Wolf was right, of course, but I never thought the world would come around to that point of view. Elvis Presley, Bluesman? It sounds a little far-fetched, even though this was the very title that my friends and I conferred on Elvis in fantasy as we were growing up and discovered, one by one, both the songs on this record and others like them buried on albums, disguised as Christmas offerings, obscured as the B-sides of singles. Elvis continued to sing the blues, obviously because he wanted to. No one was pushing him to record this sort of material, and it seemed to us over the years as if he was transmitting a kind of secret message, keeping faith with his roots and his fans as he delivered some of his most engaged, and engaging, performances (often in the midst of an utter wasteland of surrounding material) on songs that recalled his earliest sides. His first record ("That's All Right"), after all, was a blues. The first source of cultural confusion that he provoked was primarily racial (when he went on the radio in Memphis immediately after the release of his first single, disc jockey Dewey Phillips immediately established the name of the high school from which he had recently graduated, simply to dispel the widespread assumption that he was black). And if he didn't exactly fit the stereotype -well, neither did Howlin' Wolf, neither does B.B. King; individuation is the essence of the blues. At its best this is truly a music of personal expression, not happy, not sad, not limited to any musical formula, but sui generis, engaging the singer on whatever terms he happens to choose. And in the end who could be more sui generis than Elvis Presley, a bluesman who yearned to be saved, a rocker who aspired to sing like Dean Martin, a convention-scatterer who prized convention, a white man singing the blues?

The proof should be in the music - and it is. From the opening notes of Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby" (introduced by Elvis' emphatically strummed rhythm guitar) to the impassioned version of Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas Baby" that closes the album, what we get here is a singer who is altogether absorbed, and altogether at - so much so that he doesn't want to let it go and in several instances just keeps mashing home with his material down on the lyrics, repeating a verse over and over (like Wolf, or his favorite gospel singers) until he has wrung every last ounce of emotion from it. There's every kind of blues here, from the intensity of "Stranger In My Own Home Town", a Percy Mayfield tune that Elvis transforms into a very personal metaphor even in the midst of some of the most screwy production work Chips Moman ever did (but it works!), to the irrepressible high spirits of "Ain't That Loving You Baby" (taken at a breakneck pace in this hitherto unreleased alternate version, which thankfully omits the Jordanaires). There's the casual insouciance of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "So Glad You're Mine," the breathtaking beauty of Lonnie Johnson's blues ballad "Tomorrow Night" (which in this also unreleased Sun demo version is taken almost a capella) along with the tough rhythm and blues stance of "Down In The Alley" and "One Night (Of Sin)'' - yes, these are the original, un bowdlerized lyrics. Sometimes the instrumentation is a little shaky, occasionally the production may falter, but Elvis is always idiomatic, lyrically at ease, rhythmically confident, never doubting for a moment that when he growls "Play those blues, boy," his accompanists will respond in kind. When his voice fails him (on the "Hi-Heel Sneakers" session he seems to have had a cold, as well as to have pitched the song too low), he improvises like a bluesman, making a virtue out of necessity and creating out of his hoarseness a sense of wordless you feel as if on each of these songs Elvis has been set free. There is no need to menace. The whole album is like that - worry about image, there is no need to worry about effect. He remains on each of the cuts the same shiny-eyed teenager who showed up in the Sun studio in Memphis one day and declared to label owner Sam Phillips (who had himself declared already that he was looking for a white boy with "the Negro sound and the Negro feel") that he was a "sucker" for the blues.

In the early 1960s, when Elvis was out of style, he seemed to lose faith in himself and his music. Not surprisingly the signal for his regeneration was a series of blues singles ("Big Boss Man'', "Guitar Man'', ''Hi-Heel Sneakers'', ''U.S Male") that went largely unnoticed at the time, and the '68 TV Special, whose centerpiece was a nakedly intimate, almost embarrassingly spontaneous live concert he did with his original Sun sessionmates (now packaged on video as ''One Night with You''), which focused not surprisingly on the blues. In the end I don't think there is any question that this is what Elvis will be remembered for: the feeling that he created, not necessarily the fashion. And that's what you get on this album in abundance: the pure feeling of Elvis' music, unencumbered by myth or self-consciousness, the very sound that first rocked the world.

- Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records

It was on a hot summer day in 1953 that a young man, just out of high school, first showed up all the door of the Memphis Recording Service, a custom studio whose motto read ''We record anything – anywhere – anytime''. For a few minutes he paced nervously outside the plate-glass window clutching a beat-up guitar, then finally plunged into the small outer office whose reception area was already filled to capacity by the three or four customers waiting to make a "personal" record of their own for just $3.98 plus tax. Sitting behind the desk jammed to the left of the door was an attractive woman in her mid-thirties, who took the young man's name and politely asked him to take a seat while he waited his turn. "(At first) I wondered if he wanted a handout'', Marion Keisker later recalled. "We get a lot of drifters along Union Avenue. His hair was long and shaggy, and he was wearing khaki work clothes and was dirty. Of course he had his guitar''.

"W"ho do you sound like''> Mrs. Keisker asked, just to make conversation.
"l don 't sound like nobody'', said the young man politely.

When it finally came his turn to record, Marion Keisker ushered the young man back info the little studio where blues singers B.B. King and Howlin Wolf and Ike Turner had all cut their first sides for Memphis Recording Service owner Sam Phillips, who had a leasing arrangement with the Chess and Modern labels in Chicago and Los Angeles. Phillips, who had recently started his own label, Sun, was just about to go out for lunch, so Marion set up the acetate disc cutter herself and, halfway through the young man's performance of his first song, an old Ink Spots number called "My Happiness'', she decided to make a reference tape as well. His guitar playing was rudimentary, and his singing style "changed every eight bars'' as he swung erratically from a thin tenor to a somewhat wobbly bass and back again - but Marion felt there was something "differed'' about his voice and she thought Sam would, too. She got about a third of "My Happiness" on tape and all of his second song, another Ink Spots number called "That's When Your Heartaches Begin'', complete with recitation. She noted down his address and a neighbor's telephone number on a piece of paper that was headed: Elvis Presley. Good ballad singer. Hold''.

The young man returned some six months later, on January 4, 1954, and recorded two more slow numbers, this time in a western style, "Casual Love Affair" and "I'll Never Stand In Your Way''. On this occasion it was 31-year-old Sam Phillips who noted the singer's name and the fact that he was "a good ballad singer''. If anything suited to his style were to come up in a commercial vein, Sam assured the young truck driver, he would call him. "I had never sung anything but slow music and ballads in my life at that time'', said Elvis Presley, reminiscing just two years later.

He stopped by the studio often in the next few months, trying out songs and seeking out advice, but Sam Phillips didn't call him for anything even resembling a session until June. Phillips had gotten a demonstration record that spring from Peer Publishing in Nashville on a song called "Without You'' and, struck by the soulful quality in the singers voice, had contacted Peer to see if he could put out the demo on Sun. No one at Peer even knew the name of the singer, though; it was just a young black man who had been hanging around the studio.

"What about the kid with sideburns''? said Marion Keisker.
''If you can get him over here.. said Phillips.
I called and asked him at his convenience to come see us'', recalled Marion. "l turned around, and there was Elvis coming through the door. I think he ran the way''.

As good an idea as if may have seemed to every one involved, it didn't work out the way that any of them planned. For whatever reason, Elvis Presley couldn't capture the special quality that Sam Phillips had heard in that anonymous black man's voice and Sam Phillips was definitely looking for something different. For Phillips, who had started out as a radio announcer and engineer in his hometown Florence, Alabama, individuality had always been the one quality he had most pursued and prized. In Memphis he had made his reputation broadcasting the big bands on a national hookup for the Hotel Peabody Skyway, but he soon grew disillusioned with the way those bands were ''programmed''. Every orchestra, every number sounded alike. It bored me, and I assumed it also bored the public. It just seemed to me that (the Negro people) were the only ones who had any freshness left in their music''. That was why he had started the Memphis Recording Service in 1950, "just to make records with some of (the) great Negro artists''. And it was why he had started his own record label two years later. He had never, he boasted at the time, "made a record with an established star yet", and he was looking even then for the same distinctiveness that he continues to seek to this day.

"Without You" was simply not the right vehicle to bring it out in this singer. At Phillips' instigation the young man ran through every song in his repertoire, including "Rag Mop'', a host of Billy Eckstine favorites, and just about every number in the Dean Martin songbook. Sam Phillips wasn't sure just what he head but he knew he heard something. "I suppose it was all the gospel singing Elvis had done that gave me a hint of that special thing'', he said a year or two later. Marion Keisker had evidently heard the same thing when she originally noted the name. ''Over and over," she told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins, "I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars'''.

At this same time there was a young guitarist in Memphis named Scotty Moore who also had a vision. Moore, recently out of the Navy and working as a hatter in in his brother's dry-cleaning establishment, had just cut a record for Sun with the group he was fronting, Doug Poindexter and the Starlite Wranglers. The record, "My Kind Of Carrying On'', has been pointed to as a seminal step in the development of rockabilly music, but if it in fact represented the seed of the revolution, it was a very modest seed that remained to be planted. For Scotty Moore if was contact with Sam Phillips that crystallized his sense of where the music was going.

"He knew there was a crossover coming'', says Scotty. "He foresaw it. I think that recording all those black artists had to give him an insight; he just didn't know where that insight would lead. Well, Sam and I got to be pretty good friends, just by my hanging around the studio at the time. It got to be an almost daily thing, fact, I would get through work and just drift down to the studio, and we would sit there over coffee at Miss Taylor's Cafe next door and say to each other, ''What is it?''.

That was where Sam Phillips first mentioned Elvis Presley's name to Scotty Moore "The best I can remember, he can sing pretty good'', Sam said. Well, that started me to thinking, and every day after that I would ask him, Did you call the guy? No, ''Did you call the guy? After a couple of weeks of this - either me or Marion bothering him all the time - he finally went back to the studio one day and actually came up with the number. He fold me, 'You get him to come over the house and see what you think of him'. Which I did''.

"Bill Black (the bass player in the Starlite Wranglers) lived just a couple of doors down, and he came down and listened for a while. Well, you know, Elvis came in, he was wearing a pink suit and white shoes and duck-tail, I thought my wife was going to go out the back door. We sat around a couple of hours going through a bit of everything - Marty Robbins, Billy Eckstine, Hank Snow, Eddy Arnold, you name it. After he left Bill came back and said, do you think? I said, 'Well, he sings good, but I can't really say he knocks me out.' This was on a Sunday afternoon. The next day I told Sam the same thing, and he called Elvis to set up an audition''.

''A few days later, I believe it was the following Monday night (this would have been July 5, 1954, following that June 27 initial meeting), Elvis came in for the audition. Sam just wanted to see what he sounded like on tape, because quite naturally you can sound quite a bit different in the studio than sitting around the living room singing. It wasn't intended to be a session - that was the reason just Bill and I were there. Well, we tried three or four things. ''Love You Because''' I believe was the first thing we actually put on tape. Then we were taking a break, I don't know, we were having Cokes and coffee, and all of a sudden Elvis started singing a song, jumping around and just acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass and he started acting the fool, too, and, you know, I started playing with 'em. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open - I don't know, he was either editing some tape or doing something - and he stuck his head out and said, you doing?' And we said don't know'. 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again'''.

And that, according to Scotty Moore, was the genesis of "That's All Right'', a free-flying blues with a country beat that sounds - for all the work that went into it - as fresh and spontaneous as the most spontaneous Howlin' Wolf blues that Sam Phillips ever put on wax. The next night the trio came up with "Blue Moon Of Kentucky'', a reworking of the Bill Monroe classic arrived at under similar circumstances, and by the end of the week Sam Phillips had a two-sided acetate to deliver to three Memphis disc jockeys. Country disc jockeys Uncle Richard and Sleepy Eye John jumped on the bluegrass tune, but it was the irrepressible Dewey Phillips, a Memphis taste maker whose role in the popularization of rock and and rhythm and blues cannot be overstated, who really put the record across. He played it over and over again, first one side, then the other, while the unwitting subject of all this furor went to the movies (a western double bill). "When the phone calls and telegrams started to come in," Dewey told writer Stanley Booth, "I got hold of Elvis' daddy, Vernon. He said Elvis was down at Suzore's No. 2 Theatre. 'Get him over here', I said, and before long Elvis came running in. Sit down, I'm gone interview you', I said. He said, 'Mr. Phillips, I don't know nothing about being interviewed'. Just don't say nothing dirty', I told him''.

"He sat down, and I said I'd let him know when we were ready to start. I had a couple of records cued up, and while they played we talked. I asked him where he went to high school, and he said, 'Humes.'I wanted to get that out, because a lot of people had thought he was colored. Finally I said, All right, Elvis, thank you very much.'Aren't you gone interview me?' he asked. 'I already have', I said. The mike's been open the whole time'. He broke out in a cold sweat''.

The record was released on July 19, just two weeks after it was recorded. On July 27, Marion Keisker brought a very uncomfortable - looking Elvis Presley down to the Memphis Press-Scimitar building, where he was interviewed by theater critic Edwin Howard (who would later make a record of his own for Sun). "Marion said he was a truck driver'', recalled Howard, "and he could only come during his lunch hour. I'll never forget.. .he walked in there looking like the wrath of God. Pimples all over his face. Duck-tail hair. Had a funny-looking thin bow tie on. He was very hard to interview. About all I could get out of him was yes and no''.

On July 30 Elvis appeared at an outdoor concert at the Overton Park Shell headlined by Slim Whitman. He didn't go over very well at the afternoon show, where he sang mostly ballads. In the evening he came back with ''Good Rockin' Tonight'', and the shock was heard all around the world. Elvis Presley himself was no less shocked, it seemed. "My very first appearance'', he recalled in a 1956 interview, "I was on a show in Memphis as an extra added single. I was scared stiff. I came out, and I was doing a fast-type tune, and everybody was hollering, and I didn't know what they were hollering at. Everybody was screaming and everything, and I came offstage and my manager told me that they was hollering because I was wiggling. And so I went back out for an encore, and I did a little more. And the more I did, the wilder they went''.

That was the story in a nutshell; that was the genesis of Elvis Presley. The more he did, the wilder they went. Everyone knows something of the progression of events. Sometimes it is portrayed Hollywood-style as a long, hard, roller coaster-like climb, with obstacles looming along the way. Unquestionably, to the participants it must have seemed like a perilous ride which could come to an end of any moment ("We didn't have any idea how this thing was going to turn out'', says Sam Phillips today (1987). With the benefit of hindsight, though, it seems more like a nuclear explosion.

On September 10, Elvis recorded "Good Rockin' Tonight'', the Wynonie Harris blues with which he had shaken up the Overton Park Shell, while "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" hit the top of the Memphis Country and Western charts (it had probably sold 20,000 copies nationally at this point). In October he made his debut on the Louisiana Hayride, the Saturday night broadcast on which Hank Williams had made his reputation, and the next month signed on as a regular, after quitting his job at Crown Electric. In November, too, he was named eighth-most- promising Country and Western vocalist by Billboard' magazine (behind Tommy Collins, Justin Tubb, and Jimmy ''C" Newman), and in December he was acknowledged as "the hottest piece of merchandise on the Louisiana Hayride... the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat" by the same magazine. Within a year he had left forever the schoolhouse gyms and hardwood floors, the shopping center openings and impromptu shows on the back of a flatbed truck, and signed with RCA Victor. By the time he was 21- years-old he had acquired the status of legend and would never again be able to venture out in the world.

All this is known and can be interpreted in various ways. What isn't known, and what can perhaps never by fully explained, is where the music came from and what caused it to hit the way if did. Nor is it simply that there never was a phenomenon quite like Elvis Presley either before or since. If this were all there was to the story, you could always point to Sinatra or the Beatles, say, as similar manifestations of cultural implosion. No, what is truly astonishing - what is unique - about Elvis Presley is that at 19 he knew instinctively not so much who he was as what he wanted to be and that, out of that desire, he was able to create a style which was original from start to finish.

That is what is so important about this record. It shows the creation of the style. It shows Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips groping for something it would have been impossible to name (simply because it didn't exist), struggling to discover a common language, and, together, creating a new form out of what anyone else might have discarded on the scrapheap of history. Even this might be deserving of only passing cultural note, were it not for the fact that the ten sides that Sun issued in the sixteen months that Elvis Presley was on the label are so perfectly realized that, had he never recorded again, they alone would be sufficient to sustain the legend of the birth of rock and roll. This is the most improbable story of all: in a tiny Memphis studio, in 1954 and 1955, Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created rock and roll.

What do we actually hear on the Sun sides? Here is what Bob Johnson, the Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter who followed Elvis from the beginning of his career, wrote all the time. "That's All Right'' was in the rhythm and blues idiom of Negro field jazz, ''Blue Moon'' more in the country field, but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both... (Sam Phillips) doesn't know how to catalogue Elvis exactly. He has a white voice, sings with a Negro rhythm which borrows in mood and emphasis horn country style. When I first read these words 32 years after they were written, in 1987, it was as if the theory of relativity had finally been proved by practical demonstration. Certainly this is the received wisdom about Elvis ("A white boy with black hips'', as the New York Times once said), bud as often as I and others had stated it, sometimes I wondered if we were not merely perpetuating some abstract theoretical construct on to which the participants themselves had unaccountably latched. It's only recently that I've had a chance (mainly through the Dutch

publisher and archivist, Ger Rijff, whose Long Lonely Highway and Faces and Stages: An Elvis Presley Time-Frame are essential reading and viewing) to scrutinize some of the contemporary accounts, and there is no longer any question in my mind that Elvis and Sam Phillips knew exactly what they were doing, if not why they were doing it. "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doing now, man, for more years than I know'', declared Elvis in a 1956 interview. "They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind till I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup (the Mississippi bluesman who originated "That's All Right'') bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw''.

He may or may not have gotten to that place - but, of course, he did become a music man like nobody ever saw. With this record we see, insofar as you can ever see anything of the nature of creativity, how the process occurred.

The issued sides (the first ten cuts) have been written about so often that I'm not going to dwell on them here, They illustrate perfectly Sam Phillips' belief in purity, simplicity, and economy of musical expression. They also possess that indefinable spark that could not have been drown out, no matter what the production methods, if it had not simply arrived unbidden. For a clue to the more prosaic mysteries, though, listen to the outtakes and the five completed master takes (from "I Love You Because" to "Trying to Get to You") that RCA put out after Elvis came to the label. It's here that we see for the first time the extent to which spontaneity merely served as hand-maiden to a great deal of experimentation and hard work. It's here that we are finally able to glimpse not just the range of styles attempted but the range of possibilities. Musically, the song selection runs the gamut from the most sentimental of ballads ("I Love You Because" and the Hawaiian-inspired "Harbor Lights") to the most low-down of blues - but all have one element in common: a willingness to go out on a limb, a zest for taking risks, for venturing off into unknown territory, regardless of whether anyone has ever been there before.

Listen to "Blue Moon'', the Rodgers and Hart ballad which Billy Eckstine recorded in 1948 in a satin-and-silk version with which Elvis must have been familiar (Eckstine was one of his favorite singers). What is he doing to this song? What is that eerie falsetto wail? The first time I heard this cut on Elvis's debut album in 1956 when I was 12 years old, I was outraced! I must have taken it as a betrayal of rock and roll! Now I hear it somewhat differently: now it seems touching to me, a ghostly echo from the past, though whose past - Elvis' or mine - I'm not really sure. That isn't really the point, though. The point is that here in the course of a single song we witness the first rock and roll wedding; we see an improbable marriage of the most unlikely elements approaching consummation. Here is the crooner who admired Dean Martin and Eddie Fisher, the devout church-goer whose single greatest ambition was to sing with the gospel Songfellows, the Beale Street dreamer who listened to rhythm and blues bird groups and wanted more than anything to be able to sing like Clyde McPhatter, the apprentice bluesman who wanted to feel all that Arthur Crudup had felt. We hear the western clip clop of Scotty Moore's guitar. We hear all of these elements coming together, or not coming together as the case may be. We see Elvis Presley struggling blindly to create a new music by instinct and will. And we see Sam Phillips doing all that he can - technically and psychologically - to further that instinct, fulfilling his own mission to bring out of a person what was in him, to recognize that individual's unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it''.

"Tomorrow Night'', "I'll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin')'', the various takes of "I Love You Because" and "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine" all offer the same blend of drama and tentative resolution. On the alternate takes of "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone'', a straightforward country tune written expressly for Elvis by Stan Kesler and Bill Taylor, the musicians explore a blues direction which seems unpromising at first, is then refined but finally discarded for the light breezy flavor of the issued take. "Don 't make it too damn complicated'', Sam remonstrated with Scotty after an unsuccessful take of "When It Rains, It Really Pours'', a blues which was never completed in the Sun studio and to which Elvis eventually returned nearly two years later. "That's All Right'', the song which has always been portrayed mainly as an inspired accident, appears here in a version very close to the issued take and yet undeniably lacking the magic. Simplify, Sam Phillips seems to keep on saying. "All right, boys, we just about on it now. Do it again. Do it one time for Sam''. And they did. The guitar solo got less complicated. The vocal communicated more of the essence of the song. The whole finally flowed. And at the end, just as he did when the band finally started hitting it on "Blue Moon Of Kentucky'', Sam Phillips might pronounce himself pleased. "That's fine," he says. 'Hell, that's different. That's a pop song now, nearly 'bout''. And it is.

You can see the sessions in your minds eye. Time didn't matter. Trends didn't matter. Mistakes didn't matter. "You just forgot about making a record and tried to show him'', Carl Perkins later recalled. "I'd walk out on a limb, I'd try things I knew I couldn't do, and then have to work my way out of it. I'd say, Mr. Phillips, that's terrible' He said, That's original. I said, But it's just a big original mistake'. And he said, That's what Sun Records is. That's what we are'''. There was simply no containing the enthusiasm, the ingenuousness, the sense of possibilities. You listen to the Elvis Sun sessions, and you sense the belief in those possibility, the firm conviction that if didn't matter a damn what the rest of creation thought as it went about its appointed rounds, that if didn't matter a damn if to the "music industry" Memphis was just another back water town out of which nothing, and no one of significance could ever come - there was simply no formula that could encapsulate Sam Phillips' vision or Elvis' omnivorous embrace of the world and all that was in it. That is what I think the records finally come down to: a young man hungry for success - no, hungry for everything - and just impatient to get on with it. A few years ago I happened to be watching the television documentary, "The Heroes of Rock And Roll'', with Sam Phillips, when Elvis came on the screen, looking impossibly young, impossibly expectant.

"Ah, wasn't he something? Let me fell you some - thing about him. Elvis - you looking at him now, back then - he looks so clumsy and so totally uncoordinated. And this was the beauty of it, he was being himself. Well, he had that little innocence about him, and yet he had, even then, he had a little something 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 he was. just beautiful and lovely - and I'm not talking about physical beauty, because he was not that good-looking then. Really, by conventional standards he was supposed to have been thrown off that stage, and I - listen, I calculated that stuff in my mind. An they going to resent him? With his long sideburns? That could be a plus or a minus. But I looked at it as this. When he came through like he did, it was neither. He stood on his 'own''.

- Peter Guralnick, April, 1987

All Recordings Produced and Engineered by Sam C. Phillips at the Memphis Recording Service, 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee, July 1954-July 1955.

This compilation A&R Director - Gregg Geller
Marketing Director - Don Wardell
Audio Restoration by Rick Rowe.
Mastered by Jack Adelman
Cover liner notes by Peter Guralnick
Art Director - Ria Lewerke
Design - Piedro Alfieri
Hand Tinting Theresa Alfieri-Weinberg

Thanks to:
Sam Phillips, Knox Phillips, Ger Rijff, Colin Escott, Stan Kesler,
Stanley Booth, Marion Kaisker, and Scotty Moore

© - 706 UNION AVENUE SESSIONS - ©

It was a Saturday, and the young man fidgeted incessantly as he waited in the tiny outer office, partitioned off by a thin wall from the almost equally tiny studio and crowded with other walk-ins. Phillips' office manager, Marion Keisker, a leading Memphis radio personality, interrupted her work only because she felt sorry for the boy. They made small talk while he waited his turn, and he was drawn out by her kindly manner, but Marion was puzzled by his seeming mix of boldness and abject self-effacement and she always remembered his answers to her questions. "What kind of singer are you''? she asked. "I sing all kinds''. "Who do you sound like''? said Marion. "I don't sound like nobody''. It was obvious to Keisker that he was trying to recommend himself to her attention in some way beyond the usual, but she was baffled for the moment as to what could be his motive. In later years he would always say that he went in to make a record for his mother, or simply to hear the sound of his own voice - but it became plain to Marion Keisker and Sam Phillips over the succeeding weeks and months that what the boy really wanted was to make a commercial record.

What was it exactly that could have led so cripplingly shy and limited a musician to conceive of so bold a plan when none of the peers from whom he took his musical cues seems even to have contemplated such a visit? Up until this time Elvis Presley had confined his music-making almost entirely to private occasions, with his appearance on the Humes High annual talent show, just four months earlier, the first time that many of his classmates even became aware that he sang. He was well known, however, to the residents of Lauderdale Courts, the housing project where he had lived with his family until January of that year, as one of a group of boys who played their guitars on the leafy, tree-shaded mall between the two-and three-story residences - but by no means one of the more talented ones. Dorsey and Johnny Burnette, Johnny Black, above all Jesse Lee Denson, a Golden Gloves boxer who had created a sensation the previous year by performing Hank Snow's "Golden Rocket" between bouts, were the musicians that everyone remembered. If anyone recalled Elvis Presley, it was for his appearance - his long, greasy hair and the outlandish outfits that he wore. Music may have been his deepest passion since being given his first guitar as a small child in Tupelo and singing, with other schoolchildren, in the children's contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair. But he had never given any hint of his true ambitions, or even of the extent of his talents, until he walked in the door of Sun. Why should he alone have made the journey?

The answer may lie in a story that had just appeared in the Memphis Press-Scimitar on July 15, 1953, about a new group making records at Sun. The Prisonaires were the group. They had begun their career inside the walls of the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, and when they first came to Sam Phillips' attention, the studio proprietor, according to the Press-Scimitar, "was skeptical - until he heard the tape''. At that point he was sold. And so on June 1, 1953, "the five singing prisoners'', accompanied by an armed guard and a trusty, were transported to 706 Union Avenue to make their first record for Sun. "They worked from 10:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., until the records were cut just right to suit painstaking Mr. Phillips''.

"Just Walkin' In The Rain" came out at almost the same time as the Press-Scimitar story. The song went on to become something of a hit, as reporter Clark Porteous had predicted, if now here near as big a hit as it was for pop singer, Johnnie Ray, three years later. It was the song that put Sun Records on the map, though, and, very likely, the item that captured the attention of Elvis Presley as he read about the studio, the label, and the "painstaking Mr. Phillips'', who had staked his reputation on a recording by an unknown singer and a song whose plaintive notes Elvis could hear reverberating both in his imagination and on the air. Nor was he the sort to be put off, as many of his contemporaries might have been, by Sun's status as a blues and "race" label - in fact, that may just have added to the allure for someone not only open to the sound of black music but equally open to a democratic dream based on a sense of his own exclusion.

He showed up in any case not long after the article appeared and presented himself to Marion Keisker with a diffidence she would always remember, cradling his battered, beat-up child's guitar in his arms. From the first quavering notes of the first song he sang, it was obvious that his mumbled self-description was true - while it might not be difficult to detect his influences, he didn't sound like anyone else. There was a quality of almost unutterable plaintiveness in his version of "My Happiness'', a 1948 pop hit for Jon and Sandra Steele that he had sung over and over in the Courts, a sentimental ballad that couldn't have been further from anyone's imagining of rock and roll. There is more than a hint of the pure tenor of Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots - but mostly the almost keening solo voice conveys a note of yearning that alternates with a crooning fullness of tone and a sharp nasality that fails to sustain its possessor's intent. The guitar, Elvis later said, "sounded like somebody beating on a bucket lid'', and there is, of course, the added factor of nervousness which cannot be fully assessed - and yet there is a strange sense of calm, an almost unsettling stillness in the midst of great drama, the kind of poise that comes as both a surprise and a revelation.

When he finished with the song, he embarked almost immediately upon a second, "That's When Your Heartaches Begin'', a smooth pop ballad that the Ink Spots had originally cut in 1941, with a deep spoken part for their baritone singer, Hoppy Jones. Here Elvis was not so successful in his rendition, running out of time, or inspiration, and simply declaring, "That's the end" at the abrupt conclusion of the song. When it was all over, he sat in the outer lobby while Miss Keisker typed out the label copy on the blank sides of a Prisonaires label ("Softly And Tenderly'', Sun 189). The singer's name was typed underneath the title on each side, and he hung around for a while hoping in vain that something might happen. After he left, Marion Keisker made a note of his name, which she misspelled and then editorialized beside it: "Good ballad singer. Hold''.

He stopped by the office all through the fall, trying to put himself in the way of discovery, and when that failed, he returned in January to cut another acetate, without even the excuse of surprising his mother by the sound of his voice. His selection this time consisted of a 1953 pop hit by Joni James, "I'll Never Stand In Your Way'', and a Jimmy Wakely country tune, "It Wouldn't Be The Same Without You''. This time, however, his lack of confidence betrayed him, and he sounds more forced, less self-assured than he did the first time he entered the studio. There is still that same feeling of aching tenderness, though, that same sense that he is reaching down deep within and summoning up feelings not necessarily related to the lyrics and far more "naked" than those of the "heart" singers like Eddy Arnold, and the smooth pop crooners like Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Bing Crosby, that he so much admired. Perhaps in the end he couldn't help being different, an outside observer might have been led to conclude. But if he had once again passed through the Sun doorway with the idea, if not of stardom, at the very least of being asked back - once again he was doomed to be disappointed. Because, just as the last time, there was no follow-up on anyone's part but his own. When he went to work delivering supplies for Crown Electric in the spring, Marion Keisker grew used to seeing his truck regularly pass by, and having its driver stop in from time to time to ask if she knew of a band that was looking for a singer.

Finally, on June 26, almost a year after he had first appeared at the studio, he got the call he had been waiting for. Sam Phillips, transfixed by an acetate he had picked up on his latest Nashville trip by a singer whom he was subsequently unable to locate or identify, came up with the idea of trying out "the kid with the sideburns''. The song was a plaintive lament called "Without You'', sung in a quavering voice that sounded like a cross between the Ink Spots and a sentimental Irish tenor, and while it was undeniably amateurish, there was something about it - perhaps its very amateurishness, or else just its quality of yearning - that put him in mind of the boy. When Miss Keisker called, as Elvis recounted the story in later years. She said, 'Can you be here by three?' I was there by the time she hung up the phone'.

They worked on the number all afternoon. When it became obvious that the boy was not going to get it right, Phillips had him run down other songs he knew - almost every one of them a slow ballad, some for which he could barely provide the faltering accompaniment. "I guess I must have sat there at least three hours'', Elvis told Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson in 1956. "I sang everything I knew - pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of (anything] I remembered''.

When it was over, he was exhausted, but he felt strangely elated, too. ''I was an over night sensation'', he always told interviewers in later years. "A year after they heard me the first time, they called me back"! Everyone caught the boyish modesty, but they may have overlooked the understandable pride. Mr. Phillips had called him back - his perseverance had paid off. And while nothing was said about what would happen next, there was little doubt now in Elvis' mind that something would.

Exactly one week later it did. This time he got a call from Scotty Moore, a 22-year-old guitarist who had himself made his Sun Records debut with his group, the Starlite Wranglers, just one month earlier, but who had bigger plans than simply playing in a hillbilly band. When Sam Phillips started telling him about this young singer who had something different about him, Scotty began pestering Phillips for the singer's name. On Saturday, July 3, Scotty phoned the Presley home, and, identifying himself as a scout for Sun, asked Elvis if he would like to audition and he said he guessed so. The next day they got together at Scotty's house, with Scotty's neighbor, Wranglers' bass player, Bill Black, stopping by for a few minutes to check him out. The following day, Monday, July 5, 1954, the three of them went into the studio for what was intended to be nothing more than a "rehearsal session''.

At first nothing seemed to go right. The first few songs they tried were all ballads (various touchingly revealing takes of "l Love You Because" are all that is left of this part of the session), and the musicians seemed to be casting about for a direction, trying out snatches of one song, then another, without ever really hitting on, or even knowing, what it was they were looking for. But Sam Phillips was nothing if not patient, and if he was discouraged, he showed no sign of it, even as Elvis clearly sensed his chances slipping away. Then, during a break, as the musicians were sipping on Cokes, "all of a sudden'', said Scotty, "Elvis just started singing this song and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open, and he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing'? And we said, 'We don't know'. 'Well, back up', he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again'''.

The song was ''That's All Right'', an old blues by Arthur ''Big Boy'' Crudup, and nothing could have surprised Sam Phillips more than that this boy should know let alone perform with such uninhibited freshness and zeal, the music for which Sam had crusaded all these years. But if it was a direction he could not have anticipated, it was one that he now whole heartedly embraced, as he had the trio run through their new number over and over, until they finally got it right, with Elvis gaining confidence on each try. In the next few nights, they hit upon an almost equally startling transformation of Bill Monroe's bluegrass waltz, "Blue Moon Of Kentucky'', which evolved from a slow, bluesy lament to a high-spirited declaration of self-discovery in 4/4 time. "We thought it was exciting'', said Scotty of the manner in which, almost unwittingly, they had turned the music upside down, "but what was it? It was just so completely different. But it just really flipped Sam - he felt it really had something. We just sort of shook our heads and said, 'Well, that's fine, but good God, they'll run us out of town''!

That, in a way, was the story of Elvis Presley's recordings at Sun: not just art as inspired accident (and it's hard to know what can better describe the origins of all art) but the peeling away of layers, psychological and musical, the uncovering of depths which, if not hitherto unsuspected, had hitherto lain unplumbed. As he had already done with the blues singers for whom he had built his studio (Howlin' Wolf, Little Junior Parker, Ike Turner, B.B. King), and as he would with each of the rockabilly artists (Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Jerry Lee Lewis) who followed, Sam Phillips saw it as his mission to "open up an area of freedom within the artist himself, to help him to express what he believed his message to be''. With Elvis Presley he was astonished to discover an individual with a musical curiosity as omnivorous as his own ("It seemed like he had a photographic memory for every damn song he ever heard, and he had the most intuitive ability to hear songs without ever having to classify them, or himself'). In the studio his aim was to bring out that curiosity, to encourage that area of creative difference, to stifle not even the smallest element
of exploration.

For Elvis it was like stumbling upon the unlocking key. All of a sudden everything that he had been listening to all his life - blues and gospel, hillbilly, semi-classical, and pop - could coalesce into a single sound, and the astonishing thing was that his experience served not just for himself but for a generation. In Houston, Arkansan Sleepy LaBeef heard Elvis' first Sun sides and recognized their gospel roots, heard Brother Claude Ely and Sister Rosetta Tharpe just beneath the secular veil. Carl Perkins picked up on it in nearby Jackson, Tennessee, while Jerry Lee Lewis heard the same melding of blues, country, and western swing that he had been groping for in the honky tonks around Ferriday, Louisiana. There was no question that the sound was in the air, but at the same time there was equally little question that it crystallized in the freshness, innocence, and invention that Elvis Presley brought to the music. Bill Haley and his Comets may have established the potential for a commercial trend (his "Rock Around The Clock" was on the charts for the first time when Elvis cut his first Sun single), but Elvis Presley laid the groundwork for a musical revolution.

In part it was the simplicity of the music, in part it was the sound, but most of all it was the feel for Elvis Presley, as much as for Sam Phillips, it was the accidental, the unexpected, the unique that mattered, each placed his full faith -in the spontaneity of the moment. And that is exactly how Elvis Presley's records were made. Listen to "Good Rockin' Tonight'', "Mystery Train'', "Milkcow Blues Boogie" - each is based on a classic source, each in a way is intended as a kind of homage. And yet each continues to surprise. The laugh with which "Mystery Train" trails off, the bubbling enthusiasm of "Baby, Lets Play House'', the sheer, uninhibited ardor of "Trying to Get to You" - this is the gold that Elvis and Sam Phillips were mining for, this is the hard-won inspiration that finally emerged from each session.

At the same time, if you want to look behind the scenes at the kind of creative experimentation that went into the sessions, Elvis' live sides from this period are almost equally illuminating. No recording has yet surfaced of Elvis' early live performance of Martha Carson's gospel rouser, "Satisfied'', or of his attempt at the same song in the Sun studio. But various examples exist of his and the band's first stabs at such rhythm and blues classics as the Clovers' "Fool, Fool, Fool'', Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle And Roll'', LaVern Baker's "Tweedlee Dee'', Otis Williams and the Charms' "Hearts of Stones" and Chuck Berry's "Maybellene'', and their presence on this set, along with previously unreleased versions of Elvis' own "I Don't Care If The Sun Don't Shine" and '' I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone'', further expand our sense of the group's capabilities - and of their - limitations, when they stop somewhere short of the finish line. Most Of alb though, they confirm the impression of purey vaulting ambition, the sense of almost joyful release that the studio sides proclaim; they convey the same intimation of a deeper emotion underlying even the most ephemeral of the Sun sides, an emotion that comes across whatever the tempo, whatever the genre, mistakes and all.

It's hard to say what creates such a sense of high-tension drama in the midst of such assured ease, the conviction that all is right with the world while at the same time an assault is being mounted on every complacent -assumption of the culture, social, racial, and, not least, musical. Whether or not this improbable balance could have been maintained is open to question, but even before Elvis ended his stay at Sun by the summer of 1955 you can already hear it changing, with the last full session that Elvis would have with anyone other than himself as his principal producer (in 1969 Chips Moman would oversee some of his greatest post-Sun sides, but only take responsibility for about half the session). It is, arguably, his greatest moment in the Sun studio, with "Mystery Train" defining that peculiar combination of soaring high spirits and casual insouciance that characterized every one of the released sides. It was ''I Forgot To Remember To Forget'', though, that was the hit, the second song to which Sam Phillips added drums and the first that he had to use his considerable powers of persuasion to get Elvis to perform -(''I thought it was something we needed at that point to show a little more diversification"). The resulting treatment of a composition that Elvis at first considered too conventionally country was far from conventional, and the last song of the day, "Trying To Get To You'', with its suggestive combination of the secular and the spiritual, only points to a direction yet to be explored. With his final song at Sun, "When It Rains, It Really Pours'', never finished because the session was broken off due to the imminent sale of his contract to RCA, Elvis is back on familiar ground: once again, we hear him confidently singing the blues, though this time, seemingly, with far more knowingness than the innocent nineteen-year-old of just one year earlier could ever have assumed.

This abrupt ending, little more than the inevitable intrusion of business that all popular art invites, leads to the kind of what-ifs that are the by-product of both art and commerce - and no more profitably pursued in either. The fact is that when Elvis Presley first came to Sun, he was an inspired amateur; by the time he left, on November 21, 1955, "I Forgot To Remember To Forget" was on the national country and western charts, where it remained for thirty-nine weeks and became his first national hit. The music that he would make at RCA would clearly reflect the lessons that he had learned at Sun and result almost immediately in such calculated triumphs of craft and feeling as "Heartbreak Hotel'', "Hound Dog'' b/w"Don't Be Cruel'', and "All Shook Up''. He fashioned these songs with the same patience, dedication, and spontaneity that he had poured into his earlier work, but the Sun sides would be forever set aside, perhaps simply by the very innocence of their invention. They were as Sam Phillips often said in describing Elvis himself, impudent, playful, they almost dare the listener to smile. The music that Elvis created, as Phillips said of another of his favorite artists, Howlin" Wolf, existed on its own terms only, an unmapped territory "where the soul of man never dies''.

- Peter Guralnick, November 1998

Peter Guralnick is the author of the award-winning ''Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley'', the first volume of a two-volume biography which concludes with the just-published ''Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley''.