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Elvis Presley · S1 E2
Shake Rag
Growing up next to the Black neighborhood where gospel and blues pour from every church and juke joint
A white boy no older than ten crouches under the window of a juke joint on the wrong side of the Tupelo tracks. The music inside is louder, wilder, and more alive than anything he has ever heard in church.
"Don't Be Cruel" (Elvis Presley, live on The Ed Sullivan Show, 1956). Written by Otis Blackwell, a Black songwriter from Brooklyn, this is one of the clearest examples of Elvis channeling the R&B he first heard as a kid in Shake Rag. The rhythm, the phrasing, the swing: all of it comes from those open windows.
Don't Be Cruel, Elvis Presley (1956)
Otis Blackwell wrote this song and demoed it himself, and Elvis learned it by copying Blackwell's vocal phrasing almost note for note. The two men never met in person, not during the recording, not ever. Blackwell later said on Letterman that he deliberately avoided meeting Elvis because the arrangement was working too well to risk changing it. The double-sided single with Hound Dog sat at number one for eleven weeks straight. Listen for the relaxed, behind-the-beat delivery. That's not Elvis being cool. That's Elvis being Otis.
Sources
Guralnick, Peter. "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley." Little, Brown, 1994.
Jorgensen, Ernst. "Elvis Presley: A Life in Music." St. Martin's Press, 1998.
TAP TO REVEAL: What was Shake Rag?
Two Worlds, One Sound
Tupelo in the 1940s is segregated in every way that matters: schools, churches, water fountains, neighborhoods. But sound doesn't obey Jim Crow laws. The gospel music pouring from the Black churches on the east side of town uses the same God and the same hymns as the white Assembly of God, but the delivery is completely different: louder, more physical, more ecstatic.
Sources
Guralnick, Peter. "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley." Little, Brown, 1994.
“The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in the juke joints and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up.”
— Elvis Presley, quoted in Peter Guralnick, "Last Train to Memphis," Little, Brown, 1994
The Boy Who Listened
Most white kids in Tupelo don't cross the tracks. Elvis does. He listens to WELO radio, which plays both country and R&B. He sneaks into the Shake Rag area to hear music that his white neighbors pretend doesn't exist. By the time he's a teenager, the sounds of Black gospel, country gospel, hillbilly, and Delta blues are all mixed up inside his head, and he can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
Sources
Guralnick, Peter. "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley." Little, Brown, 1994.
Mason, Bobbie Ann. "Elvis Presley: A Life." Penguin, 2003.
Trying to Get to You, Elvis Presley (1956)
Originally an R&B song by the Eagles (not the 70s band, a 1950s vocal group), Elvis recorded this at Sun Records and turned it into one of the rawest performances of his early career. The vocal is desperate, pleading, and completely unrestrained. You can hear every juke joint, every church choir, every late-night radio broadcast that poured into a kid's ears in Shake Rag. This is what it sounds like when all those influences collide.
Trying to Get to You, Elvis Presley (1956)
"I've been traveling over mountains, even through the valleys too." Read the lyrics while you listen. The song is a simple love plea, but Elvis sings it like a man who has walked barefoot across Mississippi. The conviction turns pop lyrics into something that sounds like gospel testimony.
Shake Rag: The File
Who originally recorded 'That's All Right Mama,' the song Elvis would later cut as his first single at Sun Records?
On Sunday mornings, Elvis walks into the First Assembly of God church, and the congregation lets loose with a kind of music that treats the whole body as an instrument. Next: the church that taught Elvis to move.
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