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On the night of July 7, 1954, Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips played a brand-new
recording of the song “That’s All Right” sung by 19-year-old Elvis Presley, who lived there in
Memphis. Right away, listeners starting calling, demanding that he play it again, asking exactly
what kind of music it was—blues? rock ’n’ roll?—and wanting to know more about the singer.
Dewey played the song fourteen times that night. During one break, he called the Presley
home, wanting to get Elvis down to the studio for an interview. Elvis, who’d been told that his
record might be on the radio, had been too nervous to listen. “I thought people would laugh at
me,” he later explained. So he’d gone to the movies.
Dewey asked his mother to find him, saying, “I played that record of his, and them birdbrain
phones haven’t stopped ringing since.” Mr. and Mrs. Presley hurried to the theater,
searched the dark rows, found their son, and hustled the boy off to WHBQ for the interview.
As a child, Elvis Presley soaked up gospel music at church. He listened to country music on
The Grand Ole Opry radio show, blues singers on the streets of Memphis, spirituals at tent
revivals, symphony orchestra concerts in the park, opera on the family’s wind-up Victrola.
“What kind of singer are you?” the manager of a Memphis recording studio asked him
when he made his very first record. “Aw, I sing all kinds,” he answered. “Who do you sound
like?” she pressed. “I don’t sound like nobody,” he insisted.
His answer was more than youthful boasting. Presley’s unabashedly original style embraced
all kinds of American music and crossed all borders of race, class, and region. As biographers
have noted, that democratic principle of his music helped win legions of fans. |
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