Chapter 1Two Boys

Foreword

I do not write about singers. I write about the paper that gets made around them — the session logs, the royalty statements, the assignment of copyrights, the dockets that turn up when somebody sues. Years of that leave you with one reflex: the document worth reading is almost never the one that arrived with an announcement.

I came to this book by way of a number that cannot be true. I found it while checking a broadcast date for something else, round and enormous and attributed to nobody. At half past midnight on January 14, 1973, Elvis Presley sang in Honolulu and the performance went by satellite to Asia and Oceania. Afterward his manager told a press conference that it had been watched by one and a half billion people in thirty-six countries. Looking up the denominator took about four minutes. The combined population of every country in the signal's path was roughly one and three tenths billion. The claim described an audience larger than the population it would have had to be drawn from — by some two hundred million. Realistic estimates run between a hundred and fifty and two hundred million. Nobody in the room did the subtraction. It was printed, and it has been printed ever since.

A promoter's lie is only a curiosity. What held me was what happened eight weeks later, with no announcement I have been able to find. In March 1973 the same manager sold RCA the entire pre-1973 master catalog for $5.4 million, and the biggest-selling solo recording artist of the twentieth century stopped owning the recorded sound of his own voice. Everything was in it: the first record, cut in a storefront on Union Avenue when he was nineteen; the gospel sides, the only records his industry ever gave him a competitive award for; the television hour of June 1968; the Memphis sessions of the following winter. All of it converted from a royalty that would have gone on paying into a payment made once.

The loudest number in the life was false and cost him nothing. The quietest one was true and cost him everything he had made. In fifty years of argument about this man I have never seen the two set down in the same paragraph. The argument has always been about his character, which is the one thing here the surviving evidence is worst at settling. Two charges are permanently attached to the name. The first is that he took Black music. The second is that his manager took half of him. They have been argued separately for decades, and the separation is the mistake.

The thesis of this book is that they are one story, and that the instrument in both is the same piece of paper. The appropriation that is actually documented is not a white boy singing a Black man's song. It is a publishing office — Hill and Range Songs, Inc., the Aberbach brothers, Freddy Bienstock running a company set up in the singer's name — requiring a share of the work before Elvis Presley would record it. Mae Boren Axton handed over a third of "Heartbreak Hotel" to get it onto his first RCA single, and for a decade that was the price of being recorded by him. Arthur Crudup, who wrote the song on the A-side of the first Sun record, watched a $60,000 settlement collapse in 1968 because that same office would not sign the papers, recovered a little over $10,000 through the Songwriters Guild by 1971, and died in 1974 saying he was born poor, lived poor and would die poor. Otis Blackwell wrote "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up" and never met the man who sang them. Big Mama Thornton was paid one check for $500. And the man running the machine had no papers of his own: Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk of Breda, who entered the United States illegally in May 1929, never acquired a legal identity, took twenty-five percent, and from January 2, 1967 fifty on a widening list of transactions. Half taken from him, a third taken by him, and the same letterhead on both. That is the arithmetic in the title. It is arguable rather than obvious, and a reader is entitled to decide it is the wrong frame.

I should say what this book is not. It is not a prosecution. He named his sources out loud, all his life, and the machinery that monetized them named nobody and had been running for decades before he walked into it. Locating the crime in a twenty-one-year-old from Tupelo keeps the argument fixed on a singer instead of on the publishing company, which is where the money moved.

Nor is it a defense, and that is the easier version I am the more concerned to refuse, because it is the one the merchandise prefers: an innocent, the whole thing done while he was not looking. He was thirty-one when the share doubled. He was an adult at every signing, renewed the arrangement repeatedly, was told more than once what it was costing him, and stayed. He also took a third of a song he had not written. A book that makes him only a victim has to leave out "Heartbreak Hotel," and a book that makes him only a thief has to leave out everything after it.

It is not a book about the drugs either. He dies in one sentence in chapter twenty. What killed him is argued in chapter twenty-one, alongside the ten thousand doses his physician wrote in eight months and the acquittal that physician received on all fourteen counts. Then the book goes on, because the accounting is the subject. Six of the twenty-two chapters are over before RCA buys his contract, because the reader has to watch the signatures happen. One belongs to the manager before he has a client. The seven years of films get one chapter, because the collapse in the songs was a contract rather than a failure of taste. The book ends in a probate court, with the only independent audit the arrangement ever received: a stranger appointed to look after a thirteen-year-old girl read the contracts and called a fifty percent management share extortionate against an industry standard of fifteen to twenty percent.

A word on method, and its limits. Everything here comes from the published record: the standard biographies, the discographical work, the label histories, the contemporaneous press including the Black press, court and administrative proceedings, and the memoirs of the participants, which I have used with the suspicion memoirs deserve and labeled every time. The recordings are the other body of evidence and the only one anybody can check without an appointment. Where I describe a record, I have heard it. Where I have not — a film, a videotape — I say so and do not stage the scene.

I have conducted no interviews and visited no archive. I have also not read a number of documents that would settle this book's own argument, and I name each where it would have been used rather than in a note at the back: the Lee County file on Vernon Presley's conviction, the Parchman records, the Shelby County probate docket, the White House papers of December 21, 1970, and the correspondence in the manager's own filing cabinets. The central mechanism of this book — the exact shape of what a writer had to give up to be recorded — is documented in outline and not in paper. I would rather a reader had that at the front than found it at the back.

I have quoted no lyrics and invented no quotations. He is among the most misquoted men in American culture, and much of what circulates comes from a film, a bad book or a gift shop. Where a figure could not be sourced I left it out, including a widely printed percentage that describes a different company and a very large debt that rests on a suspicion. Where the record is contested — who noticed him first at 706 Union Avenue, what a Black woman's record actually sold — I give both versions rather than the one that reads better. Where the newest and best-sourced book in the field argues the opposite, I name it and answer it in the open, because here the newest source is the case for the other side, and a book cannot absorb its strongest opponent by citing him politely.

And where the record stops, I say that it stops. We do not know whether he understood what he had signed, at any point, or understood perfectly well and preferred not to look. We do not know why he never left. We do not know what he thought about the accusation that will outlive everyone who could have answered it; he was asked seldom and answered briefly. We do not know what killed him, because the toxicology was sealed and the stomach contents were thrown away and the office that ruled had an interest in the ruling. Four holes, and each sits directly under a sentence somebody has made a career out of finishing.

He never owned the records. His birth certificate spells the middle name with one a and the stone over his grave spells it with two, and neither was written by him. The one thing in the whole transaction that nobody took a share of before it existed was the sound, because nobody had worked out how to. This book is written from it.

Chapter 1 · Two Boys

The house stood on Old Saltillo Road, in East Tupelo, Mississippi, and it had two rooms. Vernon Presley built it with borrowed money. A shotgun house is one whose rooms run one behind the other, front door to back in a straight line, and two rooms is the smallest version of the form there is. How much Vernon borrowed, from whom, and on what terms is not a figure this book can produce, and it would be worth having, because the order of the transaction is the point. The debt came first. Then the lumber, then the walls, then the family inside them. A man who did not have the money built a house with somebody else's and moved his wife into it, and the arrangement that made the house possible was a piece of paper held by another party. It is a small thing to open a book with, and it is the shape of everything that follows.

On January 8, 1935, in that house, Gladys Love Smith Presley delivered two boys. The first was named Jesse Garon, and he was born dead. Thirty-five minutes later the second was born alive, and he was named Elvis Aron.

Thirty-five minutes. It is the only quantity the birth has left behind, and it is repeated in every account of the life because it is the one number anybody wrote down. What happened inside that half hour is not recoverable. We do not know what Gladys was told, or when, or by whom; we do not know at what point in that interval the household understood that it had lost one child and was about to receive another, or whether the two facts arrived together or apart. There is no contemporaneous document of that room that this book can put in front of a reader. What survives is the interval and the outcome: two deliveries, one death, one life, and a distance of thirty-five minutes between them that would afterward be described, quoted, mythologized and sold by people who were not present.

The names rhyme. Garon and Aron: two middle names built on the same sound, given to two boys who were expected to grow up beside each other. Whether that was designed or accidental is not established. What is established, and what matters more, is the spelling of the second one. The birth certificate reads Aron, with one a. The marker over the grave reads Aaron, which is the spelling he came to prefer and the one the estate uses. Both are correct in the sense that each is the official version of some institution, and the two institutions are not the same institution. A monument and a corporation wrote it the other way afterward, and the second version won, because the second version had a business behind it.

This is worth stating plainly at the head of the book, and then not belaboring: the whole subject is a man whose name, image, voice, songs and earnings were held by other people, and the first thing held was the spelling. He did not get to write it. He was, at the moment the record of his existence was created, an infant, and infants do not sign; but the pattern established there did not break when he grew. When he died at forty-two he owned neither his master recordings, nor the publishing on the songs most associated with him, nor a controlling share of his own name. The biggest-selling solo recording artist of the twentieth century died holding almost nothing that the industry recognized as property. The distance between the certificate and the gravestone is the distance the argument of this book travels.

Now the hard part, and it has to be said before any of the interpretation, because the interpretation is where books about Elvis Presley go wrong. The stillbirth of Jesse Garon is documented. Everything said about its psychological effect is inference. That includes everything said about it here. There is no letter in which he sets out what he understood his brother to be. There is no interview transcript in which he is asked the question and answers it at length. What exists is a family that talked about the dead twin, a son who grew up knowing there had been one, and a long succession of biographers, journalists, mourners, novelists and merchandisers who found the fact irresistible and built on it. The fact is real. The building is inference. A reader is entitled to know which is which before the sentences start doing psychological work.

With that stated, the psychological work is unavoidable, because the arrangement is genuinely unusual and it structured a household. Consider what it does to a family's arithmetic. A first pregnancy produces two children and delivers one. The one who lives is not, in his mother's counting, an only child; he is the remaining half of a pair. Gladys Love Smith Presley was twenty-two, and she would not have another child. That is a fact with two edges, and it is impossible to say from the surviving record which edge cut. It means the household's entire supply of hope, ambition, superstition and attention was concentrated on one boy with no sibling to divide it. It also means that every time she looked at him she was looking at a number that did not come out even. Whether she experienced that as gratitude, as guilt, as terror, or as some compound of them that had no name in East Tupelo in the 1930s, nobody can say, and anyone who tells you otherwise is reading a mother's interior life off a birth record.

What the record will support is narrower and, in a way, stranger. It is this: he was raised by a woman who never stopped counting to two, in a house where the second number was a person who had never drawn breath. The dead child was not forgotten and not concealed. He was part of the furniture of the family's self-description, invoked, referred to, held in mind. A boy raised inside that arrangement grows up with a permanent extra seat at the table — not as trauma, necessarily, and not as a wound anybody diagnosed, but as a fixed feature of how his own existence was explained to him. He was the one who lived. That is a different thing from being the one who was born.

The evidence for the Tupelo years is better than a reader might expect and worse than a biographer would like. Elaine Dundy did the ground research in Mississippi, working the Tupelo years and the mother directly, and the Presley and Smith family lines come out of that work. The Lee County records are checkable and so are the state's. But the family testimony that carries most of the color is late and shaped: gathered after the fact, from people who had by then been asked about a famous man for most of their adult lives, in a culture that rewarded the good version of the story. That is not an accusation of lying. It is a description of what happens to a memory that has been interviewed until it is smooth. Where this book relies on that testimony, it says so.

It is worth naming the shelf, once, so that a reader knows what these pages are standing on. Dundy's Elvis and Gladys is the ground-level work on Tupelo and on the mother. Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis is the spine for the rise, and its method is the reason it is: Guralnick interviewed the surviving participants while they were still alive to be interviewed, and worked from session documentation rather than from legend. He is sympathetic to his subject, which is worth knowing, and he is not credulous, which is rarer. Jerry Hopkins published the first serious biography in 1971, while Elvis was alive, and its value is precisely that its sources had no idea how the story would end; nobody in it is arranging their testimony around a death. Against those stands Albert Goldman's book of 1981, which is in this bibliography as reception history and nothing else — contemptuous, factually unreliable, and the source of a register this series does not use. No fact in these pages comes from it. That is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of not knowing which of its sentences are true.

The other institution in the story is the Assembly of God on Adams Street, and it is the one that matters most for the music, because it is where the instrument was formed. He grew up in the Assembly of God. What that means, practically, is that the first singing he was inside of was not a performance. Nobody in that room was auditioning. There was no stage in the sense the word later acquired, no separation between the people making the sound and the people receiving it, and no professional standard being applied. Everyone sang. The singing was the worship; it was not decoration attached to the worship. A congregation in that tradition sings loudly, and it sings in a way that would be judged undisciplined by any conservatory: notes bent, phrases dragged behind the beat or shoved ahead of it, volume used as feeling rather than as dynamics, a lead voice rising out of the mass and dropping back into it without ceremony.

It is a physical practice before it is a musical one. The sound of a room of untrained voices is a rough unison that is never exactly in tune and does not want to be; the slight disagreement between the voices is where the weight comes from, and a trained ear hears it as error while the room hears it as conviction. Nothing is held back for the end. There is no second half of the evening to save the voice for. A body that learns to make sound under those conditions learns some things it will never unlearn — that the top of the lungs is not the top of the volume, that a phrase can be worried at, repeated, delayed, and that the audience for the sound is not in front of you but above you, which removes the question of whether anybody is impressed. That is not a modest training. It is a training in giving the whole thing away every time, and it produced a singer whose besetting problem, for most of his professional life, was never that he held back.

This is where his sound came from, and it is worth being precise about it, because a great deal of the argument that attaches to his name later depends on getting this right. The vocal habits people call his sound — the drop into the bottom of the register, the swallowed catch, the phrase pushed off the beat — come out of a specifically Southern religious singing practice that was never segregated in the way the record charts were. That last clause is the load-bearing one. The commercial architecture of American music in the twentieth century sorted sound by the race of the person making it and sold it into separate markets with separate names. Southern Pentecostal singing did not sort that way. The practice moved across the color line in both directions, continuously, in a region that segregated everything else it could reach, and it did so a long time before anybody thought to make a record of it. A boy learning to sing in that room was not raiding a tradition. He was inside one.

That is not a defense and it is not the end of the argument. It is the beginning of a harder version of it. The instrument he took out of the Assembly of God on Adams Street had a working range across four registers, and he kept it his whole life; all three of his competitive Grammys were for gospel records, which is to say that the only part of his output his own industry's peer body ever gave him a competitive award for was the part closest to that room and furthest from the merchandise. What he did with the instrument, and what was done to him because of it, are separate questions with separate answers, and this book is going to insist on keeping them apart. The most interesting technical fact about him is that the instrument kept developing while the material collapsed — an arc nobody designed, nobody predicted and nobody sold, and the room on Adams Street is where it starts.

On the charge itself he left almost nothing behind, and that silence has to be reported rather than filled. He was asked about it seldom, answered briefly, and did not return to it. There is no essay by Elvis Presley on what he owed and to whom, no interview in which the question is put hard and answered at length, no private correspondence in which he works it out. Every account of what he thought about being accused of theft is somebody else's reconstruction, offered after his death, usually by a person with a position to defend. This book will quote what he actually said where he said it, and where he said nothing it will say that he said nothing, which turns out to be most of the time.

There are two charges permanently attached to the name, and both of them have been argued for decades as though they were unrelated. The first is that he took Black music. The second is that his manager took half of him. Set them side by side and the same object appears in both: not a stage, not a microphone, not a body moving in a way that frightened newspaper columnists, but a contract, drafted by people who understood publishing, signed by people who did not.

Follow the paper and the story changes shape. The appropriation that is actually documented is not a white boy singing a Black man's song. It is Hill and Range Songs, Inc. requiring a share of the writing before Elvis would cut your record. Mae Boren Axton handed over a third of "Heartbreak Hotel" to get it onto his first RCA single, and she was not a victim in the usual sense; she was a professional who knew the toll and paid it to buy the placement. Big Mama Thornton was paid one check for $500 for a record whose sales she put at over two million and whose contemporary estimates run lower — and that transaction was done by a Black-owned label, and it was finished before Elvis Presley had made a record of any kind. Arthur Crudup, who wrote the song on one side of the first Sun record, spent years trying to collect; he watched a $60,000 settlement collapse in 1968 because Hill and Range would not sign the papers, recovered a little over $10,000 through the Songwriters Guild by 1971, and died in 1974 saying he was born poor, lived poor and would die poor. Nelson George's structural case is that the industry was built to route Black innovation into white ownership, and that individual guilt is beside the point. The paper agrees with him.

And the man who ran the machine at the center of it was himself an object in somebody's file. Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an undocumented Dutchman with no legal identity of his own, took twenty-five percent, then from January 2, 1967 fifty percent on a widening list of transactions, and in March 1973 sold the entire pre-1973 master catalog to RCA for $5.4 million and took a manager's share of a sale that ended his client's ownership of his own records. Nobody audited any of it while the client was alive. The audit came later, from a stranger: a lawyer named Blanchard Tual, appointed by a probate judge to look after a thirteen-year-old girl, read the contracts and used the word extortionate, measuring the arrangement against an industry standard of fifteen to twenty percent. That is the arithmetic in the title of this book. Half taken from him, a third taken by him, and the same office collecting both.

None of that is in East Tupelo in January 1935. It could not be; it had not been invented yet, and the people who would invent it were doing other things. But the disposition was, and the disposition is the reason to open here rather than in a studio. A child born into a house standing on borrowed money, in a family whose relationship to paper was that other people wrote it, does not learn to read contracts. He learns that paper is the instrument by which the world arranges itself around you without asking. There is no document in which Elvis Presley says this. It is an inference, and it is offered as one.

What is not an inference is the pair. The first fact of the life is that he was a survivor of two, raised by a woman who never stopped counting to two, and that he arrived into the world thirty-five minutes after the person he was supposed to arrive with. He was named by other people, in a spelling he did not choose and would not keep, in a house his father had raised on money that was not his. He would spend the rest of his life being loved by enormous numbers of strangers and represented by a very small number of men with better lawyers than his, and at the end of it the estate would put the other spelling on the stone.

The argument of this book opens, then, on a name he did not get to spell. Everything after this is the same transaction repeated at increasing scale — the acetate, the label, the network, the studio, the hotel, the catalog, the house itself — and every time, the sound belongs to him and the paper belongs to somebody else. What the record cannot tell us, and what nobody who was in the room lived long enough to be asked properly, is whether he ever understood that this was what was happening, or whether he preferred not to. That question stays open for the whole book. It was open on Old Saltillo Road and it was still open in Memphis forty-two years later.