Mac Davis knew talent from the inside out. He was a hit songwriter himself, and he handed Elvis some of his best stuff, “In the Ghetto,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “Don’t Cry Daddy,” “Memories.” So he had every reason to talk about Elvis like an equal. He still couldn’t quite manage it, even years later.
“Number one, he was the prettiest man you ever saw in your life,” Davis said. He called him “beyond handsome,” like the regular words just didn’t cover it. Coming from somebody who spent his whole career around famous faces, that tells you something.
And the looks were only the start. What Davis kept coming back to was what Elvis did to a room. “There was something electric about him,” he said, and everything would just stop when Elvis walked in. First time Davis watched him perform, his jaw dropped, by his own telling. He saw him as a young man and then again more than ten years later, and it hit him the same way both times.
His favorite bit was about the crowd. Watching the women at one of the shows, he came out with the line fans still pass around: “You couldn’t have wiped the smiles off their faces with a hand grenade.” Sounds like a joke, but he meant it flat. He’d watched a whole room go under at once and never shook it.
Best thing is you can hear Davis tell all this in his own words, how “In the Ghetto” ended up with Elvis and what it was like having the King cut his songs.
Mac Davis Interview – “Elvis Presley and Me”
What makes Davis worth listening to is that he knew how the trick was done. Song structure, stagecraft, all the moving parts of a performance, he understood every bit of it. He could see the wires, and he still couldn’t fully explain what Elvis did with them.
There’s a nice bit of footage, too, of the two of them in the same frame, Elvis up on stage in 1969 introducing Davis by name before launching into the song.
Elvis Introduces Mac Davis + ‘In The Ghetto’, August 26, 1969
Years on, Davis never really talked himself out of that first impression. He’d met the most magnetic performer he’d ever see, written a few songs that stuck around for good, and still came away a little starstruck.