Before the screaming crowds and the gold records, Elvis Presley was a quiet teenager with a cheap guitar and a lot of nerves.
He was 14 when his family moved into Lauderdale Courts, a public housing project in Memphis. The date was Sept 20, 1949. The Presleys took a two-bedroom apartment there for $35 a month, and they ended up staying longer than they’d stayed anywhere before Graceland.
The Courts were full of families and full of kids. One of those kids was John Deen.
Deen grew up at Lauderdale Courts, and he and Elvis both went to Humes High School. Decades later, he sat down with a small-town paper, the Albert Lea Tribune, and in 2010 he shared what he remembered about the boy from the Courts who became the King of Rock and Roll.
Deen remembers that whenever Elvis wasn’t working, he’d sit outside with that guitar. He played country songs and gospel songs. But there was a catch.
Elvis didn’t like to sing by himself.
That might be hard to believe about a man who later sang in front of millions. But Deen says the shy kid in the courtyard just couldn’t do it alone. So the Courts kids came up with a simple fix.
“Elvis was reluctant to sing alone, so my brothers, sister and I, along with other Court kids, would sit there with him and have a sing-along,” Deen said.
That’s it. They sat down next to him and sang along, so he never had to carry a song on his own. In a way, a bunch of kids in a Memphis housing project became the future King of Rock and Roll’s very first backup singers.
It wasn’t all music, either. “Besides holding sing-alongs, one of our favorite games was cork ball,” Deen said. The kids wrapped cork in tape for a ball and used old broom handles for bats.
Deen also remembers Elvis standing out in his colorful shirts. “He was different than most white males in the early ’50s,” he said.
The Presleys’ old apartment is still there. This fan’s tour takes you inside it and around the grounds where those sing-alongs happened, so you can see the place where a shy boy with a guitar first had a crowd around him.
A walk through the Presleys’ Lauderdale Courts apartment
Here’s where the story takes a turn.
Years later, after Elvis had become the biggest star in the world, he walked into a Las Vegas nightclub. Working there was John Deen, the kid from the Courts.
Elvis didn’t just say hello. Deen says Elvis told him that if he ever got tired of Vegas, he should move to Hollywood to be near him.
So Deen did. He moved to Hollywood, found work as a movie extra and went to parties at Elvis’s home.
“Early on, Elvis was a generous man,” Deen said.
And Elvis never really let go of those Memphis days. Deen remembers that on visits home in the 1960s, Elvis would rent the fairgrounds so he and his friends could ride all night long. Deen even knew his favorite ride. “Elvis especially liked the bumper cars!”
The shy boy who wouldn’t sing alone grew up and found his voice. But Deen’s memories show he kept a place for the kids who once sat beside him in that courtyard.