On 24 January 1954, a 15-year-old girl at a Memphis church noticed a boy she could not stop looking at. He was 19, painfully shy, and had a haircut and clothes that nobody else in that congregation would have dared to wear. She worked out quickly that he was never going to come over and speak to her. So she stood where he could hear and loudly made plans with a friend to go roller skating that Saturday night.
Her name was Dixie Locke. His was Elvis Presley — and at that moment he was nobody at all.
The church was the First Assembly of God, and Elvis went there for one reason: gospel music. The Blackwood Brothers quartet sang there, and he worshipped them. Dixie had attended that church her whole life.
Dixie Locke Emmons, Elvis’ Girlfriend In The Early Stages Of His Career
Her trick worked. On Saturday 30 January, Elvis turned up at the Rainbow Rollerdrome and “bumped into” her. They spoke for the first time. He drove her home in his 1941 Lincoln and asked her to the pictures.
Then everything moved extremely fast. Barely two weeks later, on 16 February, Elvis brought her home for supper to meet Vernon and Gladys. Ten days after that, they went to the all-night gospel singing at Ellis Auditorium together — which is where Elvis watched a bass singer called Big Chief Wetherington shake his legs at the microphone, a detail that matters enormously later on.
The detail everybody loves about their first proper date is what he wore. Every other young man in Memphis turned up in a white T-shirt and jeans. Elvis arrived in black dress trousers with a pink seam down the leg, and a matching jacket. Dixie’s uncle took one look at his long hair, combed into a ducktail, and offered him money to go and get it cut. Elvis politely declined.
Elvis First Steady Girl Dixie Locke Emmons
Her description of him from those days is the best thing anybody has ever said about the young Elvis. “I thought he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. He was a very shy person, but when he started singing he put so much into putting the music across that he kind of lost himself. He threw himself into it completely.”
Through that summer they were together almost daily, going to the pictures two or three times a week. His parents adored her. Gladys in particular became genuinely close to Dixie. And the two families spent so much time together that, as one account puts it, it was almost as though the pair were already married. Dixie wrote him six-page love letters from her classroom desk, thinking about seeing him again — usually in a couple of hours.
And she was there for the moment everything changed. That same summer, in July 1954, Elvis walked into Sun Records and accidentally recorded “That’s All Right.” Dixie was on holiday in Florida with her family when it happened. Driving back into Memphis, she turned on the car radio — and heard “Blue Moon of Kentucky” playing. That is how she found out.
Here is what makes her unique among all the women in his life. She was not a rock-and-roll fan. Her favorite singers were Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Peggy Lee. As she pointed out years later, that was not a snub — rock and roll did not exist yet. She had fallen for a boy, not a genre and not a phenomenon.
He tried to hold onto her. He came off the road specifically to take her to her junior prom on 6 May 1955. But by then his career, in her words, had consumed him, and there was not much time left for anything else. They drifted through 1955. She met the man she would eventually marry, Bobby Emmons, in her senior year.
She refused to talk about any of it for decades. She did not want to cheapen her first love, nor did she want it to become the thing that defined her whole life. It took Peter Guralnick until 1990 to persuade her to sit down and go on the record — and he later called it one of the most emotional interviews he had ever done. She finally published her own book in 2021. She died in December 2023.
The last time she saw Elvis was the day after his mother’s funeral in 1958. She went to Graceland to sit with him while he grieved for Gladys.