19th July 1954, Monday [I]

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Graeme
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19th July 1954, Monday [I]

Post by Graeme » Wed Nov 18, 2015 1:28 pm

Day number 7133Site Date Map
Yesterday << 19th July 1954, Monday >> Tomorrow


Released today, Sun 209, That's All Right / Blue Moon Of Kentucky

Got this from 706unionavenue, but it doesn't cite the source.
Announcer Fred Cook was the first disc jockey who played an Elvis record in the air at WREC radio in the basement of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis.
Dewey Phillips was the first disc jockey in the world to play an Elvis Presley record in the air? Later research and back-up interviews prove this wrong. Dewey was the second disc jockey to play an Elvis record on the air - runner-up by about four hours.
Marion Keisker was the first to tip to this in a lengthy conversation just six weeks before she died. "I believe, if you will check this out, you will find that Dewey was not the first to play Elvis on the air", Keisker said. "If you will dig a little deep, you will find that Fred Cook was the first to play Elvis on the air on WREC and that I had a little something to do with it".
Here is Fred Cook's memory of that day: "At the time, I was playing easy listening music at WREC. Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Perry Como... really great singers. Marion was working full-time at the station, as Kitty Kelly on the air, and writing copy for us; and then she worked part-time for Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Service. My show was a fifteen-minute show going on the air at 4 p.m."
"When television began to attract a lot of people, the radio networks began pulling back on their programming. We were a CBS affiliate. When I joined the station in 1950, most of our programming came from CBS. Virtually all of it. Then they started dropping shows and that's when we started playing records. My fifteen-minute show was named "Your Popular Music by Hoyt Wooten" (the station's founder and owner). As the network receded, my show was lengthened. Eventually I would up with a three-hour show in the late fifties and early sixties".
"One afternoon, July 7, 1954, I was playing my regular selections - Count Basie, Bennie Goodman, and stuff - and Marion came running in, all excited. She said, 'I've got a record (it was a 45 on the Sun label) that you've got to play!'. I liked Marion a great deal and I admired her taste and judgement. So, I took the record and looked at it. It was someone named Elvis Presley. I had never heard of this man, Elvis Presley. It was "That's All Right", backed with "Blue Moon Of Kentucky".
"To tell you the truth, I can't remember which side I played, but I put it on the air without listening to it. And after about thirty seconds, I had had enough! I faded it down, took it off the turntable and handed it back to her and said, 'Marion, that's the worst piece of shit I have ever heard!'. Those were my words. I knew nothing about him".
"Later, it would turn out he had tremendous charisma and all those things, but as far as being a singer, at first I was never impressed and I never changed my mind about that. Marion was quite upset with me. She couldn't understand. She thought I was wrong, except I really wasn't, because in the context of the music we were playing on WREC, it didn't fit, no more than if I had played the original version of "Hound Dog" by that back artist (Big Mama Thornton), which, I determined later, was a heck of a lot better than the "Hound Dog" that Elvis recorded".
"I understand a lot of what Elvis did. He made a lot that kind of music (black music) palatable to a larger, primarily white, audience. It was the same thing when I was in high school. The big bands, especially Benny Goodman, took music that had been primarily black music of the black bands - Count Basie, Jimmy Lunsford and others - tightened it up, polished it up a little bit, and made it palatable to a larger white constituency. Elvis did exactly the same thing".
"But that's the story. I didn't play Elvis' records all the way through. This was the afternoon the record came off the presses. As long as I did a record show in which I had a choice in what was being played, I never played Elvis on the air again".
"If you'll recall, Tom Parker used to buy time on radio stations for special programs, like Mother's Day. He paid very well for it. It was all a pre-taped show and we used to air those because there was good money in it. But I never played an Elvis record again". "As I came to understand more about what he was doing - and I think a lot of real, true Elvis fans will agree - when he started singing ballads and things like that, he wasn't really very good. His voice was not very pleasant to hear doing ballads, like "Love Me Tender".
"He had a kind of strained vibrato sort of thing. Technically, I just didn't think he had a good voice for ballads. I mean, singing the rock things, he was very good at that, but we were never in a rock format. If we had that rock format, I guess we would have played him".
"I don't remember that Marion ever talked to me about Elvis Presley after that first record", said Fred Cook. Other old-timers at WREC Radio remember this story just as Marion Keisker and Fred Cook told it. Before Elvis, Cook had, at times, broadcast the big bands from the Skyway of the Peabody Hotel. His engineer had been Sam Phillips. Further, it make sense that Marion Keisker, being an employee of WREC, would offer her own station the first chance to play Elvis Presley first on the air. This doesn't change the influence Dewey Phillips had in making Elvis popular among Memphis teens.
He wasn't the first nor even the second to play an Elvis song on the air. Dewey was the first, Sleepey Eyed John was the second.
However, there are clues in the above that suggest Fred was the first to play a proper bona fide Elvis record on the air.
Yep, not song, but record.
Both Dewey and John both played acetates. What Fred played was a 45rpm - not an acetate. It even says so above:
She said, 'I've got a record (it was a 45 on the Sun label)
He even says it was today, July 19th 1954:
This was the afternoon the record came off the presses
Dewey played an acetate of That's All Right backed with nothing as the acetate Sam gave him was just one-sided.
Because of the mix up between first to play a song and first to play a record this story often (as it did on the 706unionavenue site) gets filed under July 7th 1954.

So despite the mix up let history record that Fred Cook was the first DJ to play Elvis' first single on Sun Records on his show on WREC, even though we don't know which of the two songs it was.

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