Back in 1955, Elvis Presley wasn’t the King yet. He was a young singer from Memphis with one small record label behind him and a love of gospel music he’d carried since he was a boy sitting in church.
One Sunday afternoon that year, he slipped backstage at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis. The show belonged to Eddy Arnold, a big country star at the time, and singing with Arnold that day was a vocal group called the Jordanaires. If you’ve ever heard those warm background voices on a stack of old classic records, that’s them. Four men, tight harmony, raised on gospel.
Elvis knew exactly who they were.
He told them he’d been hearing them on the Grand Ole Opry, the famous country radio show broadcast out of Nashville. Then he asked if they’d sing a few spirituals with him right there in the room. So they did. For a little while a nobody and a well-known group just stood around together singing church songs.
That’s when Elvis made his promise.
Gordon Stoker, the group’s lead tenor, told this whole story years later, and hearing him say it beats reading it.
Gordon Stoker remembers the day a young Elvis first sang with the Jordanaires
Here’s what Elvis said to them: “If I ever get a major recording contract, I want you guys to work with me.”
The Jordanaires didn’t think anything about it. As Stoker put it, they’d been told that by a lot of people. Young singers said things like that all the time, and it never came to much. Nice words and nothing more.
Except this time the kid meant it.
When RCA, one of the biggest record companies in the country, signed Elvis in January of 1956, he remembered. At those first sessions only Stoker got the call. But after a session in Nashville that April, Elvis asked for the whole group. From then on the Jordanaires stood behind him for about 14 years, on his records and in his movies.
He didn’t stop there either. Elvis made sure the group’s name got printed right on his record labels, so anybody who bought the record knew whose voices those were. For a backing group in those days, that kind of credit was rare.
Stoker, who passed away in 2013, talked often about how down-to-earth Elvis stayed through all the fame. In this one he looks back on his years standing a few feet from him.
Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires looks back on his years with Elvis
A promise made in a backstage room, by someone nobody had heard of yet. Fans still love this one because it actually came true. Stoker tells it better than anyone, so give the clips a minute.