Elvis Presley (1935-1977): Big Boss Man

Colonel Tom Parker had seen to it that Presley was kept away from the public and even insulated from most of the people he worked with, but Elvis seems to have been content, at this point at least, to carry his culture around with him in the person of his Memphis cronies, Leiber and Stoller remember him being polite but standoffish. The Colonel was not as polite. Once, when Stoller went to visit Elvis in a Los Angeles hotel suite, the singer nervously and with some embarrassment told him that the Colonel said he had to leave.

"After Elvis got out of the Army," says D.J. Fontana, "his music changed. He wanted a bigger sound and hired more musicians." This was the period when Presley began to sing the most banal and inappropriate sort of material. It was what the Hollywood studios wanted, it seemed to be what the fans wanted, and it was what the Colonel wanted. But Elvis' musical orientation remained the same."

"Elvis always loved gospel music," says J.D. Sumner, the bass singer who hits the double low C on the current Presley single, "Way Down," and a friend since Elvis was 14. "He would go to the National Quartet Convention almost every year, and he was always showing up at performances in out-of-the-way places. I first met him when I was singing with the Blackwood Brothers quartet and we had to let him come in the back of the auditorium because he couldn't afford to pay to get in. He'd show up after that. We'd sing in Long Beach or Nashville and there he'd be.

"We spent many hours together singing gospel. You know, he wanted to sing with a quartet before he started recording for Sun. He came from a strictly evangelistic bringing-up. I remember he used to like to sing spirituals, and of course those came from the blacks. He would sit there and teach the feeling to me, and it would take me two or three hours to get it. A black singer will jump the beat, get behind the beat, and Elvis would do all that naturally. You know, with black gospel singers it's like wringing a dishrag, getting all the water out of it. They take a word and do the same thing. Elvis could do more with one word than any other man I ever heard sing. He could squeeze the world out of a word."

Presley hired Sumner and the Stamps quartet to sing with him in 1972, and the bass singer found that Elvis still recorded in the old way. "He wouldn't overdub. They tried to get him to do that, or to sing in one section of the studio with us in another one, 'It'll bleed onto the other tracks if you have everything here in the room,' they'd tell him. He didn't care. He had to have his people around him so he could get the feel of it. He needed the assurance of his family being together. He said. 'Let it bleed.'"

Larrie Londin, who filled in for regular Presley drummer Ronnie Tutt on Elvis' final concert tour, had to throw his normal working methods out the window. "His people sent me tapes two weeks in advance of everything he might do," the drummer remembers. "It was like 400 songs! So I sat down at the house and listened to them and wrote out charts for all the ones they said he was most likely to do. Then they flew me to his mansion in Memphis to rehearse. He came down and sang a few bars of this song, a few bars of that song, and had me play along. Then he said. 'Great, it's gonna be all right,' and went back upstairs to bed.

"We went out onstage cold, and I was worried. He started the first number and it didn't go like the tape. He stopped the band and said, 'Larrie, watch me,' Well, it turned out I couldn't read the charts, I just had to watch him. He was liable to stop our song in the middle and start another one. I must have sweated off 20 pounds the first two weeks of that tour, but he sweated as hard as I did. He really worked, and he expected his people to work too. And for what he was paying us, he was right to expect that."

By 1977, Presley's music-by-feel — a feel he kept alive by surrounding himself with Southerners, keeping himself steeped in his Southern roots — was almost an anachronism. But the musicians, songwriters and producers who worked with Elvis nevertheless stand in awe of his contribution to their art. For some, it had its negative side. "Ever since he came along, we've been losing our musical identities," says Chet Atkins. "There used to be pop and gospel and country and so on. Now they're all fusing together. You can hardly tell the difference between a James Taylor record and a Waylon Jennings record." J.D. Sumner sees this process differently: "One day there won't be any more pop or country or rhythm & blues. It'll just he named American music, and Elvis Presley did as much to make it that as anyone whoever lived."

[From Issue 248 — September 22, 1977]