Episode 33: “Mystery Train”, by Elvis Presley

A History of Folk Music and 500 Songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 33 Mystery Train by Elvis Presley.

We talked a few weeks back about how Elvis Presley got started in the music business.

But, of course, Elvis was important enough to rock and roll that we're not going to stop there.

Today we're going to look at the rest of his career at Sun Records, and at how and why he ended up leaving Sun for a major label, with consequences that would affect the whole of music history.

We're going to tell a tale of two Parkers.

The first Parker we're going to talk about is Junior Parker, the blues musician who had been one of the Beale Streeters, with with Johnny Ace, Bobby Blue Bland, and B.B.

King.

Junior Parker had been working with Howling Wolf for a while, before in 1952 he formed his own band, the Blue Flames, which should not be confused with all the other Flames bands we've talked about.

For some reason, there is a profusion of Flames that we'll be dealing with, well, into the 70s.

Ike Turner discovered them and initially got them signed to Modern Records, though, as with many modern records acts, they were recording mostly in Sam Phillips' studio.

Turner contributed piano to the Blue Flames' first single, You're My Angel.

But after that one single, Parker and his band started recording directly for Sun Records.

The first single they recorded for Sun was a minor hit, but wasn't particularly interesting.

Feeling good was basically a John Lee Hooker knockoff.

Now you know,

last night I was laying down,

I heard mom and papa talking.

I heard papa tell mama.

And then I heard mama got up and singing.

But it's their second single for Sun we want to talk about here, and both sides of it.

The A-side of Junior Parker and the Blue Flames' second Sun single is one of the best blues records Son ever put out.

Love My Baby.

Love my baby, keeps up business to herself.

Love my baby,

keeps our business to herself.

Well, her friends don't know it, don't believe nobody else.

Big fat mama,

me shakes all of us.

That record was one that Sam Phillips, a man who made a lot of great records, considered among the greatest he'd ever made.

Talking to his biographer Peter Geralnik about it, decades later, he said, I mean, you tell me a better record that you've ever heard, and Geralnik couldn't.

But it was the B-side that made an impression.

The B-side was a song called Mystery Train.

That song actually dates back to the old folk song, Worried Man Blues, which was recorded in in 1930 by the Carter family.

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.

I'm wearing it now, but it won't be worried long.

The Carter family were, along with Jimmy Rogers, the people who defined what country music is.

Everyone in country music followed from either the Carters or Rogers, and we'll be seeing some members of the extended Carter family much later.

But the important thing here is that A.

P.

Carter, the family patriarch, was one of the most important songwriters of his generation, but he would also go out and find old folk songs that he would repurpose and credit himself with having written.

Worried Man Blues was one of those, and those lyrics, the train arrived sixteen coaches long, became part of the floating lyrics that all blues singers could call upon, and they became the basis for Junior Parker's song.

16

coaches long

Train I ride

16

coaches long

Well let alone black train

carry my baby wrong

That song's composition was credited to Parker and to Sam Phillips.

Phillips would later claim that he made three major changes to the song, and that these were why he got the co-writing credit.

The first was to give the song the title Mystery Train, which has been a big part of the song's appeal ever since.

The second was to insist that the number of coaches for the train should be sixteen.

Parker had been singing fifty coaches long.

And the final one was to suggest that the band start the song slowly and build up the tempo like a train gathering steam.

Parker and his Blue Flames also backed Rufus Thomas on Tiger Man, a song that Elvis would later go on to perform in the 60s and would play as a medley with Mystery Train in the 70s.

I'm the king of the Jungle Decor,

I'm the king of the jungle decall

me the tiger man

When you cross my path you've got your own life in your hand

Well I get up on the mountain and I call my bear cat back

But the Rufus Thomas connection proved a signifier of what was to come.

Don Roby was still annoyed with Sam Phillips over Bearcat, the track that Phillips had produced for Thomas as an answer to Hound Dog, and Roby would take pleasure in poaching Phillips's artists for his own label.

Phillips was soon reading in Cash Box magazine that Roby was grooming little Junior Parker for big things.

Roby signed Parker to an exclusive contract, and even an unsuccessful hundred thousand dollar lawsuit from Sam Phillips couldn't stop Roby from having Parker on his label.

Junior Parker would go on to have a distinguished career in RB, having occasional hit singles until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1971.

Luckily for Phillips, he had other artists he could work with, not least of them, Elvis Presley.

But before we talk more about Elvis, let's talk about that other Parker.

Tom Parker was to become the most well known manager in the music industry, even though for most of his career he only managed one act.

So today we're going to look at him in some detail as he became the template for all the worst, most grasping managers in the music business.

When we deal with Alan Klein or Peter Grant or Don Arden, we'll be be dealing with people who are following in the Colonel's footsteps.

It's difficult to separate fact from fiction in the case of Colonel Parker, though there are biographies devoted entirely to doing so, with some success.

What we know for sure was that Parker was an undocumented immigrant to the United States, originally from the Netherlands, who had taken the name Parker upon his arrival.

We also know that the same day that he disappeared from his home in the Netherlands to travel to the US for the final time, a woman was found bludgeoned to death in his home town,

and we know that he was dishonourably discharged from the US Army as a psychopath, and that there were rumours around his home town decades later that Parker was responsible for the murder.

We also know that he desperately hid his undocumented status long past the time when he would have been eligible for citizenship, and that he completely cut off all contact with his family, even though he had been close to them before emigrating.

Whether he was a killer or not, Parker was certainly an unsavoury character, as, to be fair, were most people involved in the business side of the music industry in the 1950s.

He had his start in the entertainment industry as a con man, and throughout his life he loved to manipulate people, playing humiliating practical jokes on them that weren't so much jokes as demonstrations of his power over them.

He was, by all accounts, a cruel man who loved to hurt people, except when he loved to be outlandishly sentimental towards them instead, of course.

Parker had started out as a carney, working in travelling shows, doing everything from running a dancing chicken show, in which he'd put a hot plate under a chicken's feet, so it would keep lifting its legs up and look like it was dancing, to telling fortunes, to being the person whose job it was to tempt the geek to come back to the show with a bottle of whiskey when he became too sickened by his job.

The geek, for those who don't know, was a person in a carnival who would perform acts that would disgust most people, such as biting the head off live chickens, to the amused disgust of the audience.

Usually a geek would be someone who had severe mental health and substance abuse problems, degrading himself as the only way to make enough money to feed his habit.

All this had taught Parker a lot.

It had led him to the conclusion that audiences were there to be ripped off, and that absolutely nothing mattered to them other than the promise of sexuality.

As far as Parker was concerned, in show business, it didn't matter what the show was.

What mattered was how you sold it to the audience, and how much merchandise you could sell during the show.

In his time with the carnivals, Parker had become extremely good at creating publicity stunts.

One that he did many times was to fake a public wedding.

He and a female staff member would pretend to be just two customers in love, and they would get married at the top of the Ferris wheel, drawing huge crowds.

It was during World War II that Parker had moved into country music promotion.

He first became involved in music when he got to know Jean Austin, one of the biggest stars of the 1920s.

Now, ain't she sweet?

See you coming down the street.

I ask you confidentially, ain't she sweet?

Ain't she nice?

Look her over once or twice.

I ask you confidentially, ain't she nice?

Cast an eye in her direction.

Oh, me, oh my,

ain't that perfection?

I repeat, don't you think that's kind of neat?

I ask you confidentially, ain't she?

Austin had been a huge star, but but by the time Parker got to know him in the late thirties, he was much less popular.

Parker helped him organise some shows.

According to some claims, Parker was his manager, though other sources disagree.

But at this time, Austin had fallen on such hard times that he would fill his car at a petrol station, pay by cheque, and then tell them that his autograph was probably worth more than the money, so why not just leave that cheque uncashed and frame it?

Parker learned a valuable lesson from Austin, with whom he would remain friends for years.

That lesson was that the stars come and go, and rise and fall in popularity, but managers can keep making money no matter how old they are.

Parker determined to get into music management, and given that he didn't actually like music himself, he decided to go for the music of the common people, the music that was selling to the same people who'd been coming to the carnivals, country music.

And so to start with, he put on a show by the up-and-coming star Voyeikov.

You're the only star in my blue hell band.

And you're shining just

for me.

You're the only star in my blue heaven.

And

in dreams, you'll face my sleep.

In later years Roycoff would become, for a time, the single biggest star in country music, and Hank Williams would say of him, For drawing power in the South, it was Royacoff, then God.

But in nineteen forty

he was merely very popular, rather than a superstar.

And Parker had used his promotional knowledge to make the show he promoted one of the biggest in Acuff's career thus far.

In particular, he'd tried a new trick that no one else had ever done before.

He'd cut a deal with a local grocery chain that they would sell cut price tickets to anyone who brought in a clipping from a newspaper.

This meant that the show had, in effect, multiple box officers, while the grocery chain paid for the advertising to increase their own footfall.

Having seen what kind of money he could make from country music, Parker approached Acuff about becoming Acuff's manager.

Acuff was initially interested, but after a couple of dates he was put off from working further with Parker, because Parker had what Aikoff thought an unchristian attitude to money.

Acuff was playing dates for fixed fees, and Parker started insisting that as well as the fixed fee, Acuff should get a percentage of the gross.

Acuff didn't want to be that grasping, and so he gave up on working with Parker.

Though as a consolation, Acuff did give Parker a stake in his merchandising.

Parker got the rights to market Roy Akoff flour in Florida.

But Akuff did more than that.

He pointed Parker in the direction of Eddie Arnold, a young singer who was then working with Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys.

He told Parker that Arnold would almost certainly be going solo soon, and that he would need a manager.

Arnold was a fan of Gene Austin, and so eagerly linked up with Parker.

Parker quickly got Arnold signed to RCA Records as a solo artist, and Arnold's second single, single in 1945, Each Minute Seems Like a Million Years, reached number five in the country charts.

I have

no record now of time,

or you are all that's on my mind.

I think of you both night and day,

Eddie Arnold was to go on to become one of the biggest stars in country music, and that was in large part because of the team that Tom Parker built around him.

Parker would handle the management.

Steve Scholes, the head of country and RB at RCA, would handle the record production.

Parker cut a deal with Hill and Range Music Publishers so that Arnold would perform songs they published in return for kickbacks, and any songs that Arnold wrote himself would go through them, and the William Morris Agency would handle the bookings.

Both Scholes and Arnold were given money by Hill and Range for Arnold recording the publisher's songs.

Parker had Scholes in his pocket because he knew that Scholes was taking kickbacks and could inform Scholz's bosses bosses at RCA.

And Parker, in turn, took twenty-five per cent of the twenty thousand dollar bribe that Hill and Range paid Arnold

as Arnold's manager.

This whole team, put together by a mutual love of ripping each other and their artists off, would go on to work with Parker on every other artist he managed, and would be the backbone of his success in the industry.

Parker soon used his music industry connections to get an honorary colonel's commission from Louisiana Governor Jimmy Davis, himself a former country musician.

And from that point until the end of his life, Parker insisted on being addressed as colonel, even though in reality he was a draft dodger who had deliberately piled on weight during the Second World War so he could become too fat to draft.

But Parker and Arnold eventually split up.

Parker was originally meant to be Arnold's exclusive manager, but in 1953, Arnold found out that Parker was putting together a tour of other RTA acts, headed by Hank Snow.

Arnold fired the Colonel, and the Colonel quickly instead became the exclusive manager of Hank Snow.

a vision of lobbliness.

I uttered

a sigh,

then whispered goodbye,

goodbye

to my happiness.

Of course, Parker didn't leave his association with Eddie Arnold empty-handed.

He insisted on Arnold giving him a severance package of $50,000 because of how much money Arnold was making from the contracts that Parker had negotiated for him.

His association with Hank Snow would only last two years and would break up very acrimoniously, with Snow later saying, I have worked with several managers over the years and have had respect for them all except one.

Tom Parker was the most egotistical, obnoxious human being I've ever had dealings with.

The reason Snow said this was because the colonel tricked Snow out of the greatest business opportunity in the history of the music business.

The two of them had formed a management company to manage other artists, and when Parker found another artist he wanted to manage, Snow naturally assumed that they were partners, right up until he discovered they weren't.

Since his first single, Elvis Presley had been putting out singles on some that largely stuck to the same formula a blues number on one side, a country number on the other, and a sparse backing by Elvis, Scotty, and Bill.

In general, the blues sides were rather better than the country sides, not least because the countrysides, after the first couple of singles, started to be songs that were especially written for Elvis by outside songwriters and tended to be based on rather obvious wordplay.

Songs like, I'm left, you're right, she's gone.

Well, you're trying to tell me so,

or how

The blues songs, on the other hand, were chosen from among Elvis's own favourites and songs that got kicked around in the studio.

This would set the template for his work in the future.

Whenever Elvis got to choose his own material and follow his own instincts, the results would be good music.

Whenever he was working on music that was chosen for him by someone else, even someone as sympathetic to his musical instincts as Sam Phillips, the music would suffer, though at this stage, even the songs Elvis wasn't as keen on sounded great.

By the time of Elvis's last son single, he had finally made one more change that would define the band he would work with for the rest of the fifties.

He had introduced a drummer, DJ Fontana, and while Fontana didn't play on the single, session drummer Johnny Bonero played on it instead.

He would be a part of the core band from now on.

The trio of Elvis, Scotty and Bill had now become a singer and his backup band, Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys.

The A side of Elvis' fifth single for Sun Records was one of those country songs that had been written especially for Elvis.

I Forgot to Remember to Forget.

I can seem to get her off

my mind.

I thought I'd never miss her,

but I found out somehow

I think about her almost all the time.

That's a perfectly adequate country pop song, but the B side, his version of Mystery Train, was astonishing.

It was actually a merger of elements from the A side and the B side of Junior Parker's single, as Love My Baby provided the riff that Scotty Moore used on Elvis's version of Mystery Train.

Elvis, Scotty, and Bill melded the two different songs together, and they came up with something that would become an absolute classic of the rockabilly genre.

Train a ride

16

coaches long

Train a ride

16 coaches long

while that long black train

got my baby and it's gone The song was probably chosen because Sam Phillips was one of the credited songwriters.

As he was currently battling Don Roby in court over Junior Parker, he naturally wanted to make as much money off his former artist as he could.

But at the same time, it was a song that Elvis clearly liked, and one he would still be performing live in the 1970s.

This wasn't a song that was being forced onto Elvis.

Indeed, Elvis almost certainly saw Junior Park alive when he was playing with the Beatles Streeters.

B.B.

King would talk in later years about the teenage Elvis having been one of the very few white people who went to see them, and even allowing for later exaggerations, it's likely that he did see them at least a few times.

So this was one of those rare cases where the financial and artistic incentives perfectly overlapped.

But while he was recording for some, Elvis was also touring, and he was drawing bigger and bigger crowds, and they were going wilder and wilder.

And when Tom Parker saw one of those crowds, he knew he had to have Elvis.

He didn't understand at all why those girls were screaming at him.

He would never, in all his life, ever understand the appeal of Elvis' music.

But he knew that a crowd like that would spend money, and he definitely understood that.

Parker worked on Elvis, and more importantly he worked on Elvis's family.

And even more importantly than that, he got Hank Snow to work on Elvis' family.

Elvis's parents were big Hank Snow fans, and after being told by their idol how much the colonel had helped him, they were practically salivating to get Elvis signed with him.

Elvis himself was young and naive and would go along with whatever his parents suggested.

Carl Perkins would later describe him as the most introverted person ever to enter a recording studio, and he just wanted to make some money to look after his parents.

His daddy had a bad back and couldn't work, and his mama was so sick and tired all the time.

If they said the colonel would help him earn more money, well, he'd do what his parents said.

Maybe he could earn them enough money to buy them a nice big house, so his mamma could give up her job.

They could maybe raise chickens in the yard.

It was only after the documents were signed that Snow realized that the contracts didn't mention himself at all.

His partner had cut him out, and the two parted company.

Meanwhile, Sam Phillips was finding some more country singers he could work with and starting to transition into country and rockabilly rather than the blues.

A couple of months before Mystery Train, he put out another single by a two-guitar and bass rockabilly act, Hey Porter by Johnny Cash and the Tennessee II.

will it be to lie can you see the light of day?

We'll be hearing more from Johnny Cash later, but right now he didn't seem to be star material.

Colonel Parker knew that if Elvis was to become the star he could become, he would have to move to one of the major labels.

Sun Records was a little nothing R and B label in Memphis.

It barely registered on the national consciousness.

If Elvis was going to do what Tom Parker wanted him to do, he was going to have to move to a big label, a big label like RCA records.

Colonel Parker was in the country music business after all, and if you were going to be anything at all in the country music business, you were going to work in Nashville, not Memphis.

Parker started hinting to people that Sam Phillips wanted to sell Elvis's contract, without bothering to check with Phillips.

The problem was that Sam Phillips didn't want to give up on Elvis so easily.

Phillips was, after all, a great judge of talent, and not only had he discovered Elvis, he had nurtured his ability.

It was entirely likely that without Sam Phillips, Elvis would never have been anything more than a truck driver with a passable voice.

Elvis the artist was as much the creation of Sam Phillips as he was of Elvis Presley himself.

But there was a downside to Elvis' success, and it was one that every independent label dreads.

Sun Records was having a hit, and the last thing you want as an indie is to have a hit.

The problem is cash flow.

Suppose the distributors want 100,000 copies of your latest single.

That's great, except they will not pay you for several months if they pay you at all.

And meanwhile, you need to pay the pressing plant for the singles before you get them to the distributors.

If you've been selling it in small but steady numbers and you suddenly start selling a lot, that can destroy your company.

Nothing is more deadly to the indie label than a hit.

And then on top of that, there was the lawsuit with Don Roby over Junior Parker.

That was eating Phillips' money, and he didn't have much of it.

But at that point Sam Phillips didn't have any artists who could take Elvis's place.

He'd found the musician he'd been looking for, the one who could unite black and white people in Phillips' dream of ending racism.

So he came up with a plan.

He decided to tell Tom Parker that Elvis's contract would be for sale, like Parker wanted, but only for thirty five thousand

Now,

that doesn't sound like a huge amount for Elvis' contract today,

but in 1955 that would be the highest sum of money ever paid for a recording artist's contract.

It was certainly an absurd amount for someone who had so far failed to trouble the pop charts at all.

Phillips' view was that it was a ridiculous amount to ask for, but if he got it he could cover his spiralling costs.

And if he didn't, as seemed likely, he would still have Elvis.

As Phillips later said, I thought, Hey, I'll make him an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I'll tell him they'd better not spread this poison any more.

I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the thirty five thousand dollars, and that would have been fine.

But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn't back out then.

He gave the colonel an unreasonably tight deadline to get him a $5,000 unrefundable deposit, and another unreasonably tight deadline to get the other $30,000.

Amazingly, the Colonel called his bluff.

He got him the $5,000 almost straight away, out of his own pocket, and by the deadline had managed to persuade Steve Scholes at RCA to pay it back to him, to pay Sam Phillips the outstanding $30,000, and to pay Elvis a $5,000 signing bonus, of which, of course, a big chunk went directly into Tom Parker's pocket.

RCA quickly reissued I Forgot to Remember to Forget and Mystery Train while they were waiting for Elvis' first recording session for his new label.

With Elvis now on a major label, Sam Phillips had to find a a new Rockabilly star to promote.

Luckily, there was a new young country boy who had come to audition for him.

Carl Perkins had definite possibilities.

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is written, produced and performed by Andrew Hickey.

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