Long before the gold records and the roaring crowds, Elvis was just a boy in Tupelo, Mississippi, singing in a tiny country church.
And there was a little girl at that church too. Her name was Magdalene Morgan, and she played the piano while young Elvis sang.
Their families were close. Magdalene’s mother and Elvis’s mother, Gladys, were best friends. Magdalene even remembered Elvis sometimes wearing a birthday shirt Gladys had sewn for him out of flour-sack material, because that’s the kind of make-do, loving home it was.
From the end of fifth grade right up until the Presleys packed up for Memphis, the two of them were sweethearts.
Magdalene remembering her childhood with Elvis
In this piece she looks back on knowing Elvis as a boy, long before the world did.
You can already tell she saw something in him. “He always wanted to be a singer. Always!” she said. She knew it even then.
But the moment fans love most is the sweet thing Elvis did behind his house, the one that led straight to their first kiss. It’s about as innocent and tender as young love gets, and it left a little mark you could actually see and touch.
Their romance was gentle and shy, by her own telling. When someone later asked whether the kisses were passionate, she laughed it off with a two-word answer that’s pure 1940s small-town sweetheart. And she admitted they only kissed a handful of times across the whole stretch of years.
Then came the news that broke her young heart. The Presleys were moving to Memphis. “I cried a good while,” she remembered.
The phone call that almost happened
There’s one more part of this story that stays with you.
Years later, after Elvis had become famous, Magdalene called a Hollywood studio to try to reach her old sweetheart. And he called back. Fast too, not thirty minutes after. But she was at work when the call came, and the two of them never did get to talk.
So close, after all those years, and they just missed each other.
It’s a story that proves the biggest star in the world started out as a shy country boy carving a little heart for the girl who played piano while he sang.
Watch the clip above to hear exactly what he carved behind the house, and the sweet words he left underneath it. Some first loves really do stay with you forever.