'Last Train To Memphis' by Peter Guralnick wrote: The next night everyone showed up around 7:00. There was some desultory small talk. Bill and Scotty joked nervously among themselves, and Sam tried to make the boy feel at ease, carefully observing the way in which he both withheld himself and tried to thrust himself into the conversation at the same time. He reminded Sam so much of the blues singers he had recorded, simultaneously proud and needy. At last, after a few minutes of aimless chatter and letting them all get a little bit used to being in the studio, Sam turned to the boy and said, "Well, what do you want to sing?" This occasioned even more selfconscious confusion as the three musicians tried to come up with something that they all knew and could play — all the way through — but after a number of false starts, they finally settled on "Harbour Light," which had been a big hit for Bing Crosby in 1950, and worked it through to the end, then tried Leon Payne's "I Love You Because," a beautiful country ballad that had been a number-one country hit for its author in 1949 and a number-two hit for Ernest Tubb in the hillbilly charts the same year. They tried up to a dozen takes, running through the song again and again - sometimes the boy led off with several bars of whistling, sometimes he simply launched into the verse. The recitation altered slightly each time that he repeated it, but each time he flung into it, seemingly trying to make it new. Sometimes he simply blurted out the words, sometimes his singing voice shifted to a thin, pinched, almost nasal tone before returning to the high, keening tenor in which he sang the rest of the song — it was as if, Sam thought, he wanted to put everything he had ever known or heard into one song. And Scotty's guitar part was too damn complicated, he was trying to sound like Chet Atkins, but there was that strange sense of inconsolable desire in the voice, there was emotion being communicated.
Sam sat in the control room, tapping his fingers absentmindedly on the console. All his attention was focused on the studio, on the interaction of the musicians, the sound they were getting, the feeling that was behind the sound. Every so often he would come out and change a mike placement slightly, talk with the boy a little, not just to bullshit him but to make him feel really at home. It was always a question of how long you could go on like this, you wanted the artist to get familiar with the studio , but being in the studio could take on a kind of mind-numbing quality of its own, it could smooth over the rough edges, you could take refuge in the little space that you had created for yourself and banish the very element of spontaneity you were seeking to achieve.
For Elvis it seemed like it had been going on for hours, and he began to get the feeling that nothing was ever going to happen. When Mr. Phillips had called, he had taken the news calmly to begin with, he had tried to banish all thoughts of results or consequences, but now it seemed as if he could think of nothing else. He was getting more and more frustrated, he flung himself desperately into each new version of "I Love You Because," trying to make it live, trying to make it new, but he saw his chances slipping away as they returned to the beginning of the song over and over again with numbing familiarity . . . .
Finally they decided to take a break — it was late, and everybody had to work the next day. Maybe they ought to just give it up for the night, come back on Tuesday and try it again. Scotty and Bill were sipping Cokes not saying much of anything. Mr Phillips was doing something in the control room, and, as Elvis explained it afterward, "this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around with [it]." It was a song that he had told Johnny Black he had written when he sang it in the Courts, and Johnny believed him. The song was "That's All Right [Mama]," and old blues number by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.
"All of a sudden," said Scotty, "Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open - I don't know, he was either editing some tape, or doing something - and he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.' "
SAM RECOGNISED IT right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup - nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. all But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of cleareyed. unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded — it was "different" it was itself.
They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes — “Simplify. Simplify!” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the dam studio”! He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players the world, technically, but, man, could be slap that thing!" And yet that wasn't it either — it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”
They worked on it over and over, refining the song, but the center never changed. It always opened with the ringing sound of Elvis’ rhythm guitar, up till this moment almost a handicap to be gotten over. Then there was Elvis’ vocal, loose and free and full of confidence, holding it together. And Scotty and Bill just fell in with an easy, swinging gait that was the very epitome of what Sam had dreamt of but never fully imagined. The first time Sam played it back for them, “we couldn’t believe it was us,” Said Bill. “It just sounded sort of raw and ragged,” said Scotty. “We thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so completely different. But it just really flipped Sam — he felt it really had something. We ‘
just sort of shook our heads and said, ‘Well, that’s fine, but good God they'll run us out of town!’ ” And Elvis? Elvis flung himself into the recording process. You only have to listen to the tape to hear the confidence grow. By the last take (only two false starts and one complete alternate take remain), there is a different singer in the studio than the one who started out the evening — nothing had been said, nothing had been articulated, but everything had changed.
Sam Phillips sat in the studio after the session was over and everyone had gone home. It was not unusual for him to hang around until two or three in the morning, sometimes recording, sometimes just about what was going to become of his business and his family in these perilous times, sometimes mulling over his vision of the future. He knew that something was in the wind. He knew from his experience recording blues, and from his fascination with black culture, that there was something intrinsic to the music that could translate, that did translate. “It got so you could sell a half million copies of a rhythm and blues record,” Sam told a Memphis reporter in 1959, reminiscing about his overnight success. “These records appealed to white youngsters just as Uncle Silas [Payne's] songs and stories used to appeal to me. . . . But there was something in many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music. The Southern ones especially felt a resistance that even they probably didn’t quite understand. They liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not. So I got to thinking how many records you could sell if you could find white performers who could play and sing in this same exciting, alive way.”
'Elvis Presley: A Life In Music' By Ernst Jorgensen wrote:Back in the studio, this time with Scotty and Bill, Elvis once again tried everything he could think of. Sam recorded him singing Leon Payne’s country hit, “I Love You Because,” with little success; it wasn’t that Elvis was bad (save for the dismal recitation in the middle), but what was the point in Elvis doing the song when it had already been done better? Then, toward the end of the night, Sam was in the control room doing something when he got caught off guard by what would become the most significant musical moment in his, Elvis’s, Scotty’s, and Bill’s lives. Patience might not have been the frenetically busy Sam Phillips’s most obvious virtue, but it was one of his most important, as the hours he spent with Elvis and the boys were finally proving. In four years of work with local black musicians, he’d found their talent was frequently obscured by a lifetime of insecurity, and waiting for musicians to shake those feelings of “inferiority” and get beyond their natural fear of failure naturally took patience. Sam had always believed in the amateur spirit; to him it was only with fresh, unjaded nonprofessional musicians that truly creative and innovative work could be done. Now—if he could believe the sound coming over the monitor—his patience was finally paying off. After all his failures, Elvis was starting to warm up.
Scotty and Bill weren’t yet comfortable themselves, exactly, but they were falling in right behind Elvis, giving it their best shot, catching up with him as best they could. Clowning around was definitely second nature to both Elvis and Bill, so it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when the two of them started fooling around with a familiar blues song, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.” When the normally reserved Scotty joined in, Sam sensed that the patience part of his job was over. This was something truly unexpected, something original; it had a logic of its own, even if Sam recognized elements that were borrowed from his own recordings of Jackie Brenston or Junior Parker. It was the “something different” he’d been looking for, the beat the music had always been lacking, and without hesitating Sam finally made his move. Stopping the group in midverse, he asked them to start over as he pushed the RECORD button on the tape machine. Relaxed and loose at last, Elvis injected a bright, breezy, more melodic feel into the traditional blues, and with only two guitars plus the slap of Bill’s bass, a sound came through that got Sam’s eyes dancing. Suddenly, they were making a record.
Perhaps they tried other material that night, tried working up other songs in the same vein as “That’s All Right.” They may have done “Tiger Man,” a song Sam had cowritten (under the name Burns) with blues artist Joe Hill Louis and given to Rufus Thomas to record. (We know that in 1970 Elvis kicked off the song with a cryptic introduction: “This was my second record, but not too many people got to hear it.”) It may have been before “I Love You Because” that they spent time on “Harbor Lights,” but they couldn’t get the Hawaiian-inspired pop song right.