Elvis Presley: The Searcher Page #5

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they were hollering at.

Everybody was screaming

and then I came offstage,

and my manager told me

that they was hollering

because I was

wiggling my legs.

I was unaware, and so

I went back out for an encore,

and I did a little more.

And the more I did,

the louder they went.

Jackson:

Sam Phillips was able to get

Elvis on the Opry in Nashville,

which was massive.

I mean, you don't just

get on the Grand Ole Opry.

The Opry, you had to be

a member, be in this club,

the traditional

Nashville establishment.

You had to dress the way

that they wanted you to dress

and sing the way

they wanted you to sing.

The Opry was very,

very segregated.

Moore:

This was an older audience.

They had their artists

that they went to see.

And here's a kid

dressed funny,

coming out, doing one

of their idols' songs

in a blasphemous way.

They didn't get up

and cheer and holler.

Phillips:

Now, if you are fainthearted,

you're gonna

give up in a hurry

on a situation like that.

We were not fainthearted.

But we certainly didn't know

whether we would win it.

We knew in time

that something this great

could not be kept

under a bushel.

Ferris:

You cannot understand Elvis

apart from country music,

but he was pulling it away

from the traditional

Grand Ole Opry sound

and shaping it as a new,

bluesier version.

While country music

could recognize it,

they also knew it was

a threatening sound

that would ultimately

destroy the power

of the Grand Ole Opry.

Jackson:

So four months after

the release

of the first single,

they play their first

Louisiana Hayride show.

(man speaking)

(Elvis speaking)

(man speaking)

(Elvis speaking)

(feedback whines)

Elvis:

Tweedle, tweedle,

tweedle, dee

I'm as happy as can be

Fontana:

The Louisiana Hayride was

strictly a country show.

Webb Pierce, Faron Young,

Nat Stuckey, George Jones,

just about everybody

played the Hayride.

Robertson:

The Louisiana Hayride

was really the place

where country music and blues

hit one another and exploded.

Ferris:

It was a critical moment

in his career.

The radio broadcasts

had an enormous

impact in Memphis,

but the Louisiana Hayride was

a whole different audience.

Malone:

Hayride could be heard

all through the western

part of the South,

so it had a pretty wide

geographical audience.

Ferris:

That was a kind of

testing of his ability

to reach audiences

beyond his own home

in Memphis.

Malone:

The Louisiana Hayride

did send out

road tours

to surrounding towns.

The entire show would move.

Jackson:

They'd start to build

these touring routes

that bring them back

to Shreveport once a week.

That's a big turning point,

not only from

a financial perspective

but also from

a exposure perspective.

Jorgensen:

Elvis played a lot

of these first shows

with Jim Ed and Maxine Brown,

Bud Deckelman,

uh, Betty Amos--

successful country artists,

but not on a real top level.

Zanes:

Those performers are

competing with one another.

Somebody wants to leave there

feeling like they won.

And being on bills like that,

you are amongst people

who are gonna

teach you things.

And that's a big part

of what made Elvis

in those early becoming years

was that he had

an antenna that was up,

and he was stealing tricks,

he was learning lessons.

He was bringing it all in

without it seeming like

he was just doing

somebody else's act.

Fontana:

He could go out there,

and the audience

wouldn't be on his side

for maybe five minutes.

But all of a sudden,

somehow or another,

he'd turn 'em around.

Moore:

He could read

an audience very well.

He could tell

if it didn't seem

like he was going

or just right,

he'd do something,

something you wouldn't

even expect.

Jorgensen:

He often started

a song by like a wail

and then left it

hanging there,

so people were like,

"What's going on?"

He would stop

in the middle of a song

and turn around

or walk away,

and then go back,

or do something with

a microphone stand.

Schilling:

And he would grab

that microphone,

and he would drag it

across the stage.

He was so

sophisticated already

about making contact

with an audience.

If the audience reacted

a lot to something he did,

he did it again.

(distant screaming)

He just had this look,

like a wild, captured animal.

Shook his head and his hair

was down in his face,

and just to watch him

walk from that curtain

to the microphone,

you felt a part of it.

Jorgensen:

He gets presence

on the charts,

and his records

kept doing well,

and eventually, he gets voted

the Most Promising New Artist.

Fontana:

And he finally got a Cadillac.

Elvis:

And when I was

driving a truck,

every time a big,

shiny car drove by,

it started me

sorta daydreaming.

I'd daydream...

about how it would be.

And the first car

I ever bought

was the most beautiful car

I've ever seen.

It was secondhand,

but I parked it

outside of my hotel

the day I got it.

Elvis:

I sat up all night

just looking at it.

And the next day,

well the thing caught fire

and burned up on the road.

Uh, I've got a lot of cars,

but none of 'em would take

the place of that first one.

Zanes:

The story that we hear

about early rock and roll

is that the major labels,

in the main,

passed on rock and roll.

And so the indie

labels took it up,

and it took the

major labels a while

to see that rock and roll

wasn't going away.

Man:

Now if you've got a woman

Victor Linn:

The RCAs, the Capitols,

the Columbias, the Deccas,

they were called the majors.

All the other people,

these were independent

businessmen

who sold records to stores.

Phillips:

I have a small

record company,

been in business five years,

worked the lower

of my anatomy off,

peddling days of me

on the road

to the tune of

70,000 miles a year.

Linn:

When we say "independent,"

Sam was connected to no one

at the major labels

in any way.

He would produce what

he wanted to produce.

Dog that bite your hand

It means record it.

It means edit it.

They went into the lab

and did the mastering.

Packaging was already done,

and then they put a bunch

of singles in the car,

and got on the road

and went into the hills

of Tennessee.

And this is really a very

traditional way of doing it.

I went down to the river

Linn:

Now what the record company

would like to see happen

is they could spread

that regionality,

get it from northern

Georgia to Alabama,

and from Alabama

across to Mississippi.

You know, then they've got

national distribution.

Phillips:

I knew, really, so little

about the business

when it came

to merchandising records

and this sort of thing.

The main thing that

did more for us

than anything else

was it created excitement

amongst the major labels.

A lot of hard work

went into this thing,

both on the part of Elvis

and the part of Scotty,

and Bill, and myself.

Schilling:

Elvis, when he was

19 years old,

he knew what he had to do

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