Bobbie Moore, (wife of Scotty Moore):
"It was on a Sunday afternoon in July. We were expecting him I didn't know his name, Scotty had told me, but I had forgotten. He knocked on the door and I went to the door. He was standing there, with a guitar in his hand, pink slacks, and didn't know if this was the right place. Didn't tell me his name. I assumed it was him, so I invited him in. Scotty came in and they started talking for a while. So Scotty sent me up to Bill's house… and (then) we all sat down and listened. He was doing a lot of slow songs; he wasn't doing anything fast, like what he recorded. He had a good voice and seems like he did a lot of songs like "I Love You Because", and country songs. It seemed a bit funny, with his ducktail and long hair, doing country music more like a rock star to begin with. Elvis left, and Scotty and Bill discussed, and Bill turned to Scotty and looked at him kinda funny, `What do you think of him?' Scotty said, `Well he's got a good voice, good singer, if we can find the right material.'"
'Last Train To Memphis' by Peter Guralnick wrote:On Sunday, July 4, Elvis showed up at Scotty's house on Belz in his old Lincoln. He was wearing a black shirt, pink pants with a black stripe, white shoes, and a greasy ducktail, and asked "Is this the right place?" when Scotty's wife, Bobbie, answered the door. Bobbie asked him to have a seat and went to get Scotty. "I said, "That boy is here." He said, "'What boy?' I said, 'I can't remember his name, it's the one you're supposed to see today.' Scotty asked me to go down to Bill's house and see if Bill would come and practice with them - Bill's bass was already in our apartment, because Bill and Evelyn had to kids, and there was more room there."
After a few minutes of awkward small talk, bill showed up and they got down to business. Elvis hunched over his guitar and mumbled something about not really knowing what to play, then launched into disconnected fragments, seemingly, of every song he knew. Scotty and Bill fell in behind him on numbers like Billy Ekstine's "I Apologise"; the Ink Spots' "If I Didn't Care"; "Tomorrow Night"; Eddy Arnold's latest hit, "I Really Don't Want To Know"; Hank snow's "I Don't Hurt Anymore"; and a Dean Martin - styled version of Jo Staford's "You Belong To Me." They were all ballads, all sung in a yearning, quavery tenor that didn't seem ready to settle anywhere soon and accompanied by the most rudimentary strummed guitar. At some point Bill flopped down on the sofa, and there was some talk about how Elvis lived on Alabama, just across from Bill's mother, and how
Elvis knew Bill's brother Johnny. Bill, the most affable man in the world and the clown of the Starlite Wranglers ("He never met a stranger," Scotty has said in seeking to describe him), said he had heard from Johnny just the other day, Johnny had been in Corpus Christi since he got laid off from Firestone. They talked a little about the football games down at the Triangle, and Bill said it was funny they had never formally met before, but of course, he had left home before the Presleys moved into the Courts, he had gone into the army at eighteen, and when he got out in 1946 he was already married. There were a lot of musicians in Memphis, and you couldn't know them all - Elvis didn't happen to know a guitar player named Luther Perkins who lived just around the corner, did he? Elvis met all of Bill's attempts at conversation with perfunctory nods and stammered little asides of agreement that you could barely make out - he was polite enough, but it was almost as if he was filled with a need to say something he couldn't find proper expression, and he couldn't stop fidgeting. "He was as green as a gourd," Scotty would recall, with amusement, as his reaction at the time.
When Bobbie came back with Evelyn and Bill's sister, Mary Ann, they were still playing, but "all of a sudden there was a crowd, we probably scared Elvis," said Bobbie. "It was almost all slow ballads. 'I Love You Because' is the one that I remember." Eventually Elvis left, trailing clouds of oily smoke behind him in the humpbacked old Lincoln. "What'd you think?" Scotty asked, hoping that Bill might have seen something in the boy that he didn't. "Well, he didn't impress me too damn much," said Bill. "Snotty-nosed kid coming in here with those wild clothes and everything." But what about his singing" Scotty asked, almost desperately - he wanted the kid to be good for reasons he didn't even care to examine. "Well, it was all right, nothing out of the ordinary -
I mean, the cat can sing..."
That was Scotty's opinion, to. It was all right, nothing special - he couldn't see where the boy had added all that much to the songs that he had sung; Scotty didn't think he was going to make the world forget about Eddy Arnold or Hank Snow. But he called Sam anyway, what else was he going to do after making such a fuss about meeting the kid? What did you think? Sam asked.
"I said, 'He didn't really knock me out. I said, 'The boy's got a good voice.' I told him a lot of the songs he sang. Sam said, "Well, I think I'll call him, get him to come down to the studio tomorrow, we'' just set up an audition and see what he sounds like coming back off of tape.' I said,'shall we bring the whole band?' and he said, 'Naw, just you and Bill come over, just something for a little rhythm. No use making a big deal about it.'"