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2 Before the Storm: Dewey Arrives at the Five-and-Dime Dewey Phillips was the Wolfman Jack of Memphis. He frequently had more listeners than all other Memphis stations put together.1 Whether or not a new record got Dewey’s approval and subsequent promotion on his show would often determine the success or failure of that record. Under Dewey’s reign, Memphis had the reputation of being the predictor of whether a tune would hit nationally or not. “A record will hit No. 1 position here,” Robert Johnson of the Press-Scimitar wrote, “in most instances long before it catches on nationally.”2 Frank Berretta, who worked at Memphis’s legendary Poplar (Pop) Tunes Record Shop where Dewey and Elvis loved to hang out at the peak of their fame, dealt daily with national record distributors. Once Dewey broke the hits, he says, “then the distributors would start to work Detroit, or wherever. If it was gonna hit in Memphis, it was gonna hit everywhere.”3 Such was Dewey’s power and fame in the 1950s. But it wasn’t always that way. Though he rose to stardom rapidly, success did not come easily to this working-class country boy with a hominy grits accent and an unrefined upbringing—especially at first. Indeed, during the early years it was necessary for him to do battle with the Powers That Be just to get noticed. At the start there was a lot of scuffling and numerous refusals. If both Dewey and Elvis’s lives shared a similar tragic ending they also had common origins; Dewey Phillips’s beginnings were as genuinely humble as Elvis’s. Justasthedirt-poorVernonPresleyhadcometoMemphisfromMississippi in 1948, seeking a better way of life for his wife and son, Dewey had come, a decade earlier during the Great Depression, leaving his hometown of Adamsville, Tennessee, to find work in Memphis because his 02.30-44_Cant.indd฀฀฀30 2/8/05฀฀฀1:51:18฀PM Dewey Arrives at the Five-and-Dime 31 father had a stroke. The remainder of the family—his mother and two sisters—were counting on him to help out.4 Dewey was one of six children, three of whom died at birth. Though he spent most of his youth in Adamsville, a town of only several thousand, he was born on May 13, 1926, in Crump, Tennessee, about four miles away. Crump, even smaller than Adamsville, has a post office, a few stores, and the cemetery that holds most of Dewey’s clan. He is buried there in the family plot. His mother, Odessa, taught school until she quit after marrying. As she said, “That’s just the way it was done back then.”5 The father, Jesse, farmed and ran a small store for awhile but had to sell it during the depression . Dewey’s two sisters, Marjorie Barba and Betty Kirby, say that their mother, called Odie or Od (with a long o), was a saint who had the trials of Job. Jesse had difficulty earning a living after his stroke, so Od became the family’s breadwinner. When Dewey went to Memphis, she followed the next year and began work at Fisher Aircraft. She worked hard all her life to help provide for her family, even doing a long stint building tires at Firestone in Memphis, one of the few good-paying jobs for white women in those days. “Between Dewey and mother, we weren’t poor,” Betty, the younger sister, proudly recalls. “We were not as poor as we would have been had we stayed back in Adamsville.”6 Both sisterssay that Dewey lovedhismotherandwascloserto herthan to his father or to them. Betty recalls her brother’s unusual devotion: “To Dewey, my mother was like a God. My mother comes first. My mother was number one in Dewey’s book.” When her brother started working in Memphis, he would bring his paycheck home each week and give it to her.7 Jesse Phillips, who was reclusive, never provided a strong role model for Dewey, especially after his stroke. Billy Mills, Dewey’s cousin and lifelong close friend, thinks it was natural for Dewey to draw closer to his mother and seek out other strong males with whom he could identify. In the early years he became quite fond of his Uncle Marvin—Billy’s father—who apparently became a convenient father surrogate. Later in life Dewey enjoyed playing the same surrogate role himself to Elvis Presley, George Klein...

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