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Elvis Presley · S1 E5
Beale Street
A white teenager wanders into the heart of Black Memphis and discovers R&B, blues, and the sound that will change his life
A white teenager in a pink shirt and slicked-back hair walks down Beale Street on a Saturday night in 1950. Every doorway is leaking a different kind of music, and not a single note of it sounds like anything they play on the country station.
"Trouble" (Elvis Presley, from King Creole, 1958). Raw, snarling, pure blues attitude. This is what Beale Street sounds like when a kid from the projects absorbs it so completely that it comes back out as something new. The lip curl and the swagger started on this street.
Trouble, Elvis Presley (1958)
Recorded for the movie King Creole in 1958, Trouble is Elvis at his most dangerous. The arrangement is stripped to the bone: just guitar, bass, drums, and Elvis leaning into the microphone like he's about to bite it. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote it specifically for the film, and Elvis delivers it with more venom than anything else in his catalog. Listen for the growl underneath the melody. That's not rock and roll technique. That's Beale Street blues delivered by someone who spent his teenage years soaking it up through open doors and cracked windows.
Sources
Guralnick, Peter. "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley." Little, Brown, 1999.
Jorgensen, Ernst. "Elvis Presley: A Life in Music." St. Martin's Press, 1998.
Beale Street, Memphis
The main artery of Black Memphis since the early 1900s. B.B. King played the clubs here. Muddy Waters passed through. By the time teenage Elvis started wandering down from Lauderdale Courts, Beale Street was the richest concentration of Black music in America.
“I dug the real low-down Mississippi singers, mostly Big Bill Broonzy and Big Boy Crudup. Although they would scold me at home for listening to them.”
— Elvis Presley, interview with Charlotte Observer, June 1956
The Education of Elvis Presley
Elvis doesn't just listen. He studies. He stands outside Lansky Brothers clothing store on Beale Street, watching the sharp-dressed Black men come and go. He buys his clothes there, the flashy shirts and high-collared jackets that nobody on the white side of Memphis would wear. And he spends hours at the record shops, listening to every R&B and blues record he can get his hands on.
Sources
Guralnick, Peter. "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley." Little, Brown, 1994.
Gordon, Robert. "It Came from Memphis." Faber & Faber, 1995.
TAP TO REVEAL: Where did Elvis buy the clothes that made him look so different from every other white kid in Memphis?
Reconsider Baby, Elvis Presley (1960)
A slow, heavy blues originally recorded by Lowell Fulson in 1954. Elvis' version, from the album Elvis Is Back!, is the closest he ever came to a pure Beale Street blues recording. The guitar tone is thick and dirty, the vocal is raw, and there's no pop polish anywhere. This is the sound that teenage Elvis absorbed walking down Beale Street at night, and it never left him.
Reconsider Baby, Elvis Presley (1960)
"So long, oh baby, so long." Read the lyrics while you listen. Lowell Fulson wrote this as a classic blues breakup song, and Elvis delivers it with the kind of weight that only comes from a singer who internalized the blues as a teenager. No performance, no showmanship. Just the feeling.
Beale Street: The File
What was the name of the clothing store on Beale Street where Elvis bought his famous flashy outfits?
Elvis has a guitar now, and he can barely play three chords on it. Next: a shy outsider carries it to school every day, gets laughed at by his classmates, and then plays a senior talent show that leaves the entire auditorium in stunned silence.
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