CHAPTER 17 | ROCK AND ROLL 427
clergy but by the consumer marketplace. Youngsters in comfortable circum-
stances could now get a taste of rebellion without actually having to rebel. And
in the mid-1950s, no entertainer was better known for redrawing the boundary
lines than Elvis Presley.ELVIS PRESLEY IN MEMPHIS
Elvis Presley, born in 1935 in Mississippi, moved to Memphis with his parents in
the late 1940s. Presley’s mother and father had little money to spare for their son’s
musical education. But as a youth with an avid appetite for music, he sampled a
wide variety. Elvis was a fan of local black radio, especially WDIA, where
B. B. King, a singer and guitar player from the Mississippi Delta, was just start-
ing out as a disc jockey. Memphis was also a place where white gospel quartet
singing fl ourished (see chapter 14). By the mid-twentieth century some quartets
were making records and singing on the radio. Though their repertory was all
sacred, they were polished performers who bantered with their crowds and sang
spiritual songs that listeners could tap their feet to. Gospel quartet music was the
center of Presley’s musical universe for a time.
Indeed, there seems to have been no kind of music that the young Elvis Pres ley
did not love. He listened to Eddy Arnold, Hank Williams, and other country stars,
and to such mainstream pop singers as Teresa Brewer, Bing Crosby, Eddie Fisher,
and Perry Como. He attended classical orchestra concerts at an outdoor Memphis
park. Dramatic tenor Mario Lanza and the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts
were also on his menu of listening favorites. Accounts of Presley’s early years leave
the impression of a painfully shy loner with a rich fantasy life revolving around
music. “I just loved music. Music period,” he later told an interviewer. Though
without formal training or experience as a performer, he nursed an obsessive
wish to become a singer. And that desire led him, shortly after he graduated from
high school, to the offi ce of Sun Records, founded and run by Sam Phillips.
Phillips, a white native of Florence, Alabama (also the birthplace of W. C.
Handy), had moved to Memphis and in 1950 opened a recording studio to pro-
vide a place where black entertainers would feel free to play and record their
music. Two years later the studio became
Sun Records, and by 1953 the Sun label had
scored rhythm and blues hits by black artists
such as Rufus Thomas and Junior Parker. In
that year the eighteen-year-old Elvis Presley
showed up at the studio and paid $3.98 plus
tax for the chance to be recorded, singing
to his own guitar accompaniment. Presley
chose a pair of sentimental ballads for the
occasion, and Phillips’s assistant made a
note next to the boy’s name: “Good ballad
singer. Hold.” And that was where Presley’s
singing career rested for about a year.
In the summer of 1954 Scotty Moore,
a guitarist who led a country music band,
was looking for a singer to record with, and
Sam Phillips suggested Presley. An auditionScotty Moore Describes Elvis Presley’s
First Recording SessionA
ll of a sudden... Elvis just started singing this song,
jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill
[Black] picked up his bass, and he started acting the
fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam [Phillips],
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, “What are
you doing?” And we said, “We don’t know.” “Well, back
up,” he said, “try to fi nd a place to start, and do it again.”In their own words
Sun Records172028_17_412-439_r3_sd.indd 427 23/01/13 10:58 AM