Before anyone outside Memphis knew his name, Elvis Presley had one big dream, and it wasn’t to be a rock star.
He wanted to sing gospel.
His father, Vernon Presley, told the story himself in Good Housekeeping magazine in January 1978. Vernon wrote that right after high school, he sat his son down and asked what he wanted to do with his life. He even offered to find a way to send him to college.
Elvis had other plans. As Vernon remembered it, his boy told him, “Daddy, I want to be an entertainer. I want to sing with a gospel quartet”.
Vernon didn’t argue. “‘You do whatever you want to do’, I said, ‘and we’ll help you all we can’.”
That was how the Presleys worked. Vernon, Gladys and their boy were a tight little team. In Vernon’s words, “the three of us formed our own private world.”
Here’s some real film of Elvis’s mom and dad talking on camera, so you can meet the two people who backed that dream from the start.
Gladys and Vernon Presley talk on camera
Around that time, a new gospel quartet was starting up in Memphis. Vernon called them the Song Fellows, though the name is usually written as the Songfellows. It was a young group started by Jim Hamill and Cecil Blackwood, and Elvis knew them both.
So he asked for an audition.
It didn’t go the way he hoped. “They turned him down because they said he couldn’t sing,” Vernon wrote.
To be fair to the young singers, their problem was more specific than that. According to Elvis Presley Music, an Australian site that has traced the story, they felt Elvis “couldn’t hear harmony.” He could sing lead just fine. But in a quartet, you have to blend in behind another voice, and that wasn’t his gift yet.
For a teenager who wanted it so badly, that had to sting. But Elvis kept going.
Vernon remembered that Elvis first walked into the Sun studio in Memphis to make a record as a gift for his mother. That was in 1953. One of the songs he sang that day was “My Happiness,” and you can hear it right here.
The record Elvis made for his mother
Things moved quickly after that. Elvis signed with Sun Records, and his first records there started catching on. Listen to this 1954 Sun session tape and you’ll hear the young singer the gospel group passed on, finding his own sound.
Elvis in the studio at Sun in 1954
Then one day Elvis came home with news.
The Songfellows had a spot open. Cecil Blackwood had moved up to the famous Blackwood Brothers Quartet, and the group that once said no was now asking for Elvis.
Elvis told his dad, “Daddy, you know the Song Fellows? They want me to join them now”.
Vernon didn’t have to think long. He wrote, “My answer to that was, ‘To hell with the Song Fellows! You’re doing okay with what you’ve got going, and I don’t believe I would change’.”
It’s hard not to laugh at how blunt that is. It also says something about Vernon. This was a dad who had promised to help his son any way he could, and here he was making sure Elvis didn’t go backward.
Elvis listened. He’d already signed with Sun Records, and he didn’t break that contract.
Years later, it was Vernon who wrote the whole thing down for a magazine, blunt answer and all. He clearly hadn’t changed his mind.