Jack tell me about how when you first heard Elvis, what the tune was and how it impressed you.

Well I remember, ah, I got up one morning and I turned on the radio and there was a guy named Sleepy Eyed John, had a morning radio show there in Memphis and he said, here's that record everybody's been screaming about. And I heard, let's see, how did it go [guitar]. Sort of like that, you know. And it really woke me up. And I said, hey, that's what I've been wanting to hear. All of a sudden there was a breath of fresh air on the radio, somebody had gone into the studio and got silly, actually got it on the airwaves and I loved it and so did everybody that heard it around Memphis. It was an instant hit. Elvis was an instant hit in Memphis. You only had to play that record once on the radio and it was all over.

Tell me the story again.

Well, ah, ah, I woke up one morning there in Memphis and, ah, turned on the radio and, ah, was listening to Sleepy Eyed John who was the morning disc jockey there in Memphis and he said something like, here's that record everybody's been raving about. Comes on, [singing]. You know and I just loved it right off the bat. It was like just a breath of fresh air. And everybody that heard it loved it. Elvis was a huge, instant hit in Memphis, immediately. And I think before the day was over they were probably playing the flip side of the record "That's Alright Mama". I know both sides got going but, but "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" was the first thing. That was the big surprise. Surprised me. I don't even like surprises but liked that.

What was so surprising about it? What was he doing that was unexpected?

Well it was just sort of like total freedom, it's like somebody that had actually gone into a recording studio and got silly and managed to get it on the airwaves. I admire that.

You mentioned you were playing around Memphis and followed Elvis at the Eagles' Nest once.

About a month after Elvis started I was playing in a band that was, it was Sleepy Eyed John's band. He was promoting the singer every Friday and Saturday night at a place called The Eagles' Nest. And I was the singer and MC with, with the house band, which was a big Western swing band with about three fiddles in it and all that stuff. And I used to have, bring Elvis on but then I'd have to follow Elvis, remember that. And Elvis used to get up there and break strings on his guitar and I'd loan him mine and he'd, in fact this one here, Elvis used to play that, used to have scratches, I had it refinished a couple of years ago but used to have some scratches on there that I could say Elvis did. Then while I, while he'd be up there singing, while I'd be up there singing he'd be flirting with my girl friend but he didn't get the girl that time. She became the mother of my two children. Elvis didn't always get the girl, you know, at least not during the first month.

Performing like that, he must have been a hard act to follow.

Oh yeah, 'cause, ah, people just loved him. It, it was kind of like, I'm up there with this eight piece band, you know, and Elvis comes up there with just a acoustical guitar, I don't know if they even had a mike on it, and a bass and a, and a guitar, Scotty Moore. And he wasn't loud at all but, but he totally had the people's attention. And they hit the floor, man. There was no question about Elvis. Anybody that saw Elvis or heard him knew that, ah, he was something really, ah, really spectacular. But I don't think anybody expect, ever expected that he would become what he did but they sure liked it in Memphis right off the bat.

Well now before I heard Elvis do "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" I'd always heard it by Bill Monroe and of course he did it, he wrote it and he did it completely different, he did it as a waltz or like a ballad like [guitar and singing] And here comes Elvis, you know [guitar and singing] Yeah, and I liked that too. Then Bill Monroe went back and did it that way, you know.

So I had a played a fair amount of blue grass music before I came back to Memphis and met Elvis and all that stuff but, ah, I, I was very familiar with Bill Monroe's catalog and, and one, that was one of the things he did, "Blue Moon Of Kentucky" which he wrote but he did it as a waltz and it was more like a ballad like [guitar and singing]. And here comes old Elvis, you know, [guitar and singing] And that was Elvis. Did you want me to do something after that?

Tell me about when Jerry Lee first came to the studio, how he impressed you when you first me him.

Okay, at that time I was working for Sam Phillips, Sun Records. My job was to, ah, audition people, work with artists, listen to tapes and cut wedding tapes and all that sort of thing. So, ah, I remember when Jerry Lee came in the girl up front, Sally Woburn came back and said, this guy out here says he plays piano like Chet Atkins. I said, oh yeah, I want to hear that. So he came on back and sure enough he played "Wildwood Flower" like Chet Atkins except on the piano. And then I said, that's neat, that's nice but do you do anything else? Yeah, I sing. So he sang me some country songs, just very country, George Jones kind of country. I said, do you know any rock and roll? No, haven't done any yet. So anyway I wind up making a tape of him with about four or five songs. It was, it was real, "Seasons Of My Heart" and "Window Up Above" things that were hits by George Jones at that time. At that time George Jones was about the only country artist that was really cooking, you know, right in the middle of all that rock and roll. And, ah, but there was nothing rock and roll about these tapes. Anyway we cut four or five songs and Jerry left and then, ah, sometime later I played the tape for Sam and he really loved the guy singing and play, piano playing and everything. Said, get him in here. Anyway I was about to call him and a few days later he showed up. He'd come back to town and, ah, came in with J.W. Brown, his cousin who became his brother-in-law and bass player. And, ah, I said, I've been about to call you. Said, what are you doing Thursday? He said, well nothing. Why don't you come in here and I'll have some players and we'll cut some tapes. So he came, I remember it was a Thursday because, ah, Sam and gone to Nashville to the music convention and, ah, I also remember it was cold in there, there was something wrong with the, the thermostat, the, the heater kept going out and we had this little old electric heater but it was cold. Well we did several songs and then, ah, he, he, he'd come out with a version of "You're The Only Star In My Blue Heaven" that's what it was. That's what really, ah, made me decide to go and do these sessions. Instead of going [singing]. But he did it, [singing]. Yeah, I loved that so. And he'd written a song called "End Of The Road". So we cut those four, five songs and Sam came back to town, came in the following Monday and I put that tape on. And, ah, of course "Crazy Arms" was the one that we'd all flipped over by then. Now, at the time we did "Crazy Arms" the other, two of the musicians were on, thought we were taking a break, we actually were, but he did that and we, there was nothing on the record but, but a spinet piano and Jay and Ben Eaton on the drums, no bass, just had mike on the bass drum. But, ah, it end up Billy Lee Reiley who had been playing bass walked in and picked, picked up the guitar and hit a bad chord on, on the very end of it. But that's all that was on that record just bass and piano, I mean drums and piano. So anyway, Sam put the tape on and starts playing and piano comes on, before it got to the music, to the, to the singing, he stopped the machine and said, now, I can sell that, you know. Like to me he said, well now you young whipper snapper you finally come up with something I can sell. I can sell that. Before he ever got to the voice just from the sound of that piano. So then he went back and played it again. Of course once we started playing it we played it all day. That was the fun of rock and roll; cut something and it was finished.

Tell me the story about how you recorded Jerry Lee doing "Crazy Arms".

Alright, I had booked him in there one Thursday with, with, ah …

Start again.

I booked Jerry Lee in there on Thursday with, with a three or four piece band, and, ah, I had, I had been experimenting with the piano and I put thumb-tacks on the hammers and it sounded real good. I miked it not from the top but underneath. And it gave it a sound almost like a grand piano or something, but I'd been fooling with that. Anyway we, we, we cut "Crazy Arms" that day and three or four other things but that was the one that stuck and that's the one I played for Sam when he came in the next Monday back from Nashville. And he put the tape on and, ah, it started playing and just from the piano before it ever got to the voice, he stopped it and said, I can sell that. And then he started it over and then he, of course, heard Jerry singing and loved it. He was flipped over it and everybody was that heard it. Pretty, pretty soon people were dropping by the studio to hear this thing, they got to hearing about it. One day Sam said, I think we ought to start charging these people who are playing this record.

Was that the record that was taken to Dewey?

Yeah, that same day that Sam heard it he cut a, an acetate right there in, in the control room, you know, had a lathe and he took it down to Dewey Phillips that night. Dewey put it on the air and the phone lines lit up and everything. In the meantime though we had taken the acetate, we'd made a master and taken it to the pressing plants so that we would have records by the next Thursday.

Tell me about "A Whole Lot Of Shaking Going On". How did Jerry Lee come to do that song? What kind of reactions did you get from that?

I had written a song called "It Will Be Me" and we worked on that thing for quite a while and I was getting tired of it and we were kind of burned out. So I went out in the studio and said, let's get off this a while Jerry and come back to it later. Okay. And J.W. Brown said, hey, Jerry, do that song we been doing on the road there everybody liked so much. I said, - well, let me go turn on the machine. So I went back in and turned on the recorder. No, no dry run, no, no nothing. We just, I hit play and record and sit down there and they did "A Whole Lot of Shaking Going On" and that was the record, no first take, no dry runs, just bap, there it is. Then we went back to messing with "It Will Be Me". I don't think we even played "A Whole Lot Of Shaking" back at that moment. Later on we did and of course once we started playing it back then we'd play them back all night back in those days. That was, that was the fun of being able to make a record which, that's finished, when, when you go in there and cut it, you're not over dubbing on it for months and all that stuff. You cut a record and then you can hear it. We used to play them over and over and over, get something you really loved and just play it over and over at loud volume levels usually.

Jerry Lee liked to listen to Gene Autry.

Yeah, he liked, he was, he was pretty much like, like me as, as far as what he'd been brought up listening to. All, all the cowboy stars and the major country acts and, and that sort of thing. But I think Gene Autry wrote that song "You're The Only Star In My Blue Heaven".

Tell me the other influences on Jerry Lee. The church seemed to have a real strong influence on his music.

Yeah a lot of his music was from the gospel influence and, and another guy actually was Moon Mulligan. Jerry originally started kind of patterning, patterning his plan after Moon a lot. He's the guy that had Jody Blonde and I forget what else.

Was Jerry Lee a new kind of artist at that time? Was there something about him that was really wild and new and exciting?

It, it was a combination of things: he combined a, a certain kind of jazz piano sound with, with, ah, regular old country music. And it was just, ah, it was just a fresh working of, of all the same elements I think.

Sun's recording had a real vibrancy and energy, special sound. What do you think Sam Phillips was doing, et cetera?

Well, number one, Sam was trying to do something in Memphis that, that you could do in Memphis. He was not trying to compete with Nashville as far as the slick country sounds and that sort of thing. And of course Sam had done an awful lot of R and B records prior to that. But he was an experimenter. He just, he was always fooling around with echo and, and, you know, this kind of stuff. No, that ain't right, scratch that. I was always fooling around with echo, but from the start?

Sam was an experimenter.

Sam was a musical experimenter. He, he had done an awful lot of R and B records there. And, ah, he was not trying to compete with Nashville as far getting a slick country sound. He was, he was doing what he could do in Memphis, working with the talent that was there. And, ah, they were not, they were not, as what you would call, slick and professional as some of the Nashville people but they had their energy and their creativeness. And Sam once told me that he, he liked working with, with people when they were learning their licks 'cause you got the experiment, the benefit of their experimentation and so on. So he didn't like, Sam never did like slick. Like I always said, there's a difference in being smooth and being slick. But Sam was just, he liked earthy kind of music. And, ah, he wasn't exactly a musician himself but he had a great feel for it and he could sing bass and that sort of thing but, ah, he was, I think that was one of his best qualities was that he wasn't a musician, he wasn't real picky and, and, and analytical. He either liked it or he didn't. It was either a hit or he hated it, you know, very little in between. It didn't take Sam very long to make up his mind about something. If he liked it he liked it he loved it. If he liked it he loved it. But if he didn't love it, forget it.

Is that the way he felt about Jerry Lee when he first heard it, he loved it?

He loved it.

Tell me more about that.

Well I told you when he, when he played the thing he loved it before he ever heard the singing, right. But then when we got to listen to it he was just marveling at Jerry Lee's style and his voice and talking about, hey, that sounds like some of Moon Mulligan and some gospel music and Sam was in his classical elements and he, he fell in love with it right from the scratch.

Talk about "A Whole Lot Of Shaking Going On", how you came up with the echo.

Well I didn't come up with the echo technique, it was just that, ah, I was kind of young and new at all that and I was fascinated with any kind of gadgets like that. And I loved playing with that echo. So maybe sometimes I put more echo on something than it needed, maybe not. Unless it needed it.

In terms of "A Whole Lot Of Shaking Going On" talk about that song and how the echo affected it, why you decided to give it so much.

Well I don't remember "A Whole Lot Of Shaking Going On" having any particularly, any more echo than, than the other stuff. I think I just put a lot of echo on about everything.

Ok, that’s fair enough. When Elvis and Jerry Lee and Carl Perkins were starting to do their thing, how would you define this kind of rockabilly style? It was more than a mixture of country and blues and R and B. There seemed to be a macho attitude about rockabilly.

I think most of it came from blue grass actually. I had heard some and played some blue grass music prior to that with a slapping bass and all that, that was very similar in feel and, and attitude to some of Elvis's stuff and that rock and roll thing, rockabilly thing in general. So I think it really came more from blue grass, sort of a mixture of blue, blue grass and regular old country stuff.