In the fall of 1956, Elvis Presley came home to Tupelo, Mississippi, as a brand-new star. The whole town wanted to see him.
One family got to do more than see him. They had Elvis, his mother Gladys and his father Vernon over for dinner.
That family was the Saverys. Joe “Bitsy” Savery had been Elvis’s buddy back in the sixth grade at Milam Junior High. The two boys ate lunch together outside by the shed, and Bitsy remembered that Elvis “was always picked in the first group for sports.” Or, as he put it another way, “He was never picked last.”
Then one day his friend just wasn’t there anymore. The Presleys had moved to Memphis in 1948.
Bitsy’s father, J.M. “Ikey” Savery, ran the Mississippi-Alabama Fair, and he helped bring Elvis back to play it in 1956. At that show Elvis told the press, “Last time I was here, I didn’t have a nickel to get in.”
Bitsy Savery told the Daily Journal, the newspaper in northeast Mississippi, all about that dinner in 2018. This short film was shot in Tupelo on the day Elvis came home, and it gives you a feel for the town that was waiting for him.
Tupelo on the day Elvis came home
Ikey had a few house rules before the Presleys arrived. His boys weren’t to take pictures inside the house, and they weren’t to ask Elvis for an autograph. Bitsy admired the ring Elvis was wearing, but his dad warned him not to mention it, because Elvis “will probably give it to you.”
The table was loaded with Southern cooking. There was sweet potato casserole and a big honey and cinnamon baked ham topped with molasses.
What Bitsy noticed most was how Elvis treated his mother. He opened doors for her and helped her into her seat.
“You could just feel Elvis’ love for Gladys,” Bitsy said.
But the seat Gladys ended up in was Mrs. Savery’s butterfly chair, and that chair had a little secret. On the floor by it was a switch that rang a buzzer in the kitchen. Gladys sat down and set it off by accident.
To be clear, this was Mrs. Savery’s own chair in the Savery house in Tupelo. It had nothing to do with Graceland’s dining room.
Ikey could have leaned over and told his guest she was in the wrong seat. He didn’t. Bitsy Savery says his father “ripped that buzzer off the kitchen wall” and then sat back down and “calmly asked for more ham.”
Gladys was spared the awkward moment, and dinner went on.
The ham made an impression on Elvis too. He liked it so much that he whispered to his mother that she “really needed to find out what was on top of that ham.”
The Presleys came back the next year, when the Saverys hosted a buffet during Elvis’s 1957 visit. Elvis was resting upstairs when he heard knocking on the wall. He went looking and found Bitsy’s baby son doing it. So he scooped the little boy up, carried him downstairs and said, “Look what I found.”
If you want to see more of that first trip home and the excitement around it, this fan-made look back at the hometown hero’s 1956 return sets the scene nicely.
A look back at Elvis’s 1956 return to Tupelo
Elvis later invited Bitsy to come see him at Graceland. Bitsy never made that trip, and years afterward he still thought about it.
“Looking back now, I wish I would have gone while he was living and just visited as pals.”