Print the legend
On July 18, 1953, a painfully shy recent high school graduate walked into the Memphis Recording Service, a storefront studio perched at 706 Union Ave in Memphis. The outer office contained a desk, a filing cabinet, and 36-year-old Marion Keisker, who, among her many other duties, screened hopeful musicians who came through the door. July 18th was a slow day, so she attempted to pry some audible words out of the kid. As Keisker recalled in every interview she gave over the next thirty-five years, her exchange with the teenage Elvis Presley went as follows:
“What kind of music do you sing?”
“I sing all kinds.”
“Who do you sound like?”
“I don’t sound like nobody.”
“Hillbilly?”
“Yeah, I sing hillbilly.”
“Who do you sound like in hillbilly?”
“I don’t sound like nobody.”
One of the “services” offered by the studio (soon to be made world-famous by the kid standing at Keisker’s desk) was that a person could pay $4 to be recorded and walk out with a ten-inch acetate. The kid said he wanted to record something for his mother’s birthday (which was in April, not July, but never mind). As the legend goes, founder Sam Phillips recorded the kid singing an Ink Spots number (“That’s Where Your Heartache Begins”), and an obscure song called “My Happiness.” Elvis sang in a quavery falsetto, strumming on a tiny guitar. He had no feel for the instrument. It’s an understatement to say this was not Phillips’ “thing.” Phillips recorded blues musicians for the tiny record label he’d established called Sun Records. “My Happiness,” sung by an awkward white kid, didn’t remotely interest him.
Marion’s front office at Sun Studio taken by author in 2012
Keisker, though, sensed something. The boy had an inchoate quality: he was clearly unformed, but his presence was urgent — insistent, really — even with his awkwardness and noticeable stutter. She wanted to remember him, and asked his name (“Elvis Pressley,” she wrote). She started a file for him, adding a note: “Good ballad singer — hold.”
Marion Keisker has been referred to as a “secretary” for seventy-one years.
Contextualize the legend
Saying she was not a “secretary,” does not take away from Phillips’ accomplishments. (To be fair, Phillips never called her a “secretary.” The historians and the journalists did that for him.) Phillips, however, was always cagey about Keisker’s place in the narrative, giving her credit for some things, drawing the line at others.
Keisker’s life before Sun Records is important for context.
When she met Phillips, Keisker was such a well-known radio personality her nickname was “Miss Radio of Memphis.” Keisker was twelve years old when she made her debut on WREC (the oldest radio station in Memphis, in operation to this day). She worked at every station in town, until being hired full-time at WREC, where she wrote, directed, and produced programs. She hosted a popular daily talk show and also worked the Treasury Bandstand, a nightly music broadcast out of The Peabody Hotel. Keisker had access to the Memphis music community in a way that Phillips – a transplant from Alabama – did not.
Here is how Keisker is described in Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins’ 1992 book Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll:
Until November 1955 Phillips’ only assistant was Marion Keisker. There was little in her background to qualify her for the role … She began working as a secretary to a businessman named Chambers, who had offices in the Peabody Hotel. The Peabody also housed WREC, and Marion joined the station in 1946, a year after Phillips.
This account is egregiously incomplete. Keisker’s radio career more than qualified her for the job.
Phillips and Keisker first met at the WREC offices. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different. Keisker got a degree in Medieval French from Southwestern College. Phillips was the youngest of eight, with a childhood spent picking cotton on his parents’ heavily mortgaged farm, one step up from sharecropping. After a couple of years working in regional radio markets, Phillips arrived in Memphis to work at WREC. But he had a vision, dangerously radical in the 1940s Jim Crow South, particularly for a white man. Radio had dissolved some of the rigid boundaries between genres and people. A deejay on Memphis’ ground-breaking station WDIA, geared solely towards a Black market, once observed, “You can’t segregate the airwaves.” White kids were tuning into WDIA. Shows were increasingly integrated, with ineffectual ropes separating the Black kids from the white kids in the audience. Phillips sensed things were changing:
“My aim was to try and record the blues and other music I liked … I knew, or I felt I knew, that there was a bigger audience for blues than just the black man of the mid-South. There were city markets to be reached, and I knew that whites listened to blues surreptitiously.”
Guitarist Scotty Moore said, “He knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it. I think that recording all those Black artists had to give him an insight; he just didn’t know where that insight would lead.”
Phillips spoke of these ideas to Keisker. He wanted to set up shop for himself. Swept away by his passion, Keisker quit WREC and followed him. Once he secured the Union Avenue location, the two of them got the space ready, doing all the work themselves. They started sleeping together. Keisker, by her own admission, fell madly in love with the married Phillips. Her friends and family thought she had lost her mind.
Memphis Recording Service, with its neon sign designed by Phillips (still there), opened its doors in January, 1950. To pay the bills, Phillips hired himself out to the public, and recorded anyone with $4 to spend. Meanwhile, he tried to find diamonds in the rough for his label. He succeeded. He recorded future legends like Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King. He recorded harmonica maestro James Cotton. He recorded The Prisonaires, a vocal group incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. He recorded local WDIA deejay Rufus Thomas singing “Bear Cat,” an answer song to Big Mama Thornton’s recent hit “Hound Dog.” “Bear Cat” was the first hit for Sun.
The story of Sun Records cannot be summarized in a paragraph, but Phillips’ gift in encouraging artists to let it all hang out drew people from all over to Union Avenue. Songs recorded on Sun have a distinctive sound (particularly the famous “slap-back”). You can recognize a Sun track without even looking at the yellow label. The music was Sam’s realm, but Keisker did everything else, using her connections to get promotion, cajoling deejay friends to play the new releases. (Sam acknowledged her contribution to friend and future biographer Peter Guralnick: “I don’t know what in the hell I would have done without Marion.”)
The game changed in 1953 when the “ballad singer” walked through the door. Phillips may have sensed a crossover was imminent, and he may have said, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and feel, I could make a million dollars” (multiple people reported him saying something along those lines), but did he “see” teenage Elvis as the answer to his prayers, descending from thundery clouds, wielding a lightning bolt, singing “My Happiness,” of all things? Phillips talked like that sometimes, like he knew in an instant Elvis was The One. He took credit for everything, including Elvis’ duck-tailed hairstyle, declaring, in a 2000 documentary about Sun Records, “Elvis didn’t do all of that with his hair and the brush and spray…He did that by saying, ‘I want hair like you, Sam.’ Now you folks are not gonna believe this.” You’re right, Sam. I don’t.
Interrogate the Legend
In July 1954, exactly a year after Elvis said “I don’t sound like nobody” to Keisker, Phillips teamed Elvis up with Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black for an exploratory “let’s see what we come up with” session. The trio ended up doing a rambunctious version of Arthur Lee Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” and it was the crossover hit beyond Phillips’ wildest fantasies. Elvis was launched into outer space.
The problem between Phillips and Keisker arose years later, when Keisker gave an interview claiming she was the one who first recorded Elvis that summer day in 1953. Phillips felt betrayed and angry, even though his legacy was secure.
Phillips had a vested interest in being “the one” who discovered Elvis. But if Marion hadn’t written down Elvis’ name in 1953, if she hadn’t nudged Sam repeatedly over the following year to give the boy a try … would Sam have done it on his own? (Not on the basis of “My Happiness,” that’s for sure.) Sam could not let the “disagreement” go. When a Rolling Stone reporter asked him about it decades later, a cranky Phillips said, “Well, I would love to say Marion did it. She did an awful lot for me, man…I don’t want to make Marion look bad on the thing…I don’t care who it was. But it was simply me.”
In his biography of Phillips, Guralnick devoted a lot of time to this subject, and, unsurprisingly, came down on Phillips’ side (they were friends, after all). Guralnick showed discomfort about the whole thing. The argument was unfortunate, but Guralnick thought maybe Marion remembered it wrong.
Writer Elaine Dundy, however, went after the truth like a homicide detective in her fascinating 1985 book Elvis and Gladys. Something about Sam’s version didn’t make sense to Dundy. If Sam had a premonition about Elvis in 1953, why did he wait a year to summon him to Sun? Why on earth would Sam, enraptured by Howlin’ Wolf’s transcendent bluesman power, be drawn to a green kid singing, essentially, pop music?
Marion, though, felt what Elvis brought into the room: “He was like a mirror in a way: whatever you were looking for, you were going to find in him…He had all the intricacy of the very simple.”
She described listening to Elvis go through “My Happiness” and realizing she should record him. “I got maybe the last third of the first song and all of the second. I don’t even know if Elvis knew that I was taping it. This is what I heard in Elvis, this … what I guess they now call soul.”
Phillips spoke about him the same way … a year later.
Now we come to the elephant in the room: Elvis’ looks and charisma, present even then, when he was a weird misfit wearing pink suits to high school, perming his hair, and maybe even wearing mascara. What boy did that in 1953? He wanted something and Marion felt his wanting. In his book on Elvis, Dave Marsh wrote that if Elvis wanted anything it was to be “an unignorable man.” He was ashamed of the poverty he had grown up in and he wanted the world to know he was more than where he came from.
His looks were the ultimate in “unignorable.” Even men were forced to acknowledge it. (When Carl Perkins first met Elvis, he barely waited for him to walk away before blurting to Scotty Moore, “That’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.”) Men were hesitant to admit they too were susceptible to Elvis’ erotic pull (straight men, that is: John Waters said he realized he was gay at age 10 when he watched Elvis’ 1956 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show). Dundy observed, “Like all beautiful boys, he was sending out disturbing sexual vibrations and not only to the opposite sex.”
promotional poster for “Girls! Girls! Girls” (1962)
Doesn’t it make more sense that Marion, a woman, felt all this in the room in 1953? Couldn’t it be that Elvis, young as he was, was already projecting what would drive girls insane just a year later when they got their first look at him? And wouldn’t it make sense that a woman would clock Elvis’ magic first, magic that had nothing to do with music? Dundy again: “Whether consciously or unconsciously, it was not only what [Marion] was hearing that was sending such strong signals to her, but what she was seeing as she watched this young boy sing.” Phillips, frankly, did not see it. In January 1954, Elvis wandered into Sun again, and this time he met Sam. Elvis asked Sam if Marion had mentioned him. (This throws doubt on Elvis’ “I want to make a recording for my Mama” story.) Sam said yes, Marion mentioned him. End-stop. Phillips listened to Elvis sing a couple of songs, and said he’d call him. He didn’t. In May 1954, Sam wanted to find a singer for a demo. The implacable Marion suggested “Pressley.” The resulting session was unproductive to say the least, and Elvis, unable to get a handle on the song, broke down in tears of frustration. Perhaps by this point, Sam felt what Marion felt, because he called Elvis in again, this time pairing him with Moore and Black. It was July 5, 1954. History was made, you know the rest.
But imagine the story without Marion Keisker’s persistence. Imagine if she hadn’t trusted her gut response in 1953.
Rock journalist Lester Bangs wrote a semi-deranged book review (published posthumously) of Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, in which he lambasted Guralnick for parroting Phillips’ self mythology as a prophet who saw it all coming. Bangs rants:
Might [Sam Phillips’ motives] not have been as confused and unplanned and even self-contradictory as anything else anybody thought and then went and did some other time some other place? I mean, does everybody always sit down with this slide-ruled plan and a ten-point moral code on the wall behind ‘em and then go into battle for the clear-cut Cause with all this pat as that and never deviating?…I can sort of begin to imagine how easy it must have been for Sam and everybody around him to get just a wee bit spacy when it became obvious that Elvis Presley was gonna be the single biggest human being to hit this planet since Jesus Christ.
Bangs has a point. Phillips envisioned a kind of racial reconciliation through music, and predicted blues music would “cross over” into the mainstream, as indeed it did. But did he predict Elvis? Could anyone have foreseen the advent of the best-selling solo artist of all time?
Elvis himself acknowledged Marion’s place in his personal Pantheon. Red West, Elvis’ friend since adolescence, recalled:
Whenever Elvis came across magazines and newspapers [with] all the stories [of] Sam Phillips being the man who discovered Elvis, well, Elvis told me I don’t know how many times that Marion Keisker was the one who really did the job. She was the one who kept his telephone number…Elvis had respect for Sam, but he would say to me, ‘If it wasn’t for that lady, I would never have got a start. That woman, she was the one who had faith, she was the one who pushed me. Sure, Sam had the studio but it was Marion who did it for me.
After the Legend
Keisker left Sun Records after seven years and joined the Air Force. Commissioned as an officer, she was stationed at the Ramstein Base in West Germany, where she ran the Armed Forces television station. She and Elvis crossed paths again overseas. He, famously, was drafted in 1958, and served in Germany for two years. At an international press conference held in 1960, Elvis interrupted the proceedings when he saw Marion in the crowd. He left his spot at the microphone, and, in front of the crowd, walked over to greet her. The photo of the reunion brims with mutual joy. Elvis declared to the crowd, “Listen, if it weren’t for this lady, we wouldn’t even be having a press conference right now!”
When Keisker returned to Memphis, she got involved with the feminist movement, advocating for women’s equal rights in education and the workplace. She co-founded the Memphis chapter of NOW, and served as its president, in which capacity she organized “Take Back the Night” protests, including at her old college campus. She fought against gender discrimination in hiring practices, particularly for women in the media. She knew a little something about sexism in the workplace.
Keisker died in 1989.
Give the Legend Her Due
There were many deep cuts in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, but perhaps the most gratifying one was Luhrmann’s presentation of Marion Keisker (Kate Mulvany). She is first seen forcing Sam (Josh McConville) to listen to the recording she – yes, she – had made. “This boy’s got something,” she says. Later, when Elvis first appears on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, Sam and Marion sit in the audience, terrified. Elvis had barely performed live before. They have no idea if the audience will see what they see in him. Elvis starts, and slowly, like popcorn popping, girls start screaming. Girls weep and tear their hair. It’s chaos.
Kate Mulvany as Marion in the 2022 movie “Elvis” flipping out while Elvis performs
There are a couple of cuts to Sam and Marion, stunned at what this shy mama’s boy was doing up there. As hysteria fills the hall, Marion’s professional reserve shatters. She strains against her chair. Some enormous force threatens to overwhelm her. She holds out as long as she can before finally exploding from out of her seat, writhing her body and howling like an animal in heat.
This passage in the film shows Elvis’ effect on audiences before anyone even knew who he was, but it is also a testament to Marion. It places her where she belongs, at the center of the whirlwind.
Sam Phillips encouraged Elvis to bring out what was inside of him, to have confidence in himself and what he was doing. But on that July day in 1953, Marion Keisker saw that Elvis already had everything he needed.