artist. An entrepreneur with a background in carnivals and a fake military title called Colonel Tom Parker had taken over managing Elvis from Sam Phillips, and he steered the young man away from Sun Records to RCA — one of the five or six major recording companies. RCA proclaimed their new signing as an up-and-coming star of country music and his first release on their label was a country song, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” (recorded in Sun Studios in 1955). The B side of this disc was the sublime “Mystery Train,” one of the great rock songs, and its relegation to the B side indicates where RCA thought the core audience for Elvis might be. Yet RCA alerted their dealers that Elvis’s records should be catalogued as both pop and country.
Twenty-one-year old Elvis made the journey to Nashville at the beginning of 1956 and found himself in RCA’s recording studio under the watchful gaze of Chet Atkins. This was a complex of studios, first-rate equipment, and some of the best guitar pickers in the nation — a big change from the tiny, primitive independent studios like Sun in Memphis or Shackleford’s Heart Studios in Birmingham. When “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in January 1956, there was an anxious feeling in RCA’s offices in Nashville and New York that someone had made a big mistake. A few weeks later no one was worrying anymore; “Heartbreak Hotel” was racing up the charts — not just the pop charts, but all the charts. It had reached number 1 in pop and country and number 5 in the rhythm and blues charts by March. Its sales were astounding. Even the black radio stations were playing it. The next time Shackleford and Hines met for lunch a few weeks after that November meeting, Hines said: “Ken, you are not going to believe this but we are shipping records out of Indianapolis in boxcars” — that is, in railroad boxcars instead of in trucks or U.S. Mail packages. The national network of record distributors operated by RCA was spreading the word of rock ’n’ roll in the form of this single disc.
The Rock ’n’ Roll Show
The first national tours of artists playing the new music came to Alabama in 1956, such as Bill Haley, the Drifters, Bo Diddley, and Big Joe Turner, whose “Shake, Rattle and Roll” had been the basis of many successful covers by white artists, including one by Bill Haley. These were the days when a concert was more than one headliner and an opening band, but as many as fifteen nationally known artists all performing on one bill. Music promoter Tony Ruffino: “There was eleven acts on one show and they all did one song. The radio would only play one or two songs. So therefore no one would ever have more than one or two hits.” The next year Alan Freed’s Biggest Show of Stars came to the Deep South with some of the emerging names in what he had labeled rock ’n’ roll: Fats Domino, Paul Anka, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, the Drifters, and the Crickets, led by a bespectacled teenager called Buddy Holly. Ben Saxon remembered that evening: “This was the big show of 1957.” Saxon acquired some photographs and records given to the person who cleaned up the auditorium after the show: “He would help them unload their equipment … He got this kind of stuff from them. He got this one signed by Fats Domino. Here is Buddy Holly. This is 1957, two years before he died … Buddy Holly was it. I will be fifty-two years old tomorrow [1994]. If you took a survey of people that were three years older and younger than me, Buddy Holly would be their favorite artist. Not Elvis Presley. I’m talking about here in Birmingham … I was in Panama City, Florida, the first time I heard him. I was only a kid. I heard him on the jukebox. They had all the black artists, like Muddy Waters, on there. All of a sudden I heard this white voice and did not know what to think. I still liked it. I was adapted to the black sound.”
While the traveling shows of stars were eagerly awaited, they were rare and wonderful events in the lives of Birmingham’s teenagers, who wanted more than a once-a-year rock ’n’ roll fix. So they looked to other entertainment venues. Although television in the 1950s is usually considered to be a force of cultural conformism which illustrated a classless, lily-white version of the American Dream in its family friendly programming, it did provide an important outlet for new music. Elvis Presley’s controversial appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show might have outraged many viewers, but the size of the viewing audience (a quite amazing 82 percent share) made it clear to the entertainment business that rock ’n’ roll was far too popular to be ignored. It is not too surprising that his movements on stage — all learned from black acts he saw on Beale Street in Memphis — were deemed too provocative for the family audience. Yet it was these gyrations that made rock ’n’ roll so attractive to teenagers.
Elvis’s controversial appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show became part of his legend, and the dramatic rise of “the King of Rock ’n’ Roll” owed a lot to extensive exposure on television. Elvis’s first recording sessions in RCA’s Nashville and New York studios were fitted into a crowded schedule of live performances and TV appearances — the Dorsey Brothers’, Milton Berle’s, and Steve Allen’s nationally viewed shows — and a screen test for Hollywood producer Hal Wallis. By the 1950s television sets were installed in millions of American homes and the exposure it gave to music was quickly making it as important as radio in marketing records. Birmingham’s two television stations, WBRC and WAPI, were part of the NBC and CBS networks and carried the syndicated variety shows of Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen. The jubilation or horror that accompanied Elvis’s performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was shared all over the country. That Birmingham was part of this audience, a nation seated in front of blue-tinted screens, was part of the New South’s integration into a national popular culture.
Radio played all kinds of pop music, not just rock ’n’ roll; television networks were wary of delinquent teenagers and their music; and the major record companies were still not fully convinced that rock ’n’ roll was anything more than another passing fad. But Hollywood producers looked at the numbers and realized that the youth market might replace the adult audience lost to television. What propelled Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” into the hearts and minds of American youth was not just the playing of the record at dances like the one at the Bessemer City Auditorium or in jukeboxes all over Birmingham, but in a few minutes of a movie. Blackboard Jungle (1955) was a film about a rebellious group of students at an inner-city high school tormenting an exasperated teacher played by Glenn Ford. “Rock around the Clock” only played for a few seconds in the beginning and end credits (and as a short instrumental interlude in the film), but its impact was immediate and unprecedented. Those who watched the movie in the Alabama Theatre were struck not only by the power of the song, but also by the power of its amplification as it came over the mighty sound system of Birmingham’s picture palace: it was the loudest music anyone had ever heard. Dave Bryan was there: “Oh, yeah, it was loud … It was at the Alabama Theatre, 1956, I saw it; oh, jeez, there were folks, after the first run of it, there was people coming out, around the Alabama Theatre, the word got out about it, there were people around the theater, waiting to get in. It was the start right there of rock ’n’ roll. That’s what took it right there in this town.”
This slight exposure took a B side of a little-known country band and made it into an iconic recording in American popular music. Film and rock ’n’ roll had a symbiotic relationship; the sound and look of the new music quickly appeared in films aimed at the youth market. With his record in the charts, Bill Haley appeared in two movies in 1956. These were cheap, exploitative vehicles quickly turned out by Columbia Pictures. There was no attempt to associate the new music with the threat of teenage delinquency, as was the case with Blackboard Jungle, which scared parents and theater owners alike, and Haley’s Don’t Knock the Rock, which tried its best to persuade audiences that these were good kids after all. Elvis made his first movie right after his first RCA recording sessions and television appearances. In 1956 he started a career in Hollywood that was to eventually eclipse his music. Presley’s first film gave him no opportunity to expand his rock persona, but the next year Jailhouse Rock not only produced some exciting new music, but also served as a primer for rock ’n’ roll stardom, reflecting the meteoric rise of a southern working-class bad boy in the entertainment industry. From the beginning rock ’n’ roll was obsessed with its history, a self-conscious entertainment that dwelt on its origins and focused on its transformative powers. It shifted southern musicians’ aspirations from working on local radio to appearing in films
