Elvis Presley

Elvis was wearing pink slacks, a pink shirt and white buck shoes, the way Scotty remembers it, and after the initial awkwardness had passed, Elvis and Scotty began playing their guitars, with Elvis singing several songs recently popularized by Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, two established country artists, and Billy Eckstine, one of Elvis's favorite popular black artists. Bill Black, a bass player who lived just three doors away from Scotty, wandered in about halfway through the two-hour session and after listening for a short time wandered out again, returning after Elvis had left.

"I said, 'Well, what did you think?" Bill said, 'Well, he didn't impress me too damned much. You know-snotty-nosed kid come in here with the wild clothes. We didn't think much about it at all. So I called Sam Sunday afternoon, I told him, 'Well, the boy's got a good voice. I told him the songs that Elvis did and I said, 'He didn't do them any better than the originals did. And so forth. Sam said, 'Well, tell you what. I'll call him and we'll set up an audition for tomorrow night, Monday night. We won't bring the whole band in, the hillybilly group with the steel guitar, the whole thing.' He said, 'Just you and Bill come over, something for a little rhythm. We'll put down a few things and we'll see what he sounds like coming back off the tape recorder." I said okay." What followed was not a simple audition but several months of hard work. No one seems to remember precisely how many months. Almost every day, after they finished work, Bill and Scotty and Elvis met in the small Sun studio to rehearse, to (quoting Marion) "develop a style." Elvis appeared with Scotty's full band in a local club a few times, but Sam said he didn't sound right with that much instrumentation behind him.

"Mostly I think they were coming in every afternoon to please Sam," said Marion. "He kept saying, 'Keep it simple, keep it simple.' Sam was listening while doing other things. They were trying to evolve something that was different and unique. Finally one night—I don't know whether Sam decided he was ready or he had finally heard something he said, 'Okay, this is the session.'"

"The first thing that was put on tape was 'I Love You Because,'" said Scotty. "Then he did a couple of those country-orientated things. They were all right. Little while later we were sitting there drinking a Coke, shooting the bull, Sam back in the control room. So Elvis picked up his guitar and started banging on it and singing 'That's All Right, Mama.' Jumping around the studio, just acting the fool. And Bill started beating on his bass and I joined in. Just making a bunch of racket, we thought. The door to the control room was open, and when we was halfway through the thing, Sam come running out and said,

'What in the devil are you doing?' We said, 'We don't know.' He said, 'Well, find out real quick and don't lose it. Run through it again and let's put it on tape. So to the best of our knowledge, we repeated what we just done and went through the whole thing."

©️ELVIS , THE BIOGRAPHY-Jerry Hopkins

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November 27, 1977