My Favourite Things – Sheila O’Malley

Sheila O’Malley writes film reviews and essays on actors for Capital New York, Fandor, Press Play, Noir of the Week, and the House Next Door and RogerEbert.com. Her work has appeared in Salon.com and The Sewanee Review.

That’s All Right (1954, Elvis Presley) and Elvis is Back! (1960, Elvis Presley)

Dave Marsh, in his great, now out of print book Elvis (which I’ll be discussing later) called That’s All Right “the Rosetta Stone of rock and roll”. That isn’t strictly true. There were other tracks which came in the decade before which had started to mix different styles, like country and gospel and blues. Ike Turner’s Rocket 88 is generally thought of as the first pure rock and roll track, and that was in 1951. That’s All Right was part of the first official recording session that Elvis had at Sun Studio, created and run by Sam Phillips.

Sam Phillips was a share-cropper’s son from Alabama. He had grown up alongside African-Americans who worked in the fields with him, and he understood as a child that there was this thing called ‘racism’, and that he had a leg up because of the colour of his skin. He had this perception very early on, and because he had grown up surrounded by the singing of his neighbours, one of his goals was to create a recording studio, not a label, where he could get this rich, vibrant, spiritual, very unique part of American culture – black music, gospel, traditional folk songs – on tape. He wasn’t thinking of making these songs hits, he just wanted to give an opportunity to the guys who were playing on the street corner on Beale Street in Memphis. An opportunity to record. These are legendary recordings now. Once Elvis hit the big time every single recording ever done at Sun Studio was fully available.

Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis, apparently had said that if he could “find a white man to sing in this vernacular, I’d make a million bucks”. That could be seen as cynical or it could be seen as a continuation of the feeling that the white American culture was ignoring the source of much of its own atmosphere, which was black culture. That we were all informed by it, seeped in it. We responded to it – we being white Americans in the forties and fifties. Whites needed to acknowledge and even just hear this stuff, but Phillips found that there was a cap on how much of ‘black’ music he could sell. It was like it was confined to one market. There was no crossover. He was looking for that crossover, which he felt would come from a white man singing in a so-called ‘black’ way.

  Elvis had just graduated high school. He was clearly interested in recording. He would haunt Sun Studio, with his acne, and his pink suits, and he was very shy. If you listen to the earliest Elvis tapes at Sun, they’re hilarious, because he’s singing in this quavering tenor. He wanted to be a ballad singer, and Sam Phillips wasn’t interested because it wasn’t a style he liked. That first recording was in 1953. In 1954, Phillips had a couple of songs on demo tapes that he wanted to try out, and his assistant said, “Remember that weird kid from last year? Maybe you should give him another shot.”

 Phillips put Elvis together with two musicians who were a little bit older than him, and already in bands, Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on stand up bass. They met on July 5 1954, and they started to mess around, trying to blend the country stuff, because it was assumed a white southern boy who was also the son of share-croppers would be singing what they called ‘hill-billy’ music or country music. There were a couple of songs that they recorded that night, but they weren’t really getting anywhere. Phillips felt that there was something in Elvis, an insecurity that was very interesting. There was a hunger in him that Phillips didn’t feel was in the middle class white culture. Elvis was coming from somewhere else.  

The three of them took a break and started to let off steam, and Elvis started singing this song called That’s All Right, Mama, which had been recorded by Arthur Crudup, a black blues singer. He was jumping around, goofing off, and Scotty Moore and Bill Black joined in. Sam Phillips, who was in the booth, heard it and felt a jolt. He was shocked, first of all, that Elvis even knew the song, because up to that point Elvis had been singing Ink Spots ballads and country tunes. Phillips came running out of the booth, saying “Keep going!”. This is the legend. They did three takes. Two survived.   Whatever happened in that room is what is on the recording. There was no mixing or adding later. The track of That’s All Right has a freedom to it, but it’s hard listening to it now to realise how revolutionary it was, and how scary. They were crossing the race line, which was practically illegal at that point. Scotty Moore commented that they were going to be run out of town.

Listening to it now, it’s sometimes difficult to hear, but people like Dave Marsh went back to it and saw what was happening in the South and the rest of America, and observed that there was a class issue as well as a race issue being stirred up. Something was coming up from the bottom of society, and culture was being mixed up along the way. Elvis didn’t create it, but I feel that there was something in him that knew all of it already, even as a teenager. He was shopping at Lanksy’s clothing store, which had a mostly black clientele. He thrilled to the vibrancy of black culture and music. This is now often called cultural appropriation. There is a lot of controversy about that, but in the context of 1954, it was innocent. It was paying tribute to the songs that inspired him, and the fact that whites didn’t have to be inspired only by hill-billy country music. There was this whole other thing going on.  

Sam Phillips brought a copy to a local DJ named Dewey Phillips – who wasn’t related to Sam – who had a late night show on a Memphis station known for playing black music, black music which white teens were buying in droves. The crossover was already happening on a local level. When Dewey Phillips played That’s All Right, however, mayhem ensued. He allegedly played it about 17 times in a row, and the song blew up, not on a national level, but something was starting, and within only five months, Elvis was on his way to becoming a superstar. He was sold to RCA for $35,000, and he was world famous eight months later. He was extremely controversial because he was seen by Eastern snobby music critics as a dumb hick, but the teens, both black and white, knew what he was doing.  

He rose to the top of the charts in country and western, R&B and pop, and the only one who had had a hit in all three up to that point was Carl Perkins. Elvis is the one who brought it to the mainstream.

 In 1958, Elvis was drafted into the army, and he was going to be stationed in Germany for two years. This was at the height of his new fame, and he had started making movies in Hollywood. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show three times in 1956 and 1957, the ultimate stamp of mainstream approval. In December, 1957, Elvis was drafted, and 1958 saw him having to go get his head shaved and start basic training. While he was away in the army, Elvis wasn’t going to be recording at all, which was his manager Colonel Tom Parker’s idea, the idea being “Keep them wanting more”. Elvis had feared that rock and roll was going to be a phase, a trend, and no one in the recording industry knew what was going to happen with this new kind of music. Elvis may have come back from the Army only to find the culture had moved on without him. Parker is often painted as the villain in the Elvis story but he was right. Removing Elvis from the scene created an even greater need for him. His fans were dying to have him back recording again.  

During his time away, Elvis had been working consciously on his voice. He wasn’t a dumb genius with a natural gift, he was a very aware guy who understood his voice and what it could do, as well as its limitations. He wanted to develop his higher range, because he loved Mario Lanza and Dean Martin, who were tenors, and his voice just got even more beautiful as he matured.

 His critics had said that if he came back and just started up rock and roll songs again, he would be perceived as a has-been. Elvis understood that. One of the first songs he recorded on his return was Are You Lonesome Tonight?, which isn’t on Elvis is Back!, but it’s an extraordinary recording. It’s a corny ballad that refers to ‘chairs in the parlour’, and things like that, an old-fashioned upper-middle-class environment, not his world at all, but he sings the hell out of it. Elvis always made corniness work.

Then he recorded – very quickly – in 1960, an album called Elvis is Back!. It’s a terrific album. First of all, there are no bad tracks on it. There are some very bluesy songs, sung in a more mature way. He was a man now, not the teenager of 1954, and the songs reflect his maturity. It was the first of what would be a theme in Elvis’ life, that came up again and again, where he didn’t so much reinvent himself, but reminded everyone of his relevance, his power. He was an extremely competitive man. Even when The Beatles came in the mid-sixties, he was anxious to dominate. He could be very lazy, but when he put his mind to it, he moved mountains.

Elvis is Back! moves Elvis into a more “pop” realm, increasing his appeal and his scope – which set him up for the sixties. On Elvis is Back! there are jaunty Dean Martin-type songs which show how his voice had grown, due to his conscious effort while he was away. There are damn near operatic tracks. His craft had grown. The fifties weren’t going to be the only era with which he was associated. He was going to become one of the biggest rock stars in the world, and you can hear it on almost every track on Elvis is Back!. A very important album in his career.

Elvis (1982, Dave Marsh)

   Dave Marsh’s book was published in 1982, and it’s now out of print, which is a shame, because it’s one of the best books about Elvis. Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography is also extremely important, because they humanised him, contextualized him, and didn’t caught up in the salacious details. But Dave Marsh’s book came only four years after Elvis had died. In the wake of Elvis’ death, all these revelations came out, that he was a drug addict– with sleeping bills and amphetamines, not exactly recreational drug use. Because of that, there were a couple of sordid, salacious books which came out, including a sneering and hostile biography by Albert Goldman. Goldman’s book is universally despised.

 Goldman hated Elvis’s Southern background. He thought Elvis was trash, he pulled him off the pedestal. Dave Marsh watched this go down and got infuriated, and so his book came from a place of defensive frenzy. Marsh’s book isn’t a long book, and it’s filled with pictures – it’s also beautiful coffee table book. The text probably makes up fewer than 200 pages. You get the gist of Elvis’ life, but the book is more about what was going on in the music, something Dave Marsh thought had been lost in the Elvis story, and ultimately, the music is the most important thing about Elvis.   The fact that Elvis took pills doesn’t make him unique – pill addiction is the number one addiction in America, to this day, but people didn’t know about it in 1977. The fact that he liked guns and slept with so many people – also doesn’t make him unique, it just makes him a cliché superstar. None of it is worth talking about. What makes him worth talking about is his music, so Dave Marsh went to work.

 Marsh pretty much hates the movies, as a lot of music critics do, something I disagree with, but I understand where they’re coming from. Even though Marsh hates the movies, he looks intently at the soundtracks, and, yes, there is a lot of crap there. You can clock the tracks where he’s bored, or pissed off. He knows that he’s singing crap, but at the same time he was still growing as an artist. He put out a gospel album during the movie-years that is still going platinum today. He almost put out more gospel than rock and roll. Even though Elvis was trapped in a draconian movie contract, he was not the kind of person who would stand up to authority. He saw himself as an entertainer, and a very fortunate one.

 Another thing which Marsh did, not only in his book, but in the liner notes for one of the Elvis box-sets released after his death, is to look deeply at Elvis’ 1970s music, which had often been seen as disappointing, symbolic of Elvis on a downward spiral. John Lennon had said something like, “Elvis died when he went into the army”, which Dave Marsh thinks is crap. He set out to rehabilitate the 70s music. I love ’70s Elvis too. If you listen to That’s All Right from 1954, he sounds innocent and free, and you would never think that this 18 year old recording that track would be the guy singing gigantic ballads in the ’70s, but he did, and it fits. He loved big power ballads. He always saw himself as a ballad singer.

  First of all, ballads meant he could show off his amazing voice. Second of all, he could put himself into those ballads. They were very personal to Elvis. This is what Dave Marsh thinks. In order to really get Elvis, you have to go back to the raw, exuberant teenager, when his fame exploded. Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, Love Me Tender – these were gigantic hits, and a lot of people love that Elvis the best, but if you want to understand Elvis fully as a cultural phenomenon, it is essential that you take all of the different Elvis-es, and if you do that, you will understand why people visit Graceland every year.

 Greil Marcus wrote an amazing essay on Elvis called Presliad, and in it he said, I’m paraphrasing, “Elvis always had the mainstream running in his veins.” It’s difficult to reconcile that thought with early Elvis, because Elvis was so subversive, but Elvis never wanted to stay there. If he had tried to repeat himself, and stay put with the stuff he put out in the 50s, he would have been a nostalgia act in the 60s, and we never would have heard anything else about him.  In the 70s, you can hear how much Elvis loved melodrama. A lot of times the songs are very self-pitying ballads, but Elvis was in pain in the 70s, he got a divorce, and those songs spoke to him, he put his heart and life into them in a way that very few performers can do. Judy Garland did it. Billie Holiday did it. Ray Charles did it.

Dave Marsh’s book is out of print, but you can buy it second-hand, and it’s essential reading for anyone who loves Elvis. Marsh is such a wonderful writer. The copy I had was a newer edition. The first line is Marsh admitting it was the craziest book he had ever written, and it does read like a pissed-off raging fan, asking “Why are we pulling this man off his pedestal? He’s bringing together all these different cultural strands and trying to embody the best of us. He was important.”

 Dave Marsh had a desperation to set the record straight, and in later editions he admits that he got some things wrong. He admits that he judged Sam Phillips very harshly for keeping Elvis in a box, and he admits that he got a lot more wrong, but he decided to let the text stay.  

And, just being personal for a second, the final paragraphs make me cry. If you think what Elvis did was important and interesting, and yet you can’t explain why, Dave Marsh explains it in those last paragraphs. There’s a quote from Phil Spector, which is incoherent, but explains how people felt about Elvis. This is not an exact quote, but it’s something along the lines of, “Elvis is so great, and if you don’t know why he’s so great, I just don’t know what to tell you.” And that’s kind of the issue, especially now, so many years after his death, when he has become a cultural symbol separated from his own art. I can’t think of anyone else like him, except maybe Marilyn Monroe.

The more that that symbolic stature happens, the further away we get from what Elvis actually did, and Dave Marsh’s book delves into the music in a respectful and curious way. Marsh is not afraid to say what was embarrassing, but he also gives credit where credit was due, and was doing so in 1982, when there was an almost gleeful backlash against Elvis, telling Elvis’ dirty secrets. Anyone with any connection to Elvis was writing a book about him, books an axes to grind. Dave Marsh’s book is a counter-attack to all of that, and it came out of outrage, which is why I think it still has so much resonance. Marsh feels Elvis deserves to be on that pedestal. Elvis wasn’t a saint, he was just a man, but the music has helped us become what we are today. It’s my favourite Elvis book.

Wild in the Country (1961, Phillip Dunne)

Music critics despised Elvis’ movies, not just for what they were, but that they exist at all. The movies took time out of his touring and recording. His movies were some of the biggest box office hits of the sixties, at a time when there were very few bankable stars left. He had always wanted to be an actor, a desire that had maybe even predated the music. He idolised James Dean and Marlon Brando. His desire was sincere, and he leapt at the chance to do a screen test. The movies ended up turning out differently than he had hoped. He had hoped to do some in-depth, deep or dark subject matter which, apart from a couple of exceptions, did not come to pass.

  In the early sixties, when he came back from the army, what is now known as the Elvis formula picture started with Blue Hawaii. But before that, he’d done a couple of interesting movies which – incidentally – were not hits. They’re fantastic. One of them is a western called Flaming Star, with no songs in it, except for the theme song. He’s great in it. Follow That Dream, which my friend Larry called Elvis’ Occupy Wall Street movie, is one where he plays a noble savage type of guy, and again, there aren’t many songs in it. He’s wonderful.  

But Wild in the Country feels like an old studio system picture from the 1950s. There is an in-depth plot with a lot of Freudian psychology, which everyone was obsessed with in the Fifties. The brilliant Clifford Odets wrote the screenplay, and he came out of 1930s agitprop, and I’m not sure how much of his screenplay survived in the final version, but there were actually some big names attached to the picture, which wasn’t always the case with Elvis. He’s amazing in Wild in the Country. I think people were disappointed, because he wasn’t doing what he did in the fifties.  

In Wild in the Country, Elvis plays Glenn, a rebellious guy, who almost kills his brother because his brother had been tormenting Glenn for his whole life. Because of this incident, Glenn has to go to court, where the judge rules that in lieu of sending Glenn to jail, he needs to get a steady job, he has to check in with the court once a month, as well as submit to weekly therapy sessions with a court-ordered therapist. The basic plot is similar to Good Will Hunting. The therapist is played by Hope Lange, who is wonderful, and in their sessions he starts to take responsibility for himself, and follow his own dreams.

There are, as would be true in later Elvis pictures, multiple women circling him. He was never in a movie where it was one guy and one girl. The formula for Elvis involved triangulating him – maybe because girls in the audience would then think they had a chance, which is silly, but it worked like Gang Busters. In an absolutely amazing performance, Tuesday Weld, who was only sixteen at the time, plays Elvis’s cousin, a restless sexual girl, with a child out of wedlock. Elvis and Tuesday Weld circle each other like wild animals.  

The important thing about Wild in the Country – besides its entertainment value, and it’s extremely entertaining – is that it shows what might have been. When Blue Hawaii hit so big with audiences a year later, it cemented what audiences expected from Elvis, wanted from Elvis. Wild in the Country, plus Flaming Star, show his gift as an actor. He was not an actor who transforms, or who made a big show of himself. He’s a natural, in the same way he was a natural as a singer. Wild in the Country is an example of that. He has very complex scenes to play. Scenes where he wants to say something but can’t. Unresolved issues and grief about his mother’s death. He plays a man who is compulsively polite to women, standing up when they sit down, and at the same time Glenn is a hound dog, juggling multiple romances. Both aspects were part of Elvis’ natural personality, both were true. He was a good Southern boy, and Wild in the Country captures that in a way that his other movies do not. In Wild in the Country, Elvis was the perfect leading man.

O’Malley has performed her one-woman show “74 Facts and One Lie” all over Manhattan. She has read her personal essays at the prestigious Cornelia Street Cafe Writers Read series. O’Malley writes about actors, movies, books, and Elvis Presley at her popular personal site, The Sheila Variations.

Her first play, July and Half of August, recently had public readings at Theatre Wit in Chicago, and The Vineyard Theatre in New York. She is currently working on her second play, as well as a book about Elvis Presley in Hollywood.

Click to share on Twitter!Click To Tweet

0 Shares

About the Author

Padraic Coffey Padraic Coffey is a freelance writer and film critic who currently lives in Vancouver, Canada. He has written for the Sunday Independent, Ireland's largest circulation newspaper, and Trinity College, Dublin, ranked in the top 100 best universities in the world by the QS World University Rankings in 2014. Additionally, his film criticism has appeared on Volta - Ireland's first VOD website - as well as sites such as Taste of Cinema, Film Jam and Head Stuff.