Elvis Presley (1935-1977): Big Boss Man

Elvis came to Nashville with Moore, Black and D.J. Fontana, who'd been staff drummer for the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana was used to playing conventional country music, and he freely admits that "I didn't understand what they were doing. I had listened to a lot of music but I wasn't that familiar with what was happening in rhythm & blues. When they first played on the Louisiana Hayride — this was when he was on Sun — Elvis was playing rhythm and Bill Black played a drum kind of thing, slapping that bass. Scotty had his thing. They had a feel and a sound all their own and didn't really need me. But somehow it all fell into place."

It didn't always fall into place when Presley recorded with Nashville musicians. Many of the early RCA tracks sound chaotic and clattering compared to the sleek, spare sound in the Sun recordings.

The RCA sessions took place in New York and Los Angeles as well as in Nashville, but always with the touring band as their core. Often they went on all night. Chat Atkins, a family man, stopped playing on them when they no longer took place in the daytime, but as a Nashville RCA executive, he kept track of how they went. "They would begin setting up around eight p.m. and Elvis would come in after nine. He would do karate, swap stories. I remember at the early sessions he would come in with pockets full of press clippings and show them to his friends and laugh. Anyway, they would start cutting around 11 or 12 and then they'd send out for a hundred Krystal burgers or some other kind of fast food. They'd eat, and around two or three a.m. they'd take a little siesta. Then it would be back to work."

The night hours were necessary because of Presley's notoriety; he simply could not go out during the daytime. He kept the same hours when he returned to Memphis, but he always managed to see Sam Phillips nevertheless. "Elvis would call at three in the morning," Knox remembers, "and my mother would get up and cook eggs for him and the twenty or so people he brought with him, it would always be Memphis people with maybe a Hollywood starlet. They would stay up all night shooting pool and listening to records."

Presley toured a great deal during the late Fifties before he was inducted into the Army, and it was hard work. The group, which had fleshed out its spare sound with the vocal harmonies of the Jordanaires, depended on house public-address systems, except for Scotty Moore who had a custom-built amplifier. "We had to do the best with what we had," says D.J. Fontana, "and play hard." Presley was still very much a country musician. Several of his early Sun records — "Milkcow Blues Boogie" in particular — were virtually country blues, with the singer dropping beats and whole bars of music and the band following him like a hound on a possum. These rough edges were smoothed out on the RCA recordings, but not on the road. "As far as dropping beats and things," Fontana recalls, "he would do that all the time. We'd know to change chords by his hand movements."

If Elvis was a natural, instinctive musician, he was also a thorough professional. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote for him frequently after he had a hit with their "Hound Dog," and they had a number of chances to watch him work in the studio. "He was one of the most phenomenally consistent performers," Leiber says. "Rarely did a take flag down or drop in energy. He'd prefer one take because of a certain note he hit or a turn of phrase, but they were all good. He was very fast and seldom made more than four or five takes of any number. And he was very high-strung. He would crack jokes with the boys from Memphis, jump to the piano and play a few bars, pick up a guitar, slap somebody on the back, hit three notes on the bass. But then he'd say, 'Okay, let's make it,' and get in front of that mike and get it in a few takes."

Leiber and Stoller had been writing for and working with black artists almost exclusively since the early Fifties, and they shared with Presley a fascination for and intimate knowledge of black culture. But otherwise they were poles apart. Leiber's and Stoller's music was shaped by city blues, and Elvis was brought up on country blues and gospel. They wrote sensitively for him, including some of the music from Jailhouse Rock and King Creole and the delightful "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care," but perhaps their most successful song for him, "Love Me," was originally recorded by a black gospel duo they'd persuaded to do secular material.