Before the screaming crowds, Elvis Presley was a 19-year-old in Memphis with a steady girlfriend and a big piece of news he couldn’t keep to himself.
Her name was Dixie Locke.
Dixie first noticed Elvis at a church function at the First Assembly of God in Memphis in January 1954. She was a teenager, about 15, and Elvis was a young man who hadn’t made a single record yet.
“We started going together in January ’54, and we dated pretty steadily until his first record was released,” Dixie remembered years later.
That first record changed everything, and fast.
On July 5, 1954, Elvis recorded “That’s All Right.” Just three days later, on July 8, a Memphis disc jockey named Dewey Phillips played it on WHBQ. It was the first time anyone had heard Elvis on the radio.
You’d think his girlfriend would have been right there by the radio with him. She wasn’t. Dixie was away on a family vacation in Florida that summer.
So Elvis did what a young man did back then when news couldn’t wait for a letter. He sent her a telegram.
Dixie never forgot what it said.
“I got a telegram from him saying, ‘They’re playing my records on the radio’. He was ecstatic over it.”
That’s the message she remembered, and it’s perfect. A thrilled kid wanted his girl to know his records were out there, playing for anybody with a radio.
And the story has a sweet second chapter. When the family trip was over and Dixie’s family was driving back into Memphis, she heard Elvis on the car radio. The song was “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the other side of his very first record.
Think about being a teenager in that car, hearing your boyfriend’s voice come out of the radio as you roll back into Memphis. Dixie didn’t have to dream it up. She lived it.
In this short clip, you can hear Dixie talk about the young Elvis she knew before the rest of the world caught on.
Dixie Locke remembering Elvis in his early days
The two of them had big plans once. “We had talked about getting married, but by the time his records came out, we realized that wasn’t going to happen,” Dixie said.
There was no bad blood in it. Elvis’s life was suddenly moving at a speed nobody could have planned for, and they slowly drifted apart.
Dixie described it kindly. “It was kind of a mutual thing. His career was going in one direction, and I didn’t feel that I could be a part of it.”
That’s a pretty gracious way to look back on first love with the most famous man in the world.
She got to see the very start of it all, though. Before any of the fame, Elvis was a 19-year-old so excited about hearing himself on the radio that he had to tell Dixie right away, even with her all the way down in Florida.