Sun Session Debut

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HILLMAN ROCK ROOTS Presents
Sun Records Sessions--Elvis Presley (1954-1955)
Essay by James L. Dickerson

Elvis Presley's Sun Records Sessions began on the evening of July 5, 1954, at a downtown
Memphis recording studio owned by Sam Phillips. When Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black
arrived at Memphis Recording Service, it was a hot, sticky day, with the temperature soaring in
the 90s. Air-conditioning was in use in Memphis at that time, but not used in recording studios
where extraneous noise was always a technical concern.
The session came about after weeks of nudging by guitarist Scotty Moore. Sam had released a
record titled "My Kind of Carryin' On" by Scotty's country band the Starlite Wranglers. The
record hadn't sold well and Scotty was eager to convince Sam to give them another chance.
When the studio owner expressed little interest in another record with the Starlite Wrangers,
Scotty asked what, exactly, he was looking for, pointing out that he could play any type of
music. It didn't have to be country.
Sam, who already had recorded a number one rhythm and blues record with Ike Turner's "Rocket
88," said it wasn't something he could put into in words, explaining cryptically, "I'll know it
when I hear it."
Sitting in on the conversation with Scotty and Sam was Marion Keisker, Sam's receptionist,
business manager and silent partner. She reminded Sam of the young man named Elvis who had
come into the studio a while back to record a birthday song for his mother. She thought he had a
good voice.
"Maybe," Sam said, and changed the subject.
For two weeks Scotty pelted him with questions about when he could call the boy with the
"funny" name. Finally, Sam relented and told Scotty to audition Elvis. If he felt he could carry
the vocals he would schedule a session for them.
On the 4th of July, Elvis met Scotty, along with Starlite Wranglers bassist Bill Black, at Scotty's
home for an informal audition. Afterward, Scotty called Sam and gave him a positive report. He
was upbeat, but not gushing in his evaluation of Elvis's talents. Sam told him to bring Elvis into
the studio the following day, along with bassist Bill Black.
At the first session, no one was sure what they were supposed to do. Elvis had never worked
with Scotty or Bill, so he did not know what to expect. Scotty and Bill were less concerned
about Elvis as they were Sam, a garrulous and enigmatic figure who was known primarily for his
studio work with black musicians such as Howlin' Wolf. He had a reputation for bluntness.
After several hours of traveling down musical dead-ends, they took a break. By then it was
around midnight and the uncirculated air in the studio was rancid. The only way to get a breath
of "fresh" air was to stick your head out the back door into the prickly heat and suck in a lung
full of urban-filtered air. When they returned to their instruments, Elvis suddenly began
strumming his acoustic guitar, singing a blues song, "That's All Right," previously recorded by
Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. Taken by the beat, Bill jumped up and started slapping his bass in
time to the music. Then Scotty joined in on electric guitar.The music was fast and reckless, just
the type of rhythm Scotty preferred. Dating back to his days in the U.S. Navy, especially when
he was seeing service in China during the Communist revolution, Scotty had been experimenting
with flinger slides and bent-string pauses. For the first time, he heard a song that showed him
where those long-festering guitar licks belonged.
Sam heard it, too. When they finished, he stuck his head out of the control room door and asked,
"What are ya'll doing?"
Scotty answered, "Just foolin' around."
"Well, it didn't sound too bad through the doors," he said. "Try it again. Let me get in there and
turn the mics on."
They played the song several times while Sam adjusted the microphones, finally moving Elvis's
microphone closer to his face.
After they felt they had the song down pat, Sam started the tape recorder.
Once they finished, they sat in silence, waiting for a response from Sam.
Finally, after a brief pause, Sam stuck his head out the door and said, "Man, that's good. It's
different. What is it?"
They looked at each other, speechless.
Finally, Scotty said, "Well, you said you were looking for something different."
Sam shocked them by saying they had one side of a record. They needed another song for the
flip side.
Encouraged, they continued for another couple of hours, finally calling it a day at 2 a.m.
The following night, Elvis, Scotty and Bill returned to the recording studio filled with energy and
optimism, although no one had a clue about what to do next. As they did the previous day, they
experimented with different songs. Nothing worked. Finally, Sam told them to take a couple of
days off.
By the time they returned to the studio on Thursday, they were local celebrities. Sam had taken
"That's All Right," to a local deejay, who insisted on playing it on the radio. The song was an
immediate hit.
Again, they got lucky. Using the same strategy of taking a popular song and flipping it to their
liking, they worked up Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky," a beautiful waltz that had been
a country music hit in 1946. They turned it upside down and breathed fire into it, drawing Sam
out of the control room again, shouting jubilantly, "Hell…that's a pop song now."
The two-sided record was released on July 19, 1954, two weeks after it was recorded.
Both sides were wildly popular in Memphis, prompting Sam to send Elvis out on the road to
promote the record. At first they billed themselves as Elvis, Scotty and Bill. Subsequent records
identified them as Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys.
Between July 1954 and November 1955, when Sam announced that he had sold Elvis's recording
contract to RCA Records, Elvis, Scotty, Bill and drummer D.J. Fontana, who had joined the
group in August 1955, recorded eighteen songs in Memphis Recording Service. Not all of the
songs were released by Sun Records. Some were carried over and released by RCA Records.
Among the standouts were "Mystery Train," which became their first Number 1 hit on the
country charts, along with "Good Rockin' Tonight," on the flip side; "That's All Right," which
made “Billboard's” Top 10 country list, along with the flip side, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," and
"Baby, Let's Play House," which peaked at Number 5 on the “Billboard” charts, along with the
flip side, "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone."
In the beginning, Elvis was like a tornado skipping erratically across the musical landscape, his
talents raw, wild, and unfocused; but within a short time he was able to rein in his vocals and
become a master of both seductive nuance and mesmerizing bursts of energy. Scotty was the
perfectionist who worked to find musical counterpoint to Elvis's energetic vocals, setting a new
standard for guitarists with his precise musical licks. Bill was the only stage performer in the
group, the person who entertained Elvis and showed him how to relate to the public. Working in
sync with Bill, D.J. provided the rhythm that transformed high-energy, country-blues selections
into rock 'n' roll.
Whether the magic that occurred during the Sun Sessions was an accident, or a logical amalgam
of diverse musical talents, will be debated for years. What will not be debated is the immense
impact those sessions had on American culture, not just on the genesis of rock 'n' roll, but on
American culture itself, setting in motion social and political changes that ultimately redefined
America in the eyes of the world.
~ James L. Dickerson

July 27, 1954
At lunch Marion Kisker picks up Elvis Presley at the Crown Electric, down the street from the Press-Scimitar building at 495 Union Avenue.
"Memphis Press-Cimator" journalist Edwin Howard, son of the editor, interviews Elvis Presley. Howard remains intrigued by Elvis' story and writes an article the next day full of enthusiasm for his music.
The article was titled "In A Spin" and read: "The 19-year-old Humes High graduate just signed a recording contract with Memphis-based Sun Records and already has a record coming that promises to be Sun's biggest hit ever." Never printed.
What's strange, says Marion Kisker of Sun Records, is that both sides seem equally popular on pop and folk music shows. This guy has something that everyone seems to love. We just brought samples to distributors in other cities, but yesterday we received large orders from Dallas and Atlanta. »
Memphis Press-Cimator photographer Jim Reed remembers:
My first encounter with Elvis was in 1954, when he had just recorded his first songs at the Sun, just down the street from Pres-Simitar. The lady who worked there, Marion Kisker, brought him here one afternoon.
This week I had an evening shift from 15:00 to 23:30. When I was about to go on assignment, one of our reporters dropped this young guy off at our studio and said, "Jim, I need you to take a picture. This is Elvis Presley, he's a singer.
I was 24 at the time...I looked at this person and had to turn my back! I had never heard the name "Elvis" before, and he wore the most random clothes imaginable. His head was down and he was quite shy and looked like he wanted to run away! I thought to myself, Elvis Presley? Is this guy a singer? "
I had to turn to the wall and say to myself, "Sure!" I forced him to sit down and took two pictures, that's all
I asked him to raise his chin and he raised it I took the picture, turned the shutter and his chin was down again. He was a very shy person, very shy. I took the second picture and then he went back to the reporter's office. This was my first meeting with Elvis. "

Marion Keisker

It must never be underestimated the role Marion played in Elvis' life. It was Marion who first laid eyes on Elvis.
After Sun she joined the US air force Elvis had not seen her for many years when in 1960 March 1st Elvis spotted her, Captain Marion (Keisker) MacInnes was stationed in Germany. Elvis told her, "I don't know wether to kiss you or salute! We would not be having a press conference if it weren't for this Lady."
At the Jaycees Ten Outstanding young men of America 1970 awards which Elvis was one, Elvis saw her there and invited her to his table and introduced her to his wife Priscilla and his entourage, telling them "she is the one who made it all possible. Without her I would not even be here."
Years later, Elvis would be quick to remind anyone who would ask that it was in fact Marion Keisker not Sam Phillips who saw his potential.
Marion Keisker MacInnes (September 23, 1917 – December 29, 1989), born in Memphis, Tennessee, was a radio show host, station manager, U.S. Air Force officer, and assistant to Sam Phillips at Sun Records. She is best known for being the first person to record Elvis Presley on July 18, 1953.
Marion is perhaps best known for her role in the launching of Elvis Presley’s career at Sun Records in June 1954, when, as Sun Records secretary, she invited him back to the studio to perform for owner Sam Phillips. But Keisker was much more than secretary; she had a vibrant career in broadcasting, made inroads for women in a male-dominated media industry, and became an activist in the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Keisker is notably left out of the radio history literature, and in this paper I seek to recuperate her contributions and add to the growing field of cultural histories of media. I have culled historical documents to put together a sketch of Keisker’s career and to analyze in-depth a particularly illuminating radio interview she conducted as “Kitty Kelly” in the late 1940s. This was her first major role in radio, on WREC-Memphis, and it is here where she developed her voice as radio announcer and began to challenge, both implicitly and explicitly, gender roles of the U.S. mid-Twentieth Century.
Keisker was alone in the office of Sun Records, which also served as recording studio named "Memphis Recording Service", when Presley recorded two songs "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" for a fee of $3.25. Her exchange with Presley on that occasion has since become part of Elvis lore: I said, "What kind of singer are you?" He said, "I sing all kinds." I said,"Who do you sound like?" He said,"I don't sound like nobody."
1953
Elvis works at Parker Machinists Shop right after graduation. That summer he drops by The Memphis Recording Service, home of the Sun label, Sun Record Company, Inc. and makes a demo acetate of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” for a cost of about $4.00. The studio owner isn’t in, so his assistant, Marion Keisker handles the session. Elvis wants to see what his voice sounds like on a record and he has aspirations to become a professional singer. He takes the acetate home, and reportedly gives it to his mother as a much-belated extra birthday present. By the fall, he is working at Precision Tool Company, and soon changes jobs again, going to work for Crown Electric Company. At Crown, he does various jobs, including driving a delivery truck. He also goes to night school and studies to be an electrician.
January, 1954
Elvis makes another demo acetate at Sun. Sam Phillips, the owner, is in this time and, like Marion Keisker, is intrigued by this unusual looking and sounding young man.
Summer 1954
At Marion Keisker’s suggestion, Sam Phillips calls Elvis into the studio to try singing a song Sam hopes to put out on record. The song is “Without You” and Elvis does not sing it to Sam’s satisfaction. Sam asks Elvis what he can sing, and Elvis runs through a number of popular tunes. Sam is impressed enough to team Elvis up with local musicians Scotty Moore (guitar) and Bill Black (bass) to see if they, together, can come up with something worthwhile. Nothing really clicks until July 5, when after a tedious session, Elvis and the guys break into a sped-up version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.” This song, backed with Blue Moon of Kentucky becomes the first of five singles Elvis will release on the Sun label. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill start performing together, with Scotty acting as the group’s manager. Elvis continues to work at Crown Electric as the group starts to play small clubs and other small time gigs locally and throughout the South, enjoying moderate success with the records and personal appearances. Elvis’ one appearance on the Grand Ole Opry doesn’t go over particularly well, with one of the Opry officials reportedly suggesting that Elvis go back to driving a truck. The Opry is very important at this time. This is a painful disappointment in Elvis’ early career.
Elvis, Scotty, and Bill continue to record and to travel.
October 16, 1954
They appear for the first time on the Louisiana Hayride, a live Saturday night country music radio show originating in Shreveport, Louisiana, broadcast over KWKH Radio. The show is the Grand Ole Opry’s chief competitor, carried by 190 stations in thirteen states. This leads to regular appearances on the Hayride and, in November, Elvis signs a one-year contract for fifty-two Saturday night appearances. This is a great break, but as Elvis’ popularity grows, his commitment to the Hayride prevents him from traveling much outside the South to further his career on a larger scale. During Elvis’ association with the Hayride he meets “Colonel” Tom Parker, a promoter and manager connected with various acts, and connected with the Louisiana Hayride. Parker is also the manager for country star, Hank Snow. A previous Parker client is country star Eddy Arnold.

Elvis Presley on the brink of stardom
By Peter Guralnick
Elvis Presley’s first record (“That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky”) was recorded July 5, 1954. It was released on the Sun label two weeks later. Elvis was 19 years old. He had never appeared anywhere professionally. In fact, he had only met the two members of his band, guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black, the day before the initial session.
On July 30, Elvis made what amounted to his official debut on a country and western jamboree, headlined by Slim Whitman, at Memphis’ Overton Park shell. Even in the midst of a seasoned professional cast and despite a pronounced case of stage fright, he was an immediate sensation. Over the next few weeks, his record proved to be a big hit in Memphis, and he made a number of club appearances. But Sun Records president Sam Phillips had bigger plans.
Phillips, who had pioneered in the recording of blues men like B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner and Little Junior Parker over the previous four years, saw an opportunity for Presley to make a national mark. To that end, Phillips approached Grand Ole Opry head Jim Denny, who was less than enthusiastic but agreed to think about it.
It was a 200-mile ride from Memphis to Nashville, but the four of them were comfortable enough in Sam Phillips' four-door black 1951 Cadillac, with Bill’s bass strapped to the roof. It was Saturday, Oct. 2. Elvis, Scotty and Bill had played their regular Friday-night gig at the Eagle’s Nest; their record, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” was near the top of the charts in Memphis and just beginning to break in Nashville and New Orleans, and they had every reason to feel that they had reached the pinnacle of their musical career—because tonight they were going to play the Opry.
Jim Denny had finally succumbed to Sam’s argument that there was no need to think about putting the boy on as a regular, he didn’t have to think of this as a normal “tryout,” just give the boy a chance. Denny, who had become manager of the Opry in 1947, seemed no more convinced than he had been in the first place—perhaps he was just worn down by Sam’s persistence—but he agreed to give the young man a one-time spot on Hank Snow’s segment of the show. He could perform a single song with his band, the country number “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” If it was worth it to Sam and the boys to drive over just for that, well, then Denny was willing to give them the shot.
In the meantime, Sam had also heard from the Louisiana Hayride, the Opry’s innovative rival in Shreveport, which actually wanted this new act. The Hayride, which Denny referred to derisively as the Opry’s farm club because so many of its big acts eventually defected to Nashville, had discovered Hank Williams in 1948 and broken such stars as Slim Whitman, Webb Pierce, and, most recently, Jim Reeves and Faron Young. But Sam put them off because he explained to Hayride booking agent Pappy Covington, he wanted to play the Opry first. As soon as the boys had fulfilled this prior commitment, he told Pappy, stretching the truth a little, Elvis could appear on the Hayride. There was no doubt in his mind, he said, that Elvis could make a hit with the Hayride audience, and they could set it up for just a week or two after the Opry appearance, but he had committed himself to Denny. Sam was walking a thin line, he knew. He didn’t for a minute want to lose the Hayride, but he wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to see a new, untried artist get his national debut on the hallowed Grand Ole Opry.
Ryman auditorium was like a tattered shrine to the three musicians, none of whom had ever even attended a show at the Opry before. They wandered around the dilapidated building, erected as a tabernacle in 1886 and still retaining the old wooden pews for seats, in something of a daze. They were both overwhelmed at the sense of history contained in the room—the music they had been listening to all of their lives emanated from this cramped little stage—and somewhat disillusioned, too, that the Grand ole Opry was not, well, grander. Backstage, the other musicians mingled freely, exchanging small talk and greeting, tuning up, donning makeup and costumes, without any of the formality or protocol you might have expected from stars but with all of the remoteness, whether real or perceived, of big leaguers sniffing at bushers just up from the minors.
Twenty-one-year-old bass player Buddy Killen came up to the obviously out-of-place young singer and introduced himself. “[Elvis] said, ‘They’re going to hate me.’ I said, ‘They’re not going to hate you. You’re going to be fine.’ He said, ‘If they’d just let me leave, I’d go right now.’” Marty Robbins saw evidence of the same insecurity, but when Elvis spotted Chet Atkins backstage, he introduced himself and then knowing Scotty’s admiration for Atkins’ guitar playing, pulled Scotty over, too, saying, “My guitar player wants to meet you.” Atkins noted with asperity that the kid appeared to be wearing eye makeup.
Probably of all the Opry legends, the one they were most leery of running into was Bill Monroe. Many in the country field continued to view the Sun version of “Blue moon of Kentucky” as a desecration, and even Sam had heard that Monroe was going to take their head off for their untrammeled interpretation of his stately lament. But when they met Monroe, conservatively dressed in dark suit and tie and trademark white hat and at 43 already an elder statesman possessed a dignity that permitted neither insincerity nor informality, he came right out and complimented them. As a matter of fact, he told them, he had cut a new version of the song for Decca, due out next week, that followed their pattern.
There were two additional surprises. Sam Phillips’ assistant, Marion Keisker, left behind in Memphis to keep the studio doors open, abandoned her post and caught a bus to Nashville, where she thought at first she would just stay out in the audience so as not to spook them but before long found her way backstage. Then Bill peeked out at the audience and, to his surprise, discovered his wife Evelyn and Scotty’s wife, Bobbie, in the front row. “I think he was kind of glad to see us,” said Bobbie, “’cause they were wanting to come back to Memphis that night. But when Scotty saw me backstage, it was like he’d seen a ghost.”
At 10:15 Grant Turner announced the Hank Snow segment of the show, sponsored by Royal Crown Cola, and Snow got lost in his introduction of a young man from Memphis who has just made a hit record, let’s give him a nice round of applause, to the point that he forgot the young singer’s name. Elvis bounced out the same way that he always did, as if he had just fallen off a fast-moving train, and did his one number. Scotty and Bill were more nervous than he was; to them, it seemed, there was nowhere to go but down from here, and they could sense the polite, but tepid reception that this was exactly where they were going.
Afterward they were like a boxing management team trying to rationalize defeat. Everyone was nice to them as they gawked and huddled; they’d gotten a good reception, Bobbie and Evelyn insisted, and Bill introduced himself to everyone, laughing and cracking jokes, while Scotty stood off to one side a little stiffly, waiting to be introduced. Before leaving, Sam conferred briefly with Mr. Denny, who confirmed that Elvis Presley did not fit the Opry mold, but, he told Sam, “’This boy is not bad.’ He didn’t give me any great accolades, he just grabbed me by my skinny arm and said, ‘This boy is not bad.’ Well people put down Jim Denny , nobody much liked Jim, he was a damn tough man, but he did me a favor.”
They left not long afterward and wandered down the hill to 417 Broadway, the location of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where they were scheduled to play the famous Midnight Jamboree (which went on the air live from the record store at the conclusion of the Opry broadcast. Someone introduced Elvis to Ernest Tubb, and Tubb, the most gracious and courteous of entertainers, listened patiently as the 19-year-old poured out his love for Tubb’s music and told him that it was his real ambition to sing country music. “He said, ‘They tell me if I’m going to make any money, though, I’ve got to sing [this other kind of music]. What should I do?’ I said, ‘Elvis, you ever have any money?’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ I said, ‘Well, you just go ahead and do what they tell you to do. Make your money. Then you can do what you want to do.’”
Scotty and Bill headed back to Memphis with their wives after the broadcast. They felt simultaneously elated and depressed (they had made it to the big time, even if they were now in all likelihood on the road to oblivion), but for Sam Phillips the evening was an unmitigated triumph. To play the Opry—and then to get approval, however grudging, from Jim Denny and Bill Monroe! Even the criticism would not hurt. It could be used, Sam was firmly convinced, to further the boy’s appeal—if he could just turn around some of this damn rejection he was getting, if he could just straighten out some of the wrongheaded thinking he was encountering, the blind could be made to see, the lame could be made to walk. “I needed the attention I got from the people that hated what I was doing, that acted like” ‘Here is somebody trying to thrust junk on us and classify it as our music.’ Well, f--- them, let them do the classifying. I just had to peak that damn pyramid, or else the damn son of a bitch would have fallen down.” And with Elvis Presley, Sam Phillips was sure he had the means to peak the pyramid.

Elvis Presley’s second single was released six days before his Opry appearance. It was, if anything, an even bolder declaration of intent “That’s All Right,” especially the strident blues number “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” which rocked more confidently than anything they could have imagined in those first, uncertain days in the studio. Maybe Sam still couldn’t diagram the path, but, he felt, they were finally beginning to find their way to “that damn row that hadn’t been plowed.”
They had seized every opportunity they could get into the studio all through August, but Sam was on the road so much, and the band was working so many weekends (while still holding down full-time jobs), that this was easier said than accomplished. On Aug. 19 they spent hours doing take after take of “Blue Moon,” in an eerie, clippity-clop version that resembled a cross between Slim Whitman’s “Indian Love Call” and some of the falsetto flights of rhythm-and-blues “bird” groups (the Orioles, the Ravens, the Larks). After it was all over, Sam wasn’t satisfied that they had anything worth releasing, but he never uttered a word of demurral for fear of discouraging the unfettered freshness and enthusiasm of the singer. “The sessions would go on and on,” said Marion Keisker. “Each record was sweated out. Sam showed patience beyond belief—in a personality that’s not really given to patience.”
The problem did not appear to have so much to do with time, in any case, as with confidence and direction. They had captured the ring once, seemingly by accident, but now no one appeared to have a clear vision of how to capture it again, and Sam was reluctant to impose his own. “I had a mental picture, as sure as God is on His throne, I had a mental picture of what I wanted to hear, certainly not note for note, but I knew the essence of what we were trying to do. But I also knew that the worst thing I could do was to be impatient, try to force the issue—sometimes you can make a suggestion just [to change] one bar and you kill the whole song. And sometimes you can be too cocky around people who are insecure and just intimidate them. I mean, as far as actually saying, ‘Hey, man, don’t be scared,’ I’ve never told anybody in my life not to be scared of the microphone—don’t go calling attention to the thing you know they are already scared of. I was never a real forward person, because I didn’t give a damn about jumping out in front to be seen, but I tried to envelop them in my feelings of security.”
Over the course of the next few weeks they made several attempts at “Satisfied,” Martha Carson’s rousing spiritual hit from 1951, and “Tomorrow Night,” the Lonnie Johnson blues ballad that Elvis had crooned so often to his girlfriend Dixie. They made any number of false starts on other tunes, all of them erased because tape was expensive, after all, and they weren’t going anywhere. The slow numbers, Sam said, “would hang you out to dry,” but he was determined to give Elvis’ creative imagination free play. He was equally determined, said Marion, not to release anything even a jot below the standard they had already set; he wanted to be sure he had done all that he could to make every record as good as it was “humanly possible to make it.” From Sam’s point of view: “I wanted simplicity, where we could look at what we were hearing mentally and say, ‘Man, this guy has just got it.’ But I wanted some biting bulls---, too. Everything had to be a stinger. To me every one of those sessions was like I was filming ‘Gone With the Wind.’”
Finally, starting on Sept. 10, they hit a streak—once again it seemed almost as if they stumbled onto it by accident, but when they did, it was, as Sam Phillips said, as if it had been waiting for them all along. They cut “Just Because,” a rollicking, honky-tonk blues that the Shelton Brothers had originally recorded as the Lone Star Cowboys in 1933. The great good humor and burbling effervescence of the new trio version can be traced in equal parts to Elvis’ confident exploitation of his gospel-learned technique (here for the first time we hear the characteristic Presley drop to a slurred lower register), Bill Black’s almost comically thumping bass and Scotty’s increasingly rhythm-driven guitar. “It was almost a total rhythm thing,” Scotty said. “With only the three of us, we had to make every note count.” Although Sam never released this cut or the next one either, a weepy version of Jimmy Wakely’s 1941 “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)” with a tagged-on double-time ending, both are characterized by the kind of playfulness and adventurousness of Spirit that Sam was looking for, the fresh, almost “impudent” attitude that he was seeking to unlock.
With “I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine,” an even more unlikely transformation took place. Originally written for the Disney animated feature “Cinderella” by Mack David (brother of the celebrated pop composer Hal David), the song didn’t make the film scores final cut, but it was popularized in 1950 by both Patti Page and Dean Martin. The rhythmic approach couldn’t have been more different, but it was Martin’s version on which Elvis’ is clearly based; for all the energy that Elvis, Scotty and Bill impart to the song, and for all the high spirits of Elvis’ vocalizing, it is Martin’s lazily insouciant spirit that comes through. It's as if Dennis the Menace met the drawling English character actor George Sanders. “That’s what he heard in Dean,” said Sam, “that little bit of mischievousness that he had in his soul when he cut up a little bit—[that’s why] he loved Dean Martin’s singing.”
With the last song of the session, Wynonie Harris’ R&B classic “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” everything finally fell into place. By this time, everyone may have been getting a little testy, and no one was really sure whether they had anything, but as Scotty said, “Sam had an uncanny knack for pulling stuff out of you. Once you got a direction, he’d work you so hard you’d work your butt off, he’d make you so mad you’d want to kill him, but he wouldn’t let go until he got that little something extra sometimes you didn’t even know you had.” Sam would insist that they play nothing but rhythm, he would have them change keys just when they finally got used to the one they were in, and he called for tempos so slow sometimes that everyone was ready to scream. “A lot of times it was a tempo that I absolutely knew they weren’t going to like, but we were in a situation where we just weren’t getting anywhere, and when they came back [to the original tempo], it was like they’d hit a home run.”
To Marion Keisker it was like a puzzle to which only Sam had the key. “I still remember the times when everyone would be so tired, and then some little funny thing would set us off—I’d see Elvis literally rolling around on the floor, and Bill Black just stretched out with his old broken-down bass fiddle, just laughing and goofing off. It was a great spirit of—I don’t know, everyone was trying very hard, but everyone was trying to hang very loose through the whole thing. [Sometimes] if Elvis would do something absolutely extraordinary and somebody would hit a clinker or something would go wrong before the tape was completed, Sam would say, “Well, let’s go back, and you hold on to what you did there. I want that.’ And Elvis would say, ‘What did I do? What did I do?’ Because it was all so instinctive that he simply didn’t know.”
Sam’s one organizing principle was that it had to be fun. “I could tolerate anything, we could have tensions as long as I knew that we all had confidence in what we were trying to do, and I could get everybody relaxed to the point where they could hear and react to something without the threshold of apprehension where you almost get to a point where you can’t do anything right. Every time we did a number, I wanted to make sure… that everybody enjoyed it.”
In the case of this final number, that sense of enjoyment comes through from the very first note, as Elvis’ voice takes on a burr of aggression that is missing from the previous recordings, the band for the first time becomes the fused rhythm instrument that Sam had been seeking all along, and there is a sense of driving, high-flying good times almost in defiance of societal norms. “Have you heard the news?” is the opening declaration, drawn out and dramatic. “There’s good rocking tonight.”
The other dramatic element to declare itself was the quality that Sam thought he had sensed in Elvis from the start, that strange, unexpected impulse that had led the boy to launch himself into “That’s All right” in the first place—it seemed to come out of nowhere, and yet, Sam felt, he heard something of the same feeling in the sentimental ballads, too. He equated the insecurity that came through so unmistakably in the boy’s stance and demeanor with the sense of inferiority—social, psychological, perceptual—that was projected by the great Negro talents he had sought out and recorded. Sam couldn’t be sure, he thought he sensed in Elvis a kindred spirit, someone who shared with him a secret, almost subversive attraction not just to black music but to black culture, to an inchoate striving, a belief in the equality of man. This was something that Sam felt could never be articulated; each man doomed to stumble in his own darkness, if only because the stakes were so high.
“I had to keep my nose clean. They could have said, “This goddamn rebel down here is gonna turn his back on us. Why should we give this nigger-loving son of a bitch a break?” It took some subtle thinking on my part—I’m telling you [some] resolute facts here. But I had the ability to be patient. I was able to hold on almost with a religious fervor, but definitely subdued—I wasn’t looking for no tall stumps to preach from. And I sensed in him the same kind of empathy. I don’t think he was aware of my motivation for doing what I was trying to do—not consciously anyway—but intuitively he felt it. I never discussed it—I don’t think it would have been very wise to talk about it, for me to say, ‘Hey, man, we’re going against …’ Or, ‘We’re trying to put pop music down and bring in black …’ The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis had to be one of the biggest things that ever could have happen to us, though. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music—but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think? I went out into this no-mans land, and I knocked the s--- out of the color line.”
Sam knew that he had found a kindred spirit in other ways as well. Over the course of the next month, as he worked at trying to set up the Opry appearance, as he took around an acetate of the new single and encountered the same resistance in Nashville from old friends like WLAC deejay Gene Nobles and one-stop record distributors Randy Wodd and Ernie Young, all strictly rhythm-and-blues men, he nevertheless knew that his instincts had not been wrong. Getting to know the boy a little better, getting him to open up a little more, having the chance to talk to him not just about music but about life and love and women, he sensed a potential that even he had not fully anticipated. “I was amazed. Here I am 12 years older than him, I’m 31 and he’s 19, and I’ve been exposed to all kinds of music and lived through the damn Depression, and yet he had the most intuitive ability to hear songs without ever having to classify them, or himself, of anyone I’ve ever known outside of Jerry Lee Lewis and myself. It seemed like he had a photographic memory for every damn song he ever heard—and he was one of the most introspective human beings that I’ve ever met. You see, Elvis Presley knew what it was like to be poor, but that didn’t make him prejudiced. He didn’t draw any lines. And like [Billboard editor] Paul Ackerman said, you have to be an awful smart person or dumb as hell (and you know he wasn’t dumb) to put out that kind of thinking.”

Sam called Pappy Covington, the talent booker for The Hayride, on the Monday after the Opry appearance and settled on a date less than two weeks away. The Hayride was a little more than 6 years old. It had been predated by a similar program, the KWKH Saturday Night Roundup, before the war and was probably the second-most popular hillbilly program on the air, with a 50,000 watt clear-channel signal that rivaled the Opry’s, reaching up to 28 states, and a CBS hookup that enabled it to reach 198 stations for an hour on the third Saturday of every month.
The hallmark of the Hayride was innovation, and it was as the Opry’s brash younger cousin that the Hayride really made its mark. Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, the Carlisles, David Houston, Jim Reeves—all debuted on the Hayride before eventually lighting out for Nashville, and under the leadership of Horace Logan, it continued to be a haven for new talent and fast paced variety. The Hayride audiences in the 3,800-seat Municipal Auditorium showed the same kind of enthusiasm as the performers, and Logan placed microphones out among the crowd to register its reaction, whether to something that was going out over the air or to longtime announcer Ray Bartlett (who broadcast during the day as rhythm-and-blues deejay Groovey Boy) doing unrestrained somersaults and back flips onstage. Shreveport was a lively music town, just on the cusp of oil influence and with the kind of unassuming racial mix (nothing like desegregation, of course, but with two populations living cheek by jowel, locked in an inescapable cultural alliance) that gave Memphis its own musical flavor. The Hayride had everything, in fact, except for an aggressive booking agency to support its acts (Pappy Covington had the job only because he had a lease on the building) and record companies to sign them. This was the principle reason for the one-way migration to Nashville, but in the fall of 1954 it looked as if the supply of new talent might be inexhaustible and the Hayride had grown accustomed to thumbing its nose at the Opry, which Horace Logan referred to frequently as “the Tennessee branch of the Hayride.”
Sam, Elvis, Scotty and Bill set out for Shreveport, a good seven- or eight-hour ride from Memphis, not long after the boys got off work at their regular Friday-night gig at the Eagle’s Nest. They missed the turnoff at Greenville Miss., because Bill had everyone laughing so hard at one of his jokes, and then Scotty almost hit a team of mules as they struggled to make up time. When they finally got to Shreveport, they checked into the Captain Shreve Hotel downtown, but then they had to wait forever while Elvis combed his hair. Sam took the boys around to meet Pappy, who made them feel “like four hundred million dollars, just this kindly, fatherly old man who made you feel like you were the greatest thing that could ever walk into his office. I thought that was the best thing that could happen for these young men and even myself.”
From there, he and Elvis went and paid their respects to disc jockey T. Tommy Cutrer, who had broken “That’s All Right” on KCIJ. Elvis wearing a typical black and pink outfit and according to T. Tommy “his hair was long and greasy and he didn’t look clean. My wife commented afterwards; she said, ‘That boy needs to wash his neck.’” T. Tommy, a highly astute, charming and capable man who kept a little band of his own at the time and went on to become a Tennessee sate senator and a top Teamsters official, still had doubts about how far this boy was going to go, and Elvis scarcely opened his mouth the whole time. But Sam was such a believer, and T, Tommy was nothing if not a pragmatist, so he figured, Well, let’s just see where it goes.
From there Sam made the rest of his rounds. He stopped by Stan’s Record shop at 728 Texas St., just around the corner from the auditorium, where they chatted with Stan Lewis, a prematurely white-haired 27-year-old veteran of the music business who had started out supplying five jukeboxes from the back of his parents’ Italian grocery store. Stan had known Sam Phillips ever since Sam first went into the business. As the principal independent distributor in the area, he was without question interested in this new artist—but not too interested, because not only was the artist unknown, the genre was untried. Still, Stan was always open to new talent, he told Sam; what was good for one was good for all.
Elvis meanwhile drifted over to the auditorium. It was bigger than the Opry, with spacious dressing rooms for the stars and a large common dressing room on the second floor. The folding chairs on the floor could be taken up for dances or basketball exhibitions, and the balcony curved around on either side of the stage, giving the room a natural echo. He walked out on the stage with his eyes fixed on the floor, looked up once briefly as if measuring the crowd, and then walked back to the hotel. The Negro shacks in the Bottoms, just a few blocks from the grand auditorium entrance, were not much different than the ram shackle structures of Shake Rag, the poor black neighborhood in Tupelo, or the primitive shotguns of South Memphis; Shreveport’s bustling downtown just a couple of blocks away was busy and full of life, and when he ran into Scotty and Bill in the hotel coffee shop, Bill already had his eye on a pretty waitress…
When Elvis arrived back at the auditorium that night it was completely different, transformed by the presence not just of an audience and musicians in colorful Western outfits but by the almost palpable anticipation that something was going to happen. He was wearing a pink jacket, white pants, a black shirt, a brightly colored clip-on bow tie and the kind of two-tone shoes that were known as co-respondent shoes, because they were the kind that a snappy salesman or a co-respondent in a divorce case might be expected to wear. Scotty and Bill were wearing matching Western shirts with decorative bibs and dark ties. Bill’s battered bass looked as if it were held together with baling wire, Elvis cradled his child-size guitar, and only Scotty’s handsome Gibson ES 295 lent a touch of professional class to the trio. But everyone was taken with the boy. Pappy Covington greeted Sam and the boys warmly, as if he hadn’t seen them in months. Even Horace Logan, renowned not just for his impresario’s instincts but for his frosty air of self-congratulation, seemed to take to the boy—there was something about him that brought out almost a protective quality, even in seasoned professionals.
Sam left to take his seat in the audience. Although he had put up a brave front all day, he really didn’t know how it was going to come out, and he felt like he should do his best to at least try to cue up a sympathetic response from the crowd. He had to admit that he was worried; the boy looked as if he was scared to death, and even though you could rationalize that they were all experienced veterans by now—all those nights at the Eagle’s Nest, the original triumph at the Overland Park and of course their Opry appearance—in another way everyone knew that this could be the end of the line.
Horace Logan was out onstage. “Is there anyone from Mississippi? Anyone from Arkansas? Let’s hear it from the folks from Oklahoma. Now who here’s from Louisiana? Now how many of y’all are from the great state of Texas?” A mighty roar went up as the Western Union clock on the wall registered 8 o’clock precisely and the band struck up the familiar Hayride theme, based on the old Negro “mistrel” song, “Raise a Ruckus Tonight.” “Come along, everybody come along,” the audience all joined in, “while the moon is shining bright/We’re going to have a wonderful time/At the Louisiana Hayride tonight.”
A tall, skinny singer from Shreveport with a television show in Monroe sidled up to the new sensation—he was barely 20 himself and had been knocked out by Elvis Presley ever since hearing the first record at Jiffy Fowler’s Twin City Amusements, a jukebox operation in West Monroe. “I said, ‘Hello, Elvis, my name is Merle Kilgore.’ He turned around and said, ‘Oh, you worked with Hank Williams.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You wrote “More and More” [a No. 1 hit for Webb Pierce in the fall of 1954].’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I want to meet Tibby Edwards.’ It was the first thing he said to me. Tibby recorded for Mercury, and he was a star. I said, ‘He’s my buddy, we room together here in Shreveport.’ And I went and got Tibby and introduced him to Elvis. That’s how we got to be friends.”
“JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO,” intoned announcer Frank Page’s impressively measured radio voice, “ a young man from Memphis, Tenn., recorded a song on the Sun label, and in just a matter of a few weeks that record skyrocketed right up the charts. It’s really doing good all over the country. He’s only 19 years old. He has a new, distinctive style. Elvis Presley. Let’s give him a nice hand … Elvis, how are you doing this evening?”
“Just fine, How are you, sir?”
“You all geared up with your band—“
“I’m all geared up!”
“To let us hear your songs?”
“Well, I’d like to say how happy we are to be out here. It’s a real honor for us to hav—get a chance to appear on the Louisiana Hayride. And we’re going to do a song for you. You got anything else to say, sir?”
“No, I’m ready.”
“We’re going to do a song for you we got on the Sun record, it goes something like this…” And with that he launched into the first side of his first Sun single.
The cheers that went up from the audience were encouraged by Frank Page and Horace Logan as they stood to the side of the Lucky Strike backdrop. The microphones hanging out over the floor were turned up when Scotty took a somewhat uncertain solo, and the audience politely responded. Elvis was visibly nervous, his knees were practically knocking together, and the jackknife action of his legs was about all, Sam Phillips was convinced, that was preventing him from blowing his brains out. The reaction was not all that different from the one he had gotten on the Opry—he was so ill at ease it was hard for the audience to really like him, even though it was clear to Sam that they might want to do just that, that they were ready, like Memphis audiences, to respond to the boy’s charm.
In between shows Sam went backstage to talk to Elvis. Merle Kilgore noticed them off in a corner huddled together as Sam exhorted Elvis to just relax: The people were there to see him, just let them see what you got, put on your kind of show, if it didn’t work, well, the hell with it, at least we can say we tried. Elvis, Merle noted, looked like he was scared stiff. Sam Phillips went to take his seat among the audience; after a little while the trio came out to do their two numbers, but this time it was entirely different. Much of the younger audience from the first show had stayed for the second, and now they were ready for what the new singer had to offer. For Sam it was a moment never to be forgotten.
“There was a college up in Texarkana where Elvis records had gotten hot, and some of the young people from that college had turned up. Well, when he got through that first number, they were on their feet—and not just them either. Some big fat lady—I mean, it took an effort for her to get up, and she got up and didn’t stop talking, right in the middle of the next number, she didn’t know who I was, she just said, ‘Man, have you ever heard anything that good?’ And, honestly, the tonal impact couldn’t have compared with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, or the Carlisles, who had been on the week before—I mean, they were pros. But Elvis had this factor of communication, I think the audience saw in him the desire to please, he had that little innocence about him, and yet he had something about him that was almost impudent in a way, that was his crutch. He certainly didn’t mean to be impudent, but he had enough of that along with what he could convey that was just beautiful and lovely—and I’m not talking about his physical beauty, because he didn’t look that pretty then or that good looking, by conventional standards he should’ve been thrown off that stage. But I calculated that stuff in my mind: Are they going to resent him with his long sideburns—that could be a plus or a minus. But when he came through like he did, it was neither. He stood on his own.”
He did the same two numbers that he had the first show—there were no encores, because Mr. Logan was very strict about encores, you didn’t take one unless there was e genuine eruption of the sort that overwhelmed Hank Williams when he sang “Lovesick Blues” seven times in a row and could have kept going all night. For Elvis and Scotty and Bill it wasn’t anything like that, but all three grew visibly more confident, and Elvis, for all the terror that had just engulfed him, responded warmly to the crowd’s enthusiasm for him. Some of the Hayride veterans, like 27 year old Jimmy “C” Newman, who had just had his big hit with “Cry, Cry Darling,” regarded the proceedings with a certain amount of suspicion. “I’d never seen anything like it before. Here comes this guy, I guess you could almost call him an amateur, rings of dirt on his neck, but he had it all right from the start. He didn’t work into it, he just knew what he was going to do. We’d just stand in the wings and shake our heads. ‘It can’t be, it can’t last, it’s got to be a fad.’
“I think he scared them a little [in the first show],” said Merle Kilgore. “He was really on the toes of his feet singing, I think they thought he was going to jump off the stage. But when he came back out, he destroyed them—by now they knew he wasn’t going to jump off the stage and beat them, and they absolutely exploded.”
“What he did,” said Jimmy “C” Newman, “was he changed it all around. After that we had to go to Texas to work, there wasn’t any work anywhere else, because all they wanted was someone to imitate Elvis, to jump up and down on the stage and make a fool of themselves. It was embarrassing to me to see it—Elvis could do it, but few others could.”
Ref: https://sunrecordcompany.com/Marion_Keisker.html

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