Country Music

Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records has got to be one of the seminal geniuses of popular music. Extraordinary. He understood exactly what could be achieved by blending the white and black cultures and that he looked for the vehicle to do that and found it in Elvis Presley and recognized it and saw that as a way of bringing the races closer together and that was his purpose. That's really a visionary who's beyond music. And still his taste in music is incredible. He does Blue Moon of Kentucky, you know this is as country and hillbilly as you can get. No one's saying the work rock n' roll. No one's saying that word but there's some kind of new thing happening here. There's a new sound happening here. If Elvis hadn't been from Tupelo, Mississippi and grown up around black musicians and black and blues music and also had the white influence of hillbilly music in his life too, those songs wouldn't have happened. And that's the birth of rock n' roll right there. When Elvis came to the Hayride, I was really excited to get to go see his guitar player. I didn't even know Elvis' name and I had called a friend of mine, a disc jockey at KCIJ there in Shreveport and I said, who is the guitar player that's playing on that guy you just played whose name was kinda weird? And he told me, he said, it's a guy named Scotty Moore. He's Elvis' guitar player and I said okay and he said they're doing the Hayride Saturday night. A friend of mine and I went down, paid our money to get in to hear Scotty Moore. We are sitting there and Elvis comes out, of course Scotty and Bill and we are sitting there waiting for this instrumental that he would play. Elvis steps back at that point, starts dancing. The girls start screaming, we never heard Scotty. So it was kind of a waste of our money but it was worth it and then later on, I did find out who Elvis was though. Absolutely Hank was in his consciousness. It's there for everybody to see. Elvis saw it. Elvis was a child witness to that. I mean, Elvis couldn't escape literally an absolute direct connection in as much as Hank Sr., the next hillbilly star is Elvis Presley. They call him the Hillbilly Cat for a reason. The people at the Louisiana Hayride weren't mistaken when they applied that term to him. The Hillbilly Cat is who Elvis Presley was and hillbilly music was country music. The Hillbilly Cat, I think he was so different, he was so unique, they were trying to figure out what to do with him, where to put him, where does this guy go? He didn't neatly fit into anybody's box. He wasn't exactly country, wasn't exactly rock n' roll although he was all of those things. He wasn't exactly gospel, although he was all of that. It took the world a moment to sort out what to do with him but while they were trying to sort it out, he figured it out and just did it anyhow. Rockabilly was from Elvis. That's where the term came from because it's somebody with a guitar with I guess country roots or something doing this new type of songs. So we became rockabillies. And he was the first one I toured with when I was out of school in '55 so I had never heard of Elvis Presley. I thought, that's a funny name, you know, Elvis. When I met him, of course, I was kinda awed. He was very good looking, tall and he was dressed so nice. Black slacks, black shirt, yellow sport coat. I thought, yellow sport coat was kinda different. I'd never seen that but the rest of him, he was fine, gentleman and all. And then when we left the radio station, I saw him get into a pink Cadillac. That was before the days of Mary Kay and no one had ever seen a pink Cadillac or a pink car so I thought, this guy is pretty different, I wonder what he does on stage. That night, I had already been on and was backstage and my dad was there in my dressing room and we heard this screaming and daddy said, my gosh, wonder if there's a fire or something so he runs out, he said, get your stuff together and he came back and he's just shaking his head, he said, Wanda, you gotta come see this for yourself, you will never believe it. So he took me to the wings of the stage and I looked out and there was Elvis and doing all of his gyrations and singing and all these girls down front screaming and some were crying and reaching up for him. We had never seen anything like that. It was Frank Sinatra that they called him a crooner the girls swoon. You know, but with Elvis it was, Ah! In the early 50's, I was booking Hank Thompson all over the country. I had six dates going to Louisiana and Mississippi and I need to have an opening act so I called a friend of mine that was the Editor of DownBeat Magazine which wasn't a country magazine but I was talking to him and I said, I'm looking for an act to open for Hank down in Louisiana and Mississippi. He said, I've got the guy for you, his name is Elvis Presley. He said he's on the Louisiana Hayride every Saturday night and he's just tearing them up. Now, at that time, nobody in the world had ever heard of Elvis, except off the Louisiana Hayride. I said, I don't even know what he sounds like but I love the name. I can't remember but I called Elvis and somebody at the Louisiana Hayride and we bought six days for $1,800. For the week. That's like $300 a day. Hank didn't know it but Hank liked the name too so he opened up for Hank and Hank, the first night that Elvis was out there, he said I can't believe these people in the audience, they're just going nuts. He said, the guy's moving around on stage and he said, I've never seen anything like it. He's a good singer but he said this, I don't know whether this is country but people are loving it. It mixed with country but it was Elvis.