Comet Over Tennessee

By JAY COCKS

He was not much given to argument. In most matters he was deferential to his elders and compliant with his peers. But where music was concerned, he liked getting his own way, and he knew with fearsome certainty what his own right way was. With music, he was fierce, always. With music, Elvis Aron Presley gave no quarter.In the eighth grade at Humes High in Memphis, Tennessee, 10 blocks from the public-assistance housing project where he lived with his mother and father, Presley pulled a C in music. He objected. As Peter Guralnick writes in his supple and altogether splendid new biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown; 560 pages; $24.95), for a boy who was "wary, watchful, shy almost to the point of reclusiveness," such a challenge to a teacher was a radical move, like a con calling out the warden or a parishioner talking back to the preacher.

The teacher, a Miss Marmann, told him he couldn't sing. Presley demurred. It was just that she didn't appreciate his style of singing. To prove his point, he showed up in class the next day with his guitar and let loose with his version of Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me, a 1947 hit by Fairley Holden and His Six Ice Cold Papas. Miss Marmann agreed with him on one point: she did not appreciate his style of singing.

This was at the beginning of the 1950s. By 1954, when Presley was still in high school and the family was still living at Lauderdale Courts, he had a record on the radio. Nothing about icy fingers this time. That's All Right, Mama was a butane-bright and street-nasty version of an old blues number by Arthur ("Big Boy") Crudup; the flip side, Blue Moon of Kentucky, was a wild and beautiful version of a bluegrass waltz popularized by the country star Bill Monroe in 1946. No one had ever heard anything quite like it.

Presley was funky and unbridled, passionate and rebellious, respectful of the maverick traditions his music sprang from but proudly, defiantly new. His singing tapped and trapped that mysterious, wondrous thing at the heart of American popular music. Sam Phillips, who recorded all Elvis' early sides for his seminal Sun Records, called that elusive core the place "where the soul of man never dies." Presley would never have put it in such high-flown terms. When That's All Right, Mama became a hit, he simply let himself be borne heavenward in the great celebrity updraft. hurry home, he wired his high school sweetheart, Dixie Locke, who was on a family vacation in Florida. my record is doing great. Two years later Variety declared Presley a millionaire.

We all know this trajectory, and we have been, many of us, witnesses to this legend. But it is the particular and spectacular achievement of Last Train to Memphis that it holds both the making of the history and the beginning of the myth in a firm, simple and compassionate focus, concentrating on the four years from Elvis' first success to his entrance into the Army in 1958. (A planned second volume will chronicle the years, many of them melancholy, that followed.) Guralnick, an excellent music critic, concentrates on narrative here, and writes evocatively, empathetically, of Elvis' roots and dreams.

This is a tender book. The outlaw Elvis, the performer one fan called "a great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit," the savvy, surly dreamer who once remarked to a reporter, "You can't be a rebel if you grin," is set forth here as a kind of perpetual lost boy who clung to the sure anchorage of his family and friends. But as the book closes, friends become salaried employees, and the hometown girls are outnumbered by stars flying in from Hollywood. Natalie Wood came to Memphis and lasted four days, stunned by the celebrity madness surrounding Elvis and disappointed by the young man who was the cause of it all. "He can sing," she told her sister afterward, "but he can't do much else."

It could be that the cocoon of family that the Presleys drew around themselves was impermeable. "Though we had friends and relatives, including my parents," Presley's father Vernon recalled, "the three of us formed our own private world." Guralnick paints this world with perspective, respect and great decency; it is one of the book's triumphs. "Poor we were," the elder Presley says, "but trash we weren't. We never had any prejudice." Presley may have been easygoing, but when the country performer Ira Louvin called him "a white nigger," Presley stood up to him.

So close were the Presleys that the singer may never have recovered from the death of his mother Gladys, who died of liver problems in 1958, just after Presley had gone into the service. Presley was more than bereft; he was cleaved. The open coffin finally had to be covered with glass because he still wanted to kiss and hug his mother, pleading with her to come back. It was a different Presley who went back to the Army, and then to serve in Germany. He seemed to be haunted ever after by her, as we, still and likely always, will be haunted by him.