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CHAPTER ONE
The Kid Who Sang
Humes High School was a great big brick building on North Manassas Street in North Memphis-the biggest building around in that part of town-and it served as the junior and senior high school for kids in our working-class neighborhood. In the fall of 1948 I was ready to start eighth grade, my second year at Humes, and frankly I was looking forward to it. I liked being in the big building, moving from class to class, having my own locker, and being a part of a big group of kids-a group that included quite a few pretty girls. There was just one problem in going back to school, and that was a particular class on my fall semester schedule that I desperately wanted to get out of: Miss Marmann's music-appreciation class.
Humes had plenty of tough teachers, but Miss Marmann was one of the toughest, and in a school full of some pretty tough kids, the ones who were troublemakers in other classes always sat up straight in Miss Marmann's class and took care not to get caught chewing gum. Even by the standards of '48, Miss Marmann was "old school"-rumor had it that she was extremely prone to whacking inattentive students with a special ruler she kept on her desk.
I appreciated music well enough, but I wasn't too crazy about getting whacked, so before classes began that fall I looked for a way out. The rule at Humes was that if you were a member of the marching band, you didn't have to take the music-appreciation class, so I signed up for band tryouts and said I was interested in taking up the drums. I discovered that there were a lot of kids trying out for band just to get out of Miss Marmann's class-and I guess in that way she really did encourage music appreciation. But the tryouts consisted of a fairly complicated written test and music test, and apparently I didn't do too well on either one, because I was quickly judged not to be marching band material.
But, you know, if I could have played drums worth a lick, I might not have met Elvis Presley.
School began and Miss Marmann certainly lived up to her reputation. She really did wield a ruler, but as it turned out, she and I got along okay. It seems we both felt that much of the popular music of the day was dull, repetitive, and without merit. One afternoon when she was complaining about how our exposure to music was limited to a few hit songs, I raised my hand and chimed in that "Dance, Ballerina, Dance" by Vaughn Monroe was getting played over and over again on the radio, and it drove me nuts. Rather than reach for her ruler, Miss Marmann actually smiled a little and said, "That's a very good example, George."
Our lack of interest in songs from the hit parade was probably the only thing Miss Marmann and I agreed on when it came to music, though. She felt we'd all be better off listening to Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven. I didn't really know yet what the music I wanted to hear on the radio might sound like, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be played by an orchestra.
In November, Miss Marmann's class was joined by a new kid whose family had just moved up to Memphis from Tupelo, Mississippi. I'm sure the teacher said his name and introduced him to the rest of us, but he didn't really stand out much and I didn't take much notice of him. Didn't take much notice, that is, until a few weeks later, on a Friday, when Miss Marmann announced that since Christmas was coming up soon, instead of doing regular music lessons the following week we would have a "special treat": we'd get to sing Christmas carols together. This didn't sound too "special" to me, but the new kid raised his hand right away.
"Miss Marmann?" he called out.
"Yes, Elvis?"
"Do you mind if I bring my guitar to class and sing?"
There were a few little snickers and laughs. Back in 1948 there wasn't anything cool about a thirteen-year-old kid playing a "country" instrument like a guitar. Cool would have been bringing your football or your boxing gloves to school. But this kid wanted to bring in his guitar, and he wanted to sing. He was over on the left- hand side of the classroom, and I was all the way on the right side, but I found myself staring across the rows of desks at this new kid. Elvis Presley was his name.
Miss Marmann hushed the snickerers in the class, though she also seemed a little surprised at the request. "Yes, Elvis-that'd be fine," she said. "Bring your guitar to class."
The next Monday we all took our seats in music class and sure enough, there was Elvis Presley with his guitar. When Miss Marmann called on him, he picked up that guitar, walked to the front of the classroom, and sang us two songs, neither one a Christmas carol. First was "Old Shep," a heartbreaker about a boy and his dog, and then "Cold Icy Fingers," a funny sort of ghost song. As he strummed his last chord, there was a moment of shocked silence, then just a smattering of applause.
I think our classmates had probably been expecting something outright awful-something they could laugh at. But the kid really could sing and play, and frankly, I was blown away. First of all, it was impressive that this kid had some talent, but to see him get up in front of a class-in the classroom of one of the strictest teachers in school-and sing out so strongly and easily, I'd just never seen anything like it. I'd been going to the movies and half-daydreaming about a life in showbiz, but I didn't really know how I'd ever get there. Right here at Humes High, though, was a kid unafraid to put himself in the spotlight. That amazed me and affected me.
For the first of many, many times in my life, I thought, "Damn, that guy's cool."
It'd be nice to say that Elvis Presley and I were inseparable buddies from that moment forward, but that wasn't quite the case. I introduced myself to him at some point, and we talked a little when we had the chance, becoming two guys who were happy to see each other in the halls. I do remember him saying that he'd also tried out for the marching band but had been rejected. (I'm still not sure why a guy with his talent didn't get in, but I'm thankful for it.)
Elvis and his family were then living in a rooming house on Poplar Street, though they soon moved to the government-sponsored housing projects at Lauderdale Courts. I lived right across the street from Humes with my mom and sister, and when we kids got out of school at three-fifteen, Elvis would head his way and I'd go mine. Looking back, I know he and his family had been dirt-poor in Tupelo and were trying hard to fit in and make things work in their new hometown.
My family had come from a little farther away, but was working just as hard to get by. My mother and father were both Orthodox Jews. She was from Russia, he was from Poland, and they both fled their homes in the twenties as anti-Semitism flared across Eastern Europe. My mother had relatives in Chicago, but her passage to the U.S. was sponsored by a Jewish lawyer in Memphis, and it was through him that she met my father. They settled into a little home on Leath Street in North Memphis, had my sister Rosie, then my sister Dorothy, and then me. My parents had escaped before the rise of Hitler and had begun to build a new, better life in America, but things took an unfortunate turn when my dad got very ill. In fact, I barely remember him as a part of my childhood, and to be honest I'm not even sure what he suffered from. I just have a few vague memories of going to visit him at a special hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he was laid up for the last couple years of his life.
We weren't ever wealthy, but we did well enough that I wore clean clothes and always had something to eat for dinner. My dad had started a produce business before he got sick, buying fruits and vegetables from farmers and selling them to grocery stores, and with the money he made he bought two small houses in North Memphis-one for us to live in and one to rent out. After he passed away, we lived partly on that rent money, and my mom also worked as a seamstress, altering suits at one of the nicer tailor shops in downtown Memphis. As soon as I was old enough I began working, too: I took on a paper route and hustled up extra money any way I could, doing things like selling balloons at parades.
There weren't a lot of Jews in North Memphis, and I know there are some places in the South where my family would not have felt welcomed, especially given the high tensions during World War II. But my family was so easily accepted and got so used to fitting in that the one time I came face-to-face with prejudice, I didn't know what it was. When I was in seventh grade, my first year at Humes, an older kid walked up to me one afternoon and called me a "Jew baby." Maybe he expected me to burst into tears or take a swing at him, but I just stood there staring at him because, frankly, I didn't know if "Jew baby" was supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing. So I asked the kid, "What's a 'Jew baby'?" The question kind of threw him off, and, as it turned out, he couldn't come up with an answer. He just shrugged and walked away, and I never heard words like that again.
By the time I was in school at Humes, I had a routine I followed almost every day after school: I made a quick stop at a local snack shop for a cold drink or a piece of candy, then I rushed home to spend some time with the one luxury item in my home: a great big floor-model console radio. As a little kid, I'd rarely missed an episode of the adventures of the Green Hornet, the Lone Ranger, or Superman. Now I listened to Bill Gordon, the afternoon disc jockey on Memphis's biggest station, WHBQ. Gordon played the hits of the day- the kind of stuff that left Miss Marmann unimpressed-but he was a funny, energetic on-air personality, and he was the first guy I ever heard who would talk over records and make jokes about what he was playing.
For more excitement, sometimes I'd give the radio dial a spin from WHBQ at 560 up to WDIA 1070. In 1949, WDIA became the first radio station in the South to hire black on-air talent, beginning with disc jockey Nat D. Williams. Williams, and later fellow deejays such as Rufus Thomas and a very young B. B. King, would play a very different- sounding music for the city's sizable black audience. It was by tuning in to WDIA that I started to hear music unlike anything I'd ever heard on the hit parade: songs by Big Joe Turner, the Clovers, Fats Domino, Ruth Brown, and Johnny Ace. This stuff sounded wild and a little dangerous, and I couldn't get enough of it-even if I didn't always understand the things that were being sung about. Quite a few of my classmates felt the same way, and it became kind of a fad to try to write down the words we could catch when a new song was played on WDIA and then bring them into school the next day and try to figure out exactly what we'd heard.
I know that in some homes, kids caught listening to "race music" would have been grounded or worse. But my mother never saw any point in getting upset about what I was listening to. She'd seen some real troubles over in Russia and was happy to have what she had in the United States. As long as I wasn't getting into fights, wasn't being brought home by the police, and was pulling decent grades, she wasn't going to get too upset about where I set the radio dial.
As I moved through Humes High, Elvis and I ended up having quite a few classes together, including a typing class that I think we both barely passed. I'd occasionally see him around town, too. When the Mid-South Fair came to the Memphis Fairgrounds in 1950, a few buddies and I figured out that there was a spot behind some carnival tents where you could climb a cyclone fence to sneak in and save yourself the fifty-cent admission charge. One night, I was halfway up the fence when I felt something give it a shake. I looked to my left and there was Elvis, halfway up his section of fence and just as happy to be saving his fifty cents.
I guess everybody in high school is looking for some way to be their own person-to gain a little bit of notoriety. Back then, the common ways to get noticed were by being an athlete or a cheerleader or a part of school politics, and I took the political route. I became editor of the school paper, editor of the yearbook, and by senior year I was the class president. I kind of enjoyed being able to get along with all sorts of classmates-the athletes, the brains, and the ones who were a little different. By tenth and eleventh grade Elvis was bringing his guitar in more and more often to sing at little class events like a homeroom party. By senior year, Elvis was very clearly different.
The most obvious thing about him was that he dressed differently. Most of us were wearing jeans and plain, collared shirts. But you never saw Elvis in jeans. (I'd learn later that he hated them-they reminded him of the work clothes his family had worn at their poorest.) Instead, he'd wear black slacks with a pink stripe down the side and a black sport coat with the collar turned up. He'd let his hair grow out and had it combed back high. And he had those sideburns. What's amazing to me now is that the look he had back then wasn't the fashion of the day for anybody else in any part of Memphis I knew about-it was just pure Elvis. But at the same time, as distinctive as his look was, he was low-key about it and never seemed to be angling for any special attention. He got his notoriety in a quiet but unmistakable way. Like a velvet hammer.
Elvis wasn't quite as handsome in those years as he would become-he hadn't quite grown into his looks yet. So most Humes girls weren't sure what to make of this very different classmate. On the other hand, some of the guys at Humes felt that someone so different deserved to be given a hard time. One day he was cornered in a Humes bathroom by a tough group who brandished a pair of scissors and said they were going to cut off his hair. He tried to fight them off, but his pompadour was only saved when one of the strongest, most fearless guys at Humes, Red West, happened to walk into that bathroom and saw what was going on. Red told the would-be barbers that if they wanted to cut Elvis's hair they'd have to cut his first, and that was the end of that.
