One night in July 1954, a 19-year-old from Memphis was about to hear himself on the radio for the very first time. And he couldn’t stand to listen.
That young man was Elvis Presley. He had just made his first record, a song called “That’s All Right,” and a popular Memphis disc jockey named Dewey Phillips was going to play it on his show, “Red, Hot and Blue,” on station WHBQ. Dewey was no relation to Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records.
Elvis was a nervous wreck. His mother, Gladys, remembered exactly what he did. “Elvis fixed the radio and told us to leave it on that station, and then he went to the movies,” she said. “I guess he was just too nervous to listen.”
So he set the dial for his parents and headed out. Gladys and her husband, Vernon, stayed home by the radio and waited.
If you’ve never really sat down with it, start here, because this is the record Gladys was waiting for that night.
Elvis’s first record, “That’s All Right”
Dewey played the record, and Memphis noticed right away. Listeners began phoning the station to ask who the singer was. Dewey played it again and again, and he tried to reach Elvis by phone.
Meanwhile, back at the Presley house, Gladys was having a moment of her own.
Elvis’s mom later told her side of that night, and author Elaine Dundy shared it in her 1985 book “Elvis and Gladys.” Another writer, Gary Parker, described Gladys as “crouched before the radio.”
What got to her came a few seconds before the song even started. In Dundy’s book, Gladys put it this way.
“Hearing them say his name over the radio just before they put on that record. That shook me so it stayed with me right through the whole song, Elvis Presley, just my son’s name. I couldn’t rightly hear the record the first time round.”
Just his name, on the radio, for the whole city. That was the part she couldn’t get past.
Then the phone rang. Dewey called the house looking for Elvis, and Gladys and Vernon went to find him. He was at the Suzore No. 2, a movie theater at 279 North Main Street. In the dark, the two of them walked up and down the aisles until they spotted their son.
As the book “Elvis Day by Day” puts it, “Gladys and Vernon go up and down the aisles at the Suzore # 2, finally locating Elvis and sending him down to the radio station.” WHBQ broadcast from the Chisca Hotel, so off he went.
That night Elvis sat down for his very first radio interview. Dewey asked him where he went to high school, and the answer, Humes High, told listeners who he was.
Two years later the two of them were still talking. This recording from June 1956 lets you hear Dewey Phillips, the disc jockey who first played Elvis, talking with him.
Dewey Phillips talks with Elvis in 1956
Elvis would hear his name on the radio more times than anyone could count after that. Still, the first time was the one Gladys talked about. She was home by the radio in July 1954, and her nervous son was sitting in a dark movie theater with no idea the city was already asking about him.