In January of 1954, Presley returned and made another two sides, but it wasn't until sometime in June that he received the famous call from Sun label head Sam Phillips, asking the young singer to come over and try his hand at replicating a demo whose original singer had vanished into anonymity. Elvis showed up immediately, but couldn't handle the song, reportedly exploding in anger at his own limitations, but Phillips, always good at coaxing talent from performers, asked the young man to run through a repertoire of what h could sing. Elvis obliged, and Sam took him on, pairing him with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass.
The rest of the story is, by now, well known: on July 6, Sam heard the trio running through an impromptu version of Arthur Gunter's "That's All Right." "What are you doing?" he asked them. "We don't know," came the reply. "Well, do it again," he instructed, and a significant section of rock and roll -- some say the whole thing -- is born.
Although the record was an instant smash in Memphis, proving Phillips' oft-quoted prophecy about finding a white man who could sing like a black man, audiences were slow to take to the singer that was billed as the "Hillbilly Bopper." Too country for pop, too pop for country, and too bluesy for either, he had a hard time fitting in. But a wave of integrated postwar musical styles was already building around the country, and by the end of the year, Elvis' natural talent and charisma were starting to create a furor in the South that rivaled Sinatra's bobbysoxer mania of a decade earlier. In the next twelve months, Elvis Presley would become nothing less than the most popular entertainer of all time.
