I got to meet Elvis in Lubbock. Even then, he was about the hottest thing to hit West Texas. They invited me backstage, gave me free tickets, and the whole show was there. He and Scotty Moore were standing over by the stage, and Elvis was just jumping around everywhere, bouncing and bubbling over with enthusiasm, full of more energy than anybody I ever saw. He was talking to me like he’d known me a thousand years.
‘I’ll sing you me next thing I’m going to record’, he said. It was Tweedle Dee, the LaVern Baker song. ‘My next single’, though I don’t think he ever recorded it. He did it on the show that night.
I was crazy about Elvis. I loved that churning rhythm on the bottom. He didn’t even have drums yet, but the rock ‘n’ roll part was unmistakable. You’d think it was overnight, but he’d been plugging away a long time. He had a hard way to go, because they were fighting him from every corner in the south, calling him names – white trash bebop nigger stuff; though he could pretty well handle himself.
We had met formally only a couple of times, mostly in Las Vegas at the tail end of the sixties. RCA invited me to see his show, and he asked me back to visit him. He knew who I was; he called me hillbilly.
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