Let’s not forget that in the exact moment before Elvis popularised rock’n’roll, he was singing a country song (Leon Payne’s ‘I Love You Because’), and that the song that he turned to after the seismic shift of ‘That’s All Right’ was Bill Monroe’s classic ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky’, albeit taken at a breakneck speed. It was also country music that he saw as his way to fulfilling his dreams. Tupelo was a slower, safer, tighter community, and while it was the mixture of the two that made Elvis the artist he became, it was always the gospel and country music of Mississippi that he retreated to in times of trouble or uncertainty. Compared to Tupelo, Memphis was a very different proposition - a bustling, prosperous city, exhilarating and intimidating at the same time and bursting at the seams with the sounds of very different music. It’s easy to believe, then, that for Elvis, country music came to represent home. In the exact moment before Elvis invented rock’n’roll, he was singing a country song If he was lucky, Slim would teach Elvis a few chords on the guitar or let him sing a little.īut it would go no further - on November 6th, 1948, the Presleys packed up and left for Memphis. Elvis persuaded James to make the introductions, and most weekends the two boys would go to watch Slim’s show being broadcast. His friend James Ausborn had an older brother who performed under the name of Mississippi Slim, and Slim – when he wasn’t touring with Tex Ritter or appearing on the Opry himself – was the hillbilly star of the local radio station WELO. His whole family would routinely gather around the radio on Saturday nights to listen to the Grand Ole Opry, and Tupelo was where he made his first tentative steps toward it as a career. The stage was set.Įlvis had grown up with country music. Four months later Elvis got his first guitar for his 11th birthday. He came 5th, encouraged to enter by his teacher after he had sung the same song at school assembly a few weeks earlier. It’s impossible to tell, but what’s certainly true is that it was at this same fair in 1945 that Elvis, then just 10-years-old, first sang in front of an audience of strangers, performing country star Red Foley’s ‘Old Shep’ in the talent contest. Country song hillbilly rock movie#What’s he thinking about? Does this shy, secretive boy see himself as a cowboy in the mould of his movie star heroes, or is he, even at this point, daring to dream that music might be his future? His dark hooded eyes peer out from an expressionless face, framed by a black hat and a Western scarf, one hand gripping the prop revolver holstered on the elaborate gun belt he wears across a pair of chaps. If you’re so minded, you can easily find the picture of an 11 or 12-year-old Elvis dressed as a cowboy, posing in front of a backdrop at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, held annually in his hometown of Tupelo. His whole family would routinely gather around the radio on Saturday nights to listen to the Grand Ole Opry It goes like this…”Įlvis had grown up with country music. He grins, wipes the sweat from his face and says, “I’d like to sing a (Hank Williams) song that’s probably the saddest song I’ve ever heard. Then you can do what you want to do”.Īlmost 20 years later, on January 14th, 1973, Elvis is on stage in Hawaii in front of a vast global television audience numbering in the hundreds of millions. “Well, Elvis, you just go ahead and do what they tell you. Tubb listens attentively and then asks the singer if he has, in fact, got any money. On meeting Tubb for the first time, he pours out his heart to the older man about how he loves country music but keeps being told that if he wants to make money, he has to sing the other kind - the weird kind - of music that he’s essentially just invented. Deflated and demoralised by the country faithful’s flat response to his performance, he walks down the block to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where he’s scheduled to play the famous Midnight Jamboree that same night. It’s around 11 o’clock in Nashville on the evening of Saturday, October 2nd, 1954 a callow 19-year-old from Tupelo, Mississippi has just played at the Grand Ole Opry for the first – and last – time.
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