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10. Dewey and Elvis: The Synthesized Sound
- University of Illinois Press
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10 Dewey and Elvis: The Synthesized Sound “If Elvis had consciously sought to synthesize and alchemize blues, gospel, R&B and white country music,” Newsweek magazine wrote on the twentieth anniversary of Presley’s death in 1997, “he couldn’t have chosen a better mentor than Sam Phillips.” Had Newsweek attempted to locate the precise origin of the magic sound that Sam so successfully synthesized it would have included among Elvis’s mentors Memphis’s other musically famous Phillips. Without question Dewey was as responsible as Sam for laying down the dizzying array of musical sources the young Elvis heard, absorbed, and passed along to much of the world. Newsweek did, however, give Dewey a kind of unofficial recognition by pointing out that Memphis, by the time Elvis arrived on the scene, was about the only place where black singers who belted out blues and gospel and white hillbillies who yodeled country and western came together and “rubbed elbows . . . often over the airwaves.”1 Sam may have created the sound in his diminutive Union Avenue studio, but it was Dewey’s wide-ranging broadcasts that were responsible for disseminating that sound and attracting listeners. Without Dewey, Elvis Presley (or, for that matter, any Mid-South teenager in the early 1950s) would never have been conveniently exposed to the jam-packed cornucopia of music—especially the number of seldom-heard black artists who characterized every broadcast of Red, Hot and Blue. When the impressionable thirteen-year-old Elvis Presley arrived in Memphis from Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1948, for example, the best-selling pop records in the country were Nat “King” Cole’s “Nature Boy,” DinahShore’s“ButtonsandBows,”and“ALittleBirdToldMe”byEvelyn Knight with the Star Dusters. Memphis airwaves were also filled with the 10.135-143_Cant.indd135 2/8/051:55:30PM DEWEYANDELVIS 136 sounds of “Mañana” by Peggy Lee and “Now Is the Hour” by Margaret Whiting as well as various versions of “On a Slow Boat to China.” On the lighter side was the Art Mooney version of “I’m Looking over a FourLeaf Clover,” Spike Jones’s “All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth),” Kay Kyser’s “Woody Woodpecker Song,” and Arthur Godfry’s late-1940s’attemptathumor,“SlapHerDownagainPaw.”2 Butallwasn’t inane and innocuous. The standard country and western charts were led by Eddy Arnold, Cowboy Copas, and Hank Thompson. More important, some previously unheard black artists were beginning to cross over to the mainstream market and disturb the existing order. Fats Domino had just recorded “The Fat Man,” and John Lee Hooker had produced what would become a million-seller, “I’m in the Mood.” But it was Louis Jordan, the legendary black performer from just over the Memphis-Arkansas bridge in Brinkley, Arkansas, who made a name for himself by producing what were still awkwardly referred to in official trade publications like Billboard as “race records.” His “Run, Joe” was the most frequently played record in that category in 1948. On June 25, 1949, however, just months before Dewey Phillips was to break out with Red, Hot and Blue, Billboard replaced its clumsy “race” designation with the more descriptive “rhythm and blues.” In that new category the number-one best-seller was Jordan’s blistering version of “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” (Even after the designation of race ceased, however, things were still slow to change. WREC announcer Fred Cook remembers going into record stores in Memphis in the 1950s and seeing a category marked “race” among the 78s.)3 Jordan was to dominate Billboard’s ratings during the 1940s with twenty -one number-one songs on R&B, country, and pop charts during the decade. From 1942 to 1951 he had an incredible fifty-seven R&B hits. Indeed, Jerry Wexler coined the term rhythm and blues, but it was Jordan who popularized its musical expression. Even though Jordan recorded for Decca, a primary label, the majors were already following the new musical direction started by the up-and-coming indies. Jordan turned out a monster hit, “Caldonia,” and was also responsible for some of the best of the early crossover music. He did minor R&B classics like “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens”; “Beans and Cornbread” (used by Spike Lee in the film Malcolm X); and the number B.B. King used for years to open his shows, “Let the Good Times Roll.”4 In addition to being one of the best R&B black crossover performers Jordan was also one of Dewey’s...