In April of 1953 Elvis performed as one of twenty-two acts in the Humes High “annual minstrel show.”
In the first volume of his biography of Elvis, Last Train to Memphis, Peter Guralnick quotes him: “Nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that.” Elvis graduated from high school that year and eventually got a job driving a supply truck for Crown Electric.
In 1953, an armistice had ended the fighting in the Korean War, and unemployment was 3.0 percent.
In August 1953, eighteen-year-old Elvis went down to the Memphis Recording Service on Union Avenue, home of Sun Records and run by Sam Philips, friend of disc jockey Dewey Phillips, to make a record.
Like Elvis, Sam Phillips was passionate about music, especially the music “that white people liked but weren’t sure whether they ought to or not.”
Elvis cut a record that day for $3.95, and Phillips told him he’d call him back. Phillips didn’t call, though, and in 1954 Elvis went back and cut another record. On Saturday, June 26, 1954, Elvis got a call from Marion Keisker, who worked at Sun Records, in a story that is now world famous, asking if he could “be here by three.”
“I was there by the time she hung up the phone,” Elvis said later.
That first session didn’t work out so well, but during July Elvis and guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black—after a slow start—hit on something while they were just fooling around.
It was a speeded-up version of Mississippi crooner Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” and when Phillips heard it, he interrupted them, asking “What was that?”.
They could not tell him exactly, so they just played it again.
It was exactly the music Sam Phillips had been looking for, although he had been unable to tell them how to get there.
Sam’s brother Dewey was sold on the music too, and when he played it on his Red, Hot, and Blue radio show at WHBQ, the listeners went wild.
Dewey was kept busy on the telephone taking request after request for the song.
When the debut single of “That’s All Right” was released — with “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the flip side — it sold like crazy, and a national phenomenon was born.
Elvis was nineteen.
The group appeared for the first time on the Louisiana Hayride, a live Saturday-night country music radio show, on October 16, 1954.
The next year Elvis signed the now-famous RCA contract — for an unprecedented $40,000 — and RCA re-released the five Sun Records singles on its label.
