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Harrison had Memphis in his heart

Much will be made about George Harrison the Beatles lead guitarist, the influential solo artist, humanitarian and cultural emissary, but that he was a Memphis music devotee shouldn't go unnoticed.

In a band that didn't stress guitar solos, Harrison's were strongly rooted in rockabilly.

"I met George at Carl Perkins's funeral," said Sam Phillips, who recorded the rockabilly legend at his groundbreaking Sun Studios.

"He was a real fan of Carl's," he said. "No doubt the best musician in the group, all the Beatles, alive or dead, would agree he was a main cog in what made the Beatles sound so successful."

Harrison developed a friend ship with Perkins and performed with him in 1986 in the Cinemax cable special A Rockabilly Session: Carl Perkins and Friends. He also sang at Perkins's funeral in 1998 in Jackson, Tenn.

"His sound came through with a type of rock and roll that we were espousing here," Phillips said.

The first Beatle to tour after their breakup, Harrison earned star status as a solo artist with "All Things Must Pass," featuring songs like My Sweet Lord, What Is Life and Bob Dylan's If Not For You. Recording with Harrison was ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, Billy Preston and Derek & the Dominos bandmates Eric Clapton and Memphian Bobby Whitlock.

Quiet through the '80s, he resurfaced in '88 in the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys with Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and former Sun legend Roy Orbison.

Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's guitarist, said Harrison had discussed recording in Memphis. "Nothing was ever set as far as dates," Moore said from his Nashville home.

Moore said he and D.J. Fontana, Presley's drummer, discussed recording while dinner guests at Harrison's home near London in 1999.

"I heard he was a recluse, but that's not so," he said. "If you sat with him, he seemed like someone you knew for 40 years - someone you want to live next door to."

Source : The Commercial Appeal, By Donnie Snow

"Here's somebody who just loves to sing." Over the telephone, Peter Guralnick sounds sad, incredulous. "But he's unable at the end of his life to force himself into the recording studio - the fear of completion, fear of exposing your untrammelled idea to execution. What a terrible thing to lose that ability, that faith in yourself."

Writing about the final decade and a half of the life of Elvis Presley is, by any measure, a sad affair. Almost from the time he returned from the army in 1960, things inexorably slid downhill until his death in 1977. Except for a very few oases of artistic renewal and personal triumph, this was when Elvis, who just a few years before had changed the world both musically and sociologically, sold out. He traded his artistic aspirations for lavish consumerism, childish diversions, and numbing self-destruction, in a game with himself he knew one day he'd have to lose - or get out of entirely.

As Guralnick puts it in Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, 767 pp., 1999), the recently published second volume of his superb Elvis biography: "Aithough he never permitted himself to fully acknowledge it, [he] was well aware that he had not been faitthful to his ideals, that things were not working out in certain respects the way he had planned." A page later¤ he finishes the thought: "...in the end he felt there was no need to resolve these dichotomics just now; all would become clear when his purpose became clear, his mission revealed. All else was merely temporal; the contradictions between what he desired and what he accepted would one day fade away, hls dedication to doing something great would eventually overwhelm his weakness."

It's such clearheaded synthesis that distinguishes Guralnick's book from the many Elvis bios that have come before and makes it and its companion volume, Last Train From Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little Brown, 560 pp.,1994), a standard in Elvis biography that's unlikely to be equaled any time soon. Each volume won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in the year in whickh it was published.

While more than 300 books have been written about Elvis Aaron Presley since his explosive rise to stardom in 1955, the smaller subset of biographyics has always provided the liveliest, most clearly divided battleground.

On one side are the fans and true believers, the apologsts Who endeavor to not only logically explain away the man's dark sides, but who invariably find intellectual alleyways in which they can morally sanitize his every snarl and fetish. Many Elvis periodicals (like Elvis: The Man and His Music and Elvis World) fall into this category, as well as books like The Real Elvis: Good Old Boy, and a number of reminiscences by friends and family members. On the other, more critical side, one executioner towers above all others. By any standard applicable, Albert Goldman's Elvis (McGraw-Hill, 1981), published four years After Presley's death in 1977, is a vicious, even bloodthirsty dismembering of its subject. Unforgettably salacious, Goldman's retelling of Elvis' rise and fall - the familiar life story slathered in noxious details and scaring perversity - has become a lightning rod for controversy: a "see-I-told-ya" bible for detractors, and heresy for the rest. For anyone aspiring to write an Elvis bio, Elvis is the 800-lb gorilla that must be wrestled with before, during, and after.

"I found the book offensive. It doesn't matter who you are writting about, no humam being should be treated in that way," says Guralnick from his home near Boston. His experience with Goldman dates back long before his own Elvis project. When Elvis was released, Guralnick was a music writer for the Boston Phoenix, an alternative news - weekly, His review of the book was published the same week Greil Marus's more famous one appeared in the Village Voice.

"[Goldman's book] contradicts my ideas of decency and humanity. It has nothing to do with the book I wrote. One of the things I've always tried to do is to leave myself open to truth coming in over the transom. You can't accept any source on faith, but you can't exclude any source. So the fact that I had a visceral dislike for Goldman's book didn't mean I could disregard it. What I did was the same thing I do with fan magazine accounts: I tried to deconstruct [Goldman's] book and remove the attitude, which is a lot of the book - it's probably 70% attitude - to get to what he's really saying and whether it's well-sourced."

As far as Goldman's work being well-researched, Guralnick - who calls Elvis"chewy" - says that in some cases, like his uncovering of the Dutch background of Presley's inimitable manager, Col. Tom Parker, Goldman was solid. But the evidence for many of the numerous sex frolics cited by Goldman has proved more evanescent.

Guralnick's interest in Elvis Presley begin back in his teens, when he first begin to love the blues, and particularly the part they played in Presley's version of rock'n'roll. The distinguished author of some of the finest books written about American popular music in the last 25 years - Searching for Robert Johnson, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home - Guralnick says he'd contemplated a book on Elvis for some time before actually beginning work on it. Several specific Elvis projects finally inspired him to try to add a new voice to the already crowded chorus of Presley biographers.

"It actually stemmed from two or three specific impulses. I did the liner notes for the The Complete Sun Sessions in 1987, a two-LP set [reissued as The Sun Sessions CD, RCA 6414-2-R], at the same time I wrote the script for a documentary on Elvis." (The documentary was Elvis '56, from which Guralnick eventually disassociated himself.)

"In doing these things I listendd to all these interviews Elvis did in 1956, got all this primary source material. Then, when I was writing the liner notes for The Complete Sun Sessions, I called upp Sam Phillips, whom I had originally interviewed in 1979. But instead of interviewing him on philosophical matters or taking whatever came, I talked to him about producing Elvis. Then I talk to Stan Kesler [the Sun Studios musician who wrote "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone," which Elvis recorded at Sun (the Memphis Recording Service) in December 1954] and Scotty [Moore, Elvis' first guitar player] with the idea of how did you make these records, how did they come about. It was through doing that that suddenly realized that Elvis can speak for himself. There's a way of telling this story that's entirely different from the received idea.

A woman who knew Elvis remembered him sitting at the drugstore counter, drumming his fingers on the countertop. Then she paused and said, "Poor baby."

"The other thing, which happened at virtually the same time or maybe a year or two earlier: I was driving down McLemore Avenue with a woman named Rose Clayton, who grew up in Memphis and graduated from high school a little after Elvis, but knew him and a lot of people around. I was working on Sweet Soul Music[Guralnick's book about rhythm and blues], and we were headed toward Elvis Presley [Blvd.], just before we got to Stax [Studios] there was this closed drugstore on the right. She said, 'You know, Elvis' cousin used to work there. Elvis used to come in all the time, and he would sit there at the counter waiting for Gene to get off work. He used to sit there drumming his fingers on the countertop.' And then she paused and said, 'Poor baby.' And I had this epiphany, this illumination - that this was a real person, this was somebody I could write about."

The trick for any biographer is to determine which angle to take - to decide what, to the writer, is real, in this case about Elvis Presley. How, for instance, to reconcile or relish a man who lived, to quote Goldman, "in the day world of the squares and the night world of the cats." Does the author have a preconceived axe to grind, pro or con, or does he/she seek balance? And, by the final chapter, what image of Elvis has emerged?

Guralnick, a weekly music journalist turned author, is known for his linear, reliable prose, solid reporting, and reasonable syntheses. He is mostly content with laying out the fact as he hears and reconfirms them. However, when Careless Lovereaches the mid-1970s, the time of Elvis' divorce and subsequent decline, there is a pervasive sense that not only is Guralnick struggling with his own crushed illusions about Elvis, but that he's grown disgusted with his subject's lackadaisical nihilism. The pace of the book quickens noticeably toward the end, and a disembodied tone enters in the last 150 pages - which, Guralnick admits, he rewrote more than anything he's ever written. He denies, however, that he ever lost faith in his subject.

"I tried to write it from the inside out. When you know the end, it's hard to keep that knowledge from the reader, but also from yourself.

"What it is is that you try to understand why people do the things they do. It's not a question of saying, 'Oh, that's terrible,' because that doesn't really lead anywhere. [Understanding what people do] is the only interesting kind of perspective, otherwise you're trumpeting about 'Well, I've done this. Well, I wouldn't have done that.' And so what? All human behavior is humam. There's no such thing as inhuman behavior among humans."

When Guralnick begin uncovering some of the motivation for Elvis' behavior on his visits to Memphis, he was startled to learn that mere logistucs played a part in someof the most revered Elvis myths.

"A very simple example of that would be that I'd always repeated the litany that Elvis went to Beale Street to hear the blues. But even though I'd been to Memphis many times, what I didn't realize when I said that was that Beale Street was just around the corner from where he lived. It wasn't like he trudged miles through the snow to get to Beale Street."

Another incidence of logistics modifying popular lore concerns the famous first phone call between Elvis and Sun Records, when Marion Keisker, Sam Phillips' secretary, called Elvis to come down to the studio to make his first record. Legend holds that Elvis was there before she hung up the phone, which may in fact be nearly true - Sun Records and the Lauderdale Courts housing project, where Elvis and his family lived at the time, were only a mile apart.

Any Elvis biography is necessarily the story of an amazing cast of characters: Elvis, his family, his many girlfriiends, his buddies in the so-called Memphis Mafia, and, of course, the biggest character of them all other than the singer himself: his manager, Col. Tom Parker. That relationship of client and manager had an incalculable effect on Presley's career

"[Presley and Parker were really like, in a sense, a married couple, who started out with great love, loyalty, respect which lasted for a considerable period of time, and went through a number of stages until, towards the end of Elvis' life, they should have walked away. None of the rules of the relationship were operative any longer, yet neither had the courage to walk away, for a variety of reasons."

Guralnick wrote to, then met and established a relationship with Parker before the Colonel's death in 1997.

He does offer straight reporting of the smarmier aspects of the Elvis-In-Decline story - the singer's promiscuity and rampant drug use - as well as of Parker's gambling.

"[Parker] was very helpful to me. He'd tell me how he wasn't going to give me these answers. But then he'd also sat where I might go for the answers. It's misleading, because [officially] he didn't do interviews. I'd put things out there, he'd volley them back by return mail. I spent a lot of time thinking of how to say things, and he'd still always be three steps ahead of me."

Parker is usually cited as one of the chief villains of the Elvis story, the man who sold Elvis' talent down the Hollywood river for cash. But as Guralnick makes clear, the Colonel had other, darker, more personal flaws that often resembled those of his client. Back in the halcyon days, as Elvis' addiction to pills grew, so did the Colonel's fondness for gambling. Though Gurainick does not address the rumors of Presley's homosexuality, he does offer straight reporting of the smarmier aspects of the Elvis-In-Decline story - the singer's promiscuity and rampant drug use - as well as of Parker's gambling, a problem often linked to his raising of the price promoters had to pay to book Elvis for a concert.

If there's a flaw in Guralnick's simple, straightforward writting style, it's that at times it's dry, almost academic. But this works to his advantage in the coverage of Elvis' Last years, providing a somewhat refreshing change from the hysterical tone adopted by most chroniclers of that period. About the Colonels's gambling, for example, Guralnick calmly relates:

"The Colonel's friends and associates were growing concerned about his behavior as well: more and more they were coming to see his predilection for gambling, which had seemed like a harmless aberration at first, as an addiction over which he had no control. It was something no one would have ever figured him for, but one by one all the signs fell into place as they watched him drop ever-larger sums of money at the roulette table, playing with a grim determination that seemed to blot out everything that was going on around him." (p.447)

Guralnick's ultimately sympathetic portrait of Parker may be the only flaw worth noting in his two-volume masterwork. Although he initially describes Parker as "a heavyset, crude and blustering man with a brilliant mind and a guttural accent" (Last Train, p.165), it's clear - and again, Guralnick is a champ at trying to withhold judgment - that the author respects the Colonel's drive to be the master of whatever game he happened to be playing. Perhaps because of his acquaintance with the man, Guralnick is too forgiving of Parker's ruthless pursuit of fame and wealth for himself and his too-pliable client. Worse, Guralnick does not identify Parker's meddling in the artistic side of Elvis' career as the disaster it proved to be.

The other traditional villain in the Elvis melodrama fares even better Dr. George Nichopoulos, the infamous "Dr. Nick," comes off here as significantly less menacing - and rightfully so, as evidence presented in several court trials has shown. As one of the doctors who supplied Elvis' outrageous appetite for opiates, Dr. Nick, who lived in Memphis and was the personal physician to Elvis and his entire entourage, is usually made out to be the monster whose irresponsibly free hand in the writing of prescriptions helped kill Elvis. As the title of a famous article by Stanley Booth had it, "The King is Dead! Hang the Doctor." In Guralnick's account, however Nichopoulos is seen as someone who, after failing to break Elvis of his habit, at least felt his presence could help control it.

"[Dr. Nick] showed very poor judgment at times. He himself would say, or he has said in the last few years ,that he was an enabler," Guralnick says. "If you climinate Dr. Nick from the picture, [Elvis] still had doctors all over the places, people who would do anything he wanted. Of all the doctors who ministered to Elvis, the only one who cared about him as a person was Dr. Nick. He compromised his objectivity, he took money from Elvis, he made a lot of money off Elvis, he made real errors. What he did is not the kind of thing thast would lead you to him as a family physician, but at the same time it doesn't create the picture of a villain."

"I think Elvis was clinically depressed for the last three or four years of his life."

The only times that Guralnick allows his narrative to veer across the line into the kind of luridness infesting the Goldman book is in some of the direct quotes. One of Elvis' friends from his time in Germany, Cliff Gleaves, contributes one of the very few eyewitness accounts here of Elvis' abuse of drugs. Speaking of the spring of 1967, Gleaves said:

"Elvis didn't care if anyone else took them or not. He was getting off on them. He loved to sit there high and wiggle in the chair, just wiggle his legs with a big pitcher of ice water in front of him - he'd drink tons of water 'cause you could see it dehydrating him - just sit there and watch TV. He didn't give a damn whether you did anything. He was going to do what he wanted anyway." (p.240)

Inevitably, any Presley biography comes to the point where the singer's decline began to gain momentum. The question then to be addressed is, why? In Guralnick's view a complex amalgam of force drove Elvis to destroy himself and his music. He feels that, sometime in the aftermath of Priscilla Presley's departure - late 1972 or early 1973 - Elvis fell into a depression from which he never emerged. This assumption, he says, is why the book's final chapters are short and rapidly paced.

"I think Elvis was clinically depressed for the last three or four years of his life. It's very much like writing about a person who's a heroin addict. Once you've established that this is the case, you're not going to write about every time the person shoots up - it's irrelevant. What's relevant is the fact that it exists, and how it affects the people around him and how it affects his own life.

"What I wanted to do [in the chapters covering the last days] was climinate everything that wasn't essential. I wanted the pace to pick up because I felt, at that point, we were on an inexorable march to its conclusion. I felt at that point that everything had been said, and Elvis was on this monorail to a destiny that couldn't be avoided."

For Guralnick, tragedy also lies in the fact that Elvis had a spritual side that, had it developed, might have saved him. This theme runs throughout both books.

"If you look at his spiritual readings over the last 15 years of his life, his mind remained exploratory, but it was all within a certain framework, all within a certain world. Everything that he learned he had to teach himself because he couldn't get outside of that world. Somebody once asked me, 'If you could give Elvis anything, what would you give him?' I was kind of joking, but I was serious, too: I said I'd give him a course in comparative religion at UCLA, because it would have opened up the world to him - from acting lessons to being able to admit `Hey, I don't know everything' to'I am vulnerable.'"

By the last page of Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, at the summit of this mountain of reporting, it has become abundantly clear that the person who must bear the most responsibility for that unmaking is Elvis Aaron Presley himself. The inescapableness of this conclusion, coupled with the author's stubborn refusal to indulge his personal belief s without corroborating evidence, is what makes Peter Guralnick's Careless Love, and Last Train to Memphis before it, such skillful and determined accomplishments.

By Robert Baird

From the Burnettes I had heard about how Elvis and them had known each other, played touch football together, worked at Crown Electric. I learned of the rivalry that went all the way back to those early days. Not having previously known about the Rock'n Roll Trio, all of this impressed me very much, but it didn't lessen my love for Elvis Presley and his music.

Both Johnny and Dorsey went to Catholic High School and did not attend Humes with Elvis. However, "Aunt Alberta," who did go to school with Elvis and ended up marrying Dorsey Burnette, clearly recalls the Burnette brothers regularlly hanging around the front lawn of Humes with their guitars and singing songs with a casual group of other young musicians that included Bill Black, Scotty Moore  and Elvis Presley. But, no deep friendship developed.

But neither Johnny nor Dorsey are around any longer for further verification. Nor is Elvis for that matter. But these accounts have 
 been around long enough for Elvis to have discounted them had he never played with the Johnny Burnette Rock'n Roll Trio. The 
 only things Rocky Burnette could tell me was that he had always heard that Elvis had sang and played guitar with The Trio, that he had wanted to join the band and that Dorsey had told him that the only lead singer for the Johnny Burnette Trio could be Johnny Burnette.

Paul Burlison also vaguely recalled that Johnny Burnette was also on stage. But whether it was a show where a bunch of different people got on stage at one time or another, ...or a Johnny Burnette Rock'n Roll Trio performance, he can't say for sure any longer. "Ask Robert Schaeffer," he told me, "he was a clean-up boy on the lot then. He was there, and he owns the place now. I'm sure he'd remember better than me." Well, after some telephone tag, I finally got to speak with Mr. Schaeffer.

Now 67 years old, he remembered the Johnny Burnette Trio very well, and he remembered Elvis getting up on the flatbed trailer and performing a bit. "Elvis lived down the street then. And I remember he got turned down at first. But eventually he was up on the stage too." He knows Paul was on the stage then, and he thought he recalled Johnny Burnette also being on the stage ...but he too couldn't recall if that was with the Johnny Burnette Rock'n Roll Trio or not.

I've read before that, in addition to an in-studio performance, Elvis had actually gotten up on stage and performed during two separate KWEM "live" remote broadcasts prior to Sun Studio. One was with the Johnny Burnette Rock'n Roll Trio at a used cars lot. The other had been from a mall, featuring "Shelby Fowler" with Paul Burlison having also joined in. Paul remembered the appearance at George Kleins KWEM show. "Elvis didn't go over too big on that," he said matter-of-factly. But Paul couldn't recall the Shelby Follin show having been at a mall.

As for Elvis having never heard nor seen The Trio perform because he was "too young" to get into nightclubs, Paul said, "Elvis got into any club he wanted to. He was out of high school." And to the assertion that Elvis didn't even know who they were, Paul remarked that Elvis came to their shows even when they didn't tell him about them.

He also clearly remembered the time when he and the Burnettes were walking down the street and Elvis and Bill Black exited a building right in front of them: "Elvis said 'Uh Oh, The Daltons. Let's cross over to the other side.' Well, we all had a good laugh and talked for awhile. You know, I always had the feeling that Elvis was afraid of Dorsey." And it is a fact that Presley referred to the Trio as The Dalton Gang because of their lack of hesitation to duke it out, usually with some jealous boyfriends at a nightclub.

So. I had learned that Elvis had performed with members of the Trio, but I had no confirmation that he had actually joined the 
 wild-rocking Trio itself during his formative period just prior to Sun Studio. Yet there's no question that his initial private recordings 
 were hardly rockers. And when Sam Phillips invited him in, it was "disastrous" at first, with Elvis unhesitatingly singing every Dean 
 Martin song he knew, as well as Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow and Billy Eckstine. Elvis tried just about everything, and nothing was really clicking until that break where Elvis began "fooling around" with "That's All Right (Mama)."

And Elvis did say that definitive moment was more of a fluke than anything. Was that all it really was? It seemed very unlikely that Elvis could live in Memphis then, be interested in music and never had heard a happening band composed of people he knew and worked with. Considering how many who had been there had either died nor exercised those memories, I felt that it was now almost my duty to find someone who knew first hand whether this legendary musical crossing of paths had happened.

Barbara Pittman turned out to be the star witness. And I found her only when I thought of the Memphis Music Hall Of Fame. I called there one Saturday morning and just asked if there was anybody who might know for certain about Elvis having played with 
  the Rock'n Roll Trio. I was told if I called back Monday and asked for Willie Pittman, the owner, he might be able to help me.

When I explained to Mr. Pittman that I was seeking first-hand confirmation that the Rock'n Roll Trio had been a direct influence upon Elvis Presley, he immediately said without hesitation: "Elvis Presley didn't invent Rock And Roll. Johnny and Dorsey Burnette invented Rockabilly!"

And when I asked about the used cars lot performance, he told me it was common knowledge in Memphis that Elvis not only sang and played with the Johnny Burnette Rock'n Roll Trio then, but on other occasions as well, when he'd get up while they were playing nightclubs and join them for a song or two.

But how did he himself know this to be the truth? I explained I needed to talk to someone who had been there and knew this from personal experience, so that I could document it at the Rockhall forum. Had Elvis really performed with the Burnette Trio prior to recording "That's All Right (Mama)?"

"No question about it! My wife Barbara was there. She knew Elvis very well before he made it. She also knew the Burnettes. They all knew each other. And she also dated Elvis, even when he lived in Graceland." Wow, pay dirt. What used to be her name? "Why, Pittman," he answered, "I took her name. She's Barbara Pittman and she used to sing with Clyde Leoppard's Snarly Ranch Boys, and she also recorded at Sun." Double Wow!

Jimmy Denson, Paul Burlison's boxing teacher, he not only confirmed how he had introduced Paul to Dorsey, he also told me how his family had also been close with the Presleys. Infact, he not only confirmed the J&S Auto show ("'Sambo' Barrom put that together with 'K-WAM'.)", at 70 he has a sharp memory and even remembers the day Elvis met the Burnette Brothers: "I was there watching. I know when it happened. All of 1946 my younger brother, Jesse Lee, was teaching guitar, singing and songwriting every day of the week to Dorsey Burnette, then in 1947 Johnny started with Jesse Lee for lessons every Saturday and Sunday.

And Gladys Presley always used to tell Jesse Lee that after she saved up $12.95 to buy Elvis a Gene Autry Harmony guitar she wanted him to teach Elvis the guitar. That took about 5 months because Vernon didn't want to work. Well, last week of February,1948, Jesse Lee took on Elvis, and they met right there in apartment 227E Winchester. I watched the first lesson. Infact Elvis joined Jesse's group, The Golden Boys All Guitar Band, singing backgound behind Jesse Lee, Johnny and Dorsey. May 15, 1948, Elvis giged all afternoon with Bill and Johnny Black, plus the Burnette brothers and Jesse Lee on the front porch of the Black home on Alabama, Lauderdale Courts.

Then Elvis cried like a baby because his mother wouldn't let him off the Lauderdale Courts property to play with the Burnettes at Millington Naval Base. He used to cry a lot. Well, after they played there, after the show, the Burnettes started fighting with the sailors. - Dorsey used to terrify Elvis. He'd chase him around, and Gladys trusted us to take care of her boy, so I talked to Dorsey and made him back off. But Dorsey was bad news at the time. He'd stop cars and fight 5 or 6 boys at a time. As a boxer he knocked down my hero, Charlie Jerome, who just died 3 days ago. He was a world contender.

Nobody could get Charlie Jerome, but Dorsey caught him. He was bad, the Mid South Welterweight Champion in 1949. At 16 years old he was knocking out all the men."  Subsequently Jesse Lee Denson himself returned my call and confirmed how after Gladys Presley bought a guitar to replace Elvis' cardboard one purchased the previous year in Mississippi, he began teaching Elvis guitar. And, that Elvis was indeed very familiar with the Burnettes, who were advanced performers, having begun on their own at age 5.

Anyway, about that Elvis song the Burnettes were ripped off for, one of the first songs the Trio wrote when they formed in '53 was "Oh Baby Babe," which quickly became a real crowd pleaser. But, before they could record it, Elvis recorded the virtually identical "Baby, Let's Play House" in February of 1955. Credited to Arthur Gunter of Nashville, Elvis' record replaces the then-racier "I just want to make love to you" with a cleaned-up "let's play house." Johnny's widow Thurla told me back in the 60s that Elvis knew full well that it was their song because he had heard them perform it. When I asked Paul about it and told him too often I'd read that THEY had copied Elvis' recording, he said "I don't know why anybody would think we'd want to sound like Elvis back then. He wasn't big or anything back then, we were just being ourselves. And I used to listen to radio all the time back then and I never heard of Arthur Gunter nor 'Baby, Let's Play House' until after Elvis made his record. And back then we didn't know much about suing or songwriters' rights. I guess we just took it as a compliment that he was copying us."