Back to Tupelo
by Mike Gerrard
Go into any Ace Hardware store in the USA and you’ll see the same collection of things for sale – roach repellent, paint, sink plungers, cesspool cleaner, rose fertiliser, feather dusters, Elmer’s Glue and duct tape. Go into the Ace Hardware store in Tupelo, Mississippi, though, and you’ll notice something different. There are rows of guitars for sale, and guitar picks.
Two pieces of grey duct tape make a cross on the floor in front of one of the counters. Pick up what looks like a regular 12-inch ruler and printed on it you read: ‘Where Gladys bought her son’s first guitar.’ Gladys? Yes, Gladys Presley, and her son’s name was Elvis. The duct tape marks where they were standing, in front of the store’s music counter.
The date was January 8th, 1946, and it was Elvis Presley’s 11th birthday. Gladys took him to Tupelo Hardware.
‘Elvis saw a bicycle in the window,’ Connie Tulis tells me, ‘but Gladys said no, maybe on account of the cost. Then he wanted an air rifle but Gladys said no to that too. She bought him a guitar instead, though he did get his air rifle when he turned 13. The guitar cost $7.75 plus sales tax. You could feed your family for weeks on $7.75 back then.’
If you look on the Elvis Birthplace website they say the guitar cost $7.95, while on the website for Graceland they say $12.95. Whatever it cost, it was the best investment Gladys ever made.
As well as working in the store, Connie shows visitors around and tells them the story of Elvis’s first guitar. This pilgrimage spot means that visitors from all over the world turn up every single day, wanting to see where it happened.
‘I’ve been here about six years,’ she says. ‘I’ve got the best job in the world: talking about Elvis.’
It was my third visit to Tupelo Hardware. On my first visit several years ago, long before Connie started work there, I bought a t-shirt which said on the back, above a drawing of the hardware store: ‘Where Gladys bought her son his first guitar.’
Why say Gladys and not Elvis, I asked?
The guy behind the counter told me that when they first started selling t-shirts, they did say ‘Where Elvis bought his first guitar’. Then they got a Cease and Desist letter from lawyers, saying that Elvis Presley Enterprises owned the copyright in the name Elvis, and Tupelo Hardware was not allowed to use it. It was nonsense, the guy said, but they only sold a few thousand t-shirts a year and couldn’t afford the risk of an expensive lawsuit, so they changed the wording. No-one has yet claimed copyright in the name Gladys.
Of course it isn’t just to see the local hardware store that people come to Tupelo. The main draw is the Elvis Presley Birthplace and Museum, an attraction that pulls in over 100,000 visitors a year. As a result it keeps on expanding as the world keeps on being obsessed with this Tupelo kid who was born into poverty in a shotgun shack that was literally on the wrong side of the tracks.
I know that because on a previous visit to Tupelo I’d bumped into Guy Harris, over a doughburger and fries in Johnnie’s Drive-In. It was one of Elvis’s favourite eating places in Tupelo, though he preferred their cheeseburgers to the doughburger, a local speciality which mixes flour in with the hamburger meat. You can even sit in Elvis’s favourite booth, if you’re lucky.
Half of the elderly population of Tupelo knew Elvis before he was famous, and the other half probably claim to have known him. Guy Harris is different, though. His mother Faye was friends with Gladys Presley and actually helped to deliver Elvis in that little shotgun shack. Guy and Elvis became boyhood buddies and remained friends the rest of their lives.
‘Elvis was no different from any of the rest of us, back then,’ Guy had told me. “We’d go swimming together in the creek, just hang out, like kids do. There wasn’t a lot to do, growing up in Tupelo. If we had a few cents we’d go to the movies. When we went to see his first movie, Love Me Tender, we couldn’t believe it. A few years earlier me and him’d go to watch westerns together at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning. Now we’re watching this dude up on the screen!’
Guy’s family were Baptists and went to the Baptist Church, but the Presleys were regular attendees at the Assembly of God Pentecostal Church. It was during these church services that Elvis first sang in public, the shy boy coaxed up to sing the hymns and gospel songs that he would continue to love and record his whole life through. Guy told me that Elvis’s ambition when he grew up was to join a gospel quartet. He never did fulfil that ambition, though the nearest was the Million-Dollar Quartet, as they were dubbed, when he sat around at Sun Studios in Memphis and jammed with Sun’s other recording stars: Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins.
The Assembly of God Church was another reason I was back in Tupelo. Since my first visit the church had been moved lock, stock and pulpit from its original location to the Elvis Birthplace and Museum. As you sit in the pews a cleverly-filmed video projects on the back and side walls and recreates one of the Sunday services where a young Elvis would sing with the church’s regular musicians. It was the Minister, Brother Frank Smith, who taught Elvis to play the chords of A, D and E on the guitar, so he could accompany himself singing Old Shep.
It sounds unlikely that Elvis the Pelvis, renowned for his flamboyant stage outfits, was ever shy, but he was. When he was at high school his teacher had to persuade him to sing at the end-of-term concert when everyone in the class got up to perform something. A few years later he was making records and was the most famous artist in the world, with a wealth unimaginable to that little Mississippi boy born in a two-room shack.
That shack still stands and fans troop through from front to back. A shotgun shack gets its name from the fact that you can fire a shotgun through the front and back doors without hitting anything inbetween. The two rooms are off to one side, with an outhouse out back. The furnishings aren’t original but reflect what would have been there, though the shack is as it was when Elvis’s father Vern built it after taking out a loan.
A docent in the shack talks about Vern, and doesn’t attempt to sanitise the story. ‘Vern once went to prison for eight and a half months,’ she says. ‘A man bought a pig off him and gave Vern a cheque for $4. Vern tried altering it to $40, which was a pretty dumb thing to try to get away with. He didn’t serve the full term of his three-year sentence as the man who bought the pig off him felt sorry for him and his family and asked for him to be released early.’
The Presleys lost the house when Vern went to the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary, Parchman Farm, and Elvis and Gladys had to move in with relatives. The three-year-old Elvis would reportedly cry his eyes out, missing his daddy.
I ask the docent, who clearly knows her Elvis stuff – ‘If I didn’t know everything I wouldn’t be sitting here,’ she jokes – about another Vern story. It’s often reported that the Presleys left Tupelo in 1948 to seek a better life in the big city of Memphis. Is that true, I ask her.
‘Well, that’s what they say,’ she tells me. ‘The truth is that Vern was in trouble again, and as he’d already served time he decided he’d better make himself scarce and moved the family to Memphis.’
It was in Memphis that Elvis worked as a truck driver and paid to make a record that he said he wanted to give to Gladys as a birthday present. Some people feel the real reason was to get himself noticed by the recording studio, Sun Studios. The fact that the Presleys at this time didn’t own a record player gives some credence to that theory.
It wasn’t the studio owner Sam Phillips who noticed Elvis, but his secretary, who told Sam he ought to give the kid a listen. Elvis was soon making records, and making hits, and recruited musicians DJ Fontana and Scotty Moore as his original backing band.
In Tupelo Hardware a guitar signed by the two musicians is on display, along with a photo of the man who now owns the guitar that Elvis was given on his birthday.
‘Elvis never forgot his true friends,’ Guy Harris had told me when we met in Johnnie’s Drive-In, and he never forgot his poor upbringing either.
‘Elvis loved people,’ Connie Tulis says, back in Tupelo Hardware. ‘He never lost his humble beginnings. He gave to so many charities and never told anyone. He made many generous acts, like one day he was looking at cars in a car showroom – he always loved cars. There was a couple looking in standing next to him, and he asked them if they liked the car they were looking at. The woman said they sure did but no way could they ever afford it. Elvis bought it for them. Elvis makes me a better person. When I think of the good things he’s done in his life, it makes me want to be better.’