Long before Elvis Presley ever stood on a stage with a guitar, there was music in his parents’ house. Not on the radio. It came from the three of them.
We know about it because of a newspaper reporter who knocked on the Presleys’ door in 1956.
That September, New York Daily Mirror columnist Sidney Fields traveled to Memphis. Elvis wasn’t even home. He was out in Hollywood filming the movie “Love Me Tender.” But his parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, invited Fields inside anyway, and they talked to him about the boy they’d raised.
Their conversation turned into a five-part newspaper series called “The Real Story of Elvis Presley.” It ran from Sept 23 to 27, 1956.
Fields could tell right away what kind of couple he was sitting with. He wrote that they “do have a deep bond between them… and they express it in a quiet kindness.”
You don’t have to just read about them, either. Gladys and Vernon sat for a radio interview later that same month, and this recording lets you hear their own voices talking about their son.
Gladys and Vernon Presley talking about Elvis in 1956
When Vernon told Fields about the early days, he started with church.
“At 9 he was picked to sing alone in church,” Vernon said.
Gladys had her own memories of those church days. Even as a little boy, Elvis couldn’t keep still when the music started. “Even when he was a tiny kid and we sang at church and camp meetin’s, Elvis moved around and acted out his songs,” she said.
So the music was there from the start. And at home, the Presleys didn’t need anybody else to make it.
Here’s how Vernon put it, in his own words.
“At home we sang as a trio, when Gladys wasn’t playin’ the harmonica.”
Gladys Presley played the harmonica.
It’s a picture most of us never had of her. We think of Elvis’s mother singing in church. But Vernon remembered her with a harmonica, making music of her own whenever she wasn’t singing with her husband and son. The interview doesn’t say what songs she played, so we’re left to wonder.
Then Vernon said something every proud dad has said in one way or another.
“Elvis always had a natural talent. He can’t read a note even now. But you don’t have to teach a fish to swim.”
He had a point. The boy who couldn’t read a note was already out in Hollywood making a movie.
Gladys saw the same thing in her son. “He’s always had a lot of energy and he’s big now and gets rid of it in his music,” she told Fields. “When he sings he’s bein’ himself and that’s not bad or wrong.”
She was proud of how he’d turned out, too. “He never lies. He doesn’t swear. I never heard him call anyone anything except ‘Mister’ and ‘Sir.'”
Elvis spent his boyhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, and this fan’s audio tour takes you inside the First Assembly of God church there, a stop for Elvis fans who visit the town.
An audio tour inside the First Assembly of God church in Tupelo
Sidney Fields went back to New York liking the Presleys a lot. “I like these people,” he wrote. “They’re simple, neighborly, unaffected by the fame and fortune of their son, or the furor he has created.”
That’s who they were in that little house. A dad and his boy singing, and a mom with a harmonica, filling in whenever she wasn’t singing along.