond, had a late-night classical music show, and Mintz was pushing him to switch over to a new show catering exclusively to these wayward kids. Mintz told Freed he knew the reason why the taste was changing: It was all about the beat. The beat was so strong in black music, he said, that anyone could dance to it without a lesson. Mintz promised he would advertise himself on Freed’s new program and that he would help find other advertisers if Freed would switch.