Long before the gold records and the sold-out shows, Elvis Presley was just a skinny boy in Tupelo, Mississippi. Tupelo is the small town in northern Mississippi where Elvis was born in 1935 and spent his early years, in a two-room house his father built by hand. The family had almost no money, but young Elvis had a cheap guitar and a big imagination.
He also had a hero.
His name was Carvell Lee Ausborn, though everyone in town knew him as Mississippi Slim. Slim was a country singer with his own program on WELO, the local Tupelo radio station over on Spring Street. In a town that size, a man with his own show on the air was about as famous as a person could get, and to Elvis he was a star.
Every Saturday, Elvis made his way down to that station. He wasn’t going alone. Slim had a younger brother named James, and James later remembered Elvis coming along with him into town on those Saturday mornings, walking to the station where Slim’s broadcast aired before the big weekly show.
Elvis wasn’t there just to listen. He wanted Slim to teach him. As his brother James later remembered it, Elvis kept asking to go back because, in his words, “I want him to show me some more chords on the guitar.” Slim would sit with the boy and show him a little more each visit.
Here’s the part the whole thing was building toward, and it surprises most people.
This short film takes Elvis back to the Tupelo streets where all of it started.
Elvis and the Tupelo that made him
Tupelo has never forgotten any of this. There’s a historical marker at the old Lee County Courthouse on Spring Street, and it spells out exactly what the boy wanted most. In the town’s own words: “Elvis’ dream was to become as famous as Mississippi Slim and to have his own radio show some day.”
That’s the line that catches people off guard. The most famous entertainer the world would ever see didn’t dream of Hollywood or big stages. He dreamed of being as big as a hillbilly singer on a small-town station, and of hosting his own show on WELO one day.
Slim gave him more than guitar chords. Back in 1946, WELO ran weekly music jamborees from inside that courthouse, and as the marker puts it, “Mississippi Slim, who had his own show on WELO, arranged for Elvis to perform at the jamboree.” Tupelo counts that night as Elvis’s first live performance on the radio.
Mississippi Slim, who lived from 1923 to 1973, probably never guessed how far that kindness would carry. He gave a poor local kid a handful of chords and one turn at the microphone, and that kid grew up to change music forever.