given that his friend Ed Leek had the disc all those decades the story of making a recording for Gladys needs to be put to rest
https://recordcollectormag.com/articles ... al-of-1953
The death of Captain Edwin S
Leek Junior, on 4 June 2010,
made the obituary column of a
newspaper in Florida, USA,
but failed to make an impact elsewhere
in the media.
Nevertheless – for good reason –
news of Leek’s death is now circulating
on the internet. Ed Leek, as he was
known to his friends, played a very
important part in the early history of
Elvis Presley’s astounding career in
popular music.
According to Ed, it was he who gave the shy and
evasive Elvis four dollars to go and record two songs
at the Memphis Recording Service, later to become
world famous as Sun Studios. Ed’s idea was to get
the record played on radio shows, so Elvis’ voice
would be heard by the general public on the
Tennessee airwaves.
Legend has it that, eventually, Elvis acquiesced to
Ed’s taunting and, still toting his first guitar,
hesitantly entered the Memphis Recording Service
one day in August 1953. The studios were – and are
– a far cry RCA’s. They’re surprisingly small, barely
furnished and claustrophobic in the ferocious
Memphis heat.
Marion Keisker, Sam Phillip’s assistant, was on
hand to witness Elvis’ far from confident entrance.
To put the 18-year-old at his ease, Marion engaged
Elvis in conversation, asking him what kind of songs
he sang.
“All kinds”, was his reply.
“Well, whom do you sound like?” Marion
tried to probe.
“I don’t sound like nobody”, was Elvis’
prophetic answer.
Elvis then recorded two sentimental slow ballads
which had been hits in the 40s: My Happiness and
That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.
Afterwards, Marion made a note of his name
and telephone number and added, “Good ballad
singer.” By the time she turned, Elvis had already
left the building.
In order to hear his own voice on the recording,
Elvis had to play it at his friends’ homes, as the
Presleys were too impoverished to possess a record
player in those days.
On the other hand, Ed Leek’s background was
middle class. His parents and grandparents were
making a good living as medical doctors and they
owned a very modern phonograph. Ed’s
Maurice Colgan mourns the
passing of Ed Leek, the man
who helped Elvis make his
very first recording
grandmother was eager to hear Elvis sing, marking
the beginning of this amazing story:
For reasons unknown, Elvis left the acetate
behind at Ed Leek’s grandparent’s home.
Though friends were appreciative, was Elvis
himself dissatisfied with his first attempts? All the
promise was there – you can hear it. But Presley was
a very discerning listener and may not have been that
keen; especially on That’s When Your Heartaches
Begin, which ends quite abruptly.
It’s often been said that Elvis undervalued his
own extraordinary and versatile vocal ability. Yet a
great many musicologists still marvel at his
phenomenal range. Elvis could sing up a storm or
calm the proverbial troubled waters with his
amazing voice.
In his book Dead Elvis, American musicologist
Greil Marcus described My Happiness’ recording:
The performance is the purest distillation of devotion
imaginable; it is almost impossible to believe it is not
meant for a single, beloved listener, very hard to hear it
as part of a career, or even as a wish for one.
Yet at the same time the piece is intensely crafted,
careful and precise, fully-realised 19th-century parlour
music, a work of art. The last, suspended moment, one
can think, before the beginning of the present age.
The teenager slides his voice over the sentimental
lyric, slips down below the quiet melody, then almost
imperceptibly rises beyond it, and the listener to
whom the music must have been addressed vanishes,
in her place a constructed, willed version of a single,
unique individual.
“Who do you sing like?” Marion Keisker asked Elvis
that day. “I don’t sing like nobody,” he said, and the
recording proves he was already right.
According to the far too often repeated
legend, the My Happiness disc was supposedly
made as a birthday gift for Elvis’ mother
Gladys. But Gladys’ birthday was three months
earlier, so it is far more likely that Elvis actually
made the record to hear his own recorded voice
and possibly get it played on the Memphis
airwaves. That was not to be. Not in 1953
anyway.
Nevertheless, just a year later, accompanied by
guitarist Scotty Moore and Bill Black on Bass, Elvis
Presley hit the airwaves big-time with the release of
That’s Alright, Mama and Blue Moon Of Kentucky,
his first commercial single.
Ed Leek was at hand to witness Elvis see his first
Sun Studio record slip in large numbers from the
manufacturer’s machines.
“He was like a kid at Christmas”, Ed later
recalled. Ed had the foresight to exclaim to Elvis: “You’re on your way now, kid!” Ed then grabbed
one of the discs and Elvis signed it: “To a good Pal,
Elvis Presley.” It was a keeper!
Soon after, Ed and Elvis went their separate ways,
only meeting briefly a few years later in Chicago,
when Ed asked, “Elvis what will I do with the My
Happiness acetate? It’s got to be worth money now.”
“You keep it,” his friend replied, inidicative of the
kind of generous man Presley was.
Ed leek took up his career as a pilot with TWA
and American Airlines and married Susan, a girl he
met in Florida. Elvis became the world’s most
famous vocalist. Decades went by.
During the 50s, 60s and 70s, the vast majority of
Elvis Presley fans knew the story of the My
Happiness acetate because it had been repeated in
just about every article and biography about Elvis of
any significance since 1956.
Yet not one original Elvis fan, including John
Lennon and this author, had ever heard My
Happiness sung by Elvis. It was, to all intents and
purposes, lost to us forever. We knew the song from
other artists such as Connie Francis, and heard how
good it was but, for decades, Elvis’ version just had
to be imagined.
None of us would have heard it if Ed Leek had
not retired and approached RCA about finally
releasing the legendary song in August 1988.
Newspapers at the time reported how Ed had
rediscovered the disc that had been stored away in
a trunk for decades and thought it high time the
whole world heard this fascinating and historic
recording by a very young Elvis Presley.
Ed, along with witness James Bobbit, flew to
Memphis and met Marion Keisker in her
Memphis home, where she verified the acetate
disc Ed possessed was indeed the original 1953
recording. An affidavit was signed by them all.
The press began to report large figures ranging
from $500,000 and up to a million exhanging
hands for the rights to release the songs. It’s not
been established how much Ed received, but one
report in the January 1989 DISCoveries
publication says it was “beyond his wildest
dreams”.
At last, in 1989, Elvis’ recording of My
Happiness was released on the Great Performances
collections on Video, CD and cassette sets.
That ‘s when this author first heard the song,
watching the video without having read the
sleevenotes. What a moment! Millions of Elvis
fans everywhere must have been astonished on
hearing Presley’s plaintive, wavering and
uncertain voice on this historic
1953 attempt to capture the
ballad in his own remarkable
way.
For reasons still unknown,
the 1953 version of That’s
When Your Heartaches Begin
wasn’t included in the collections, though perhaps
it’s because the later 1957 commercial version is
such an improvement on Elvis’s faltering 1953
attempt. Nevertheless, we can all access the
original now thanks to modern technology.
Before Ed Leek died he had attempted to find the
right buyer for the My Happiness acetate. Irish
friends of his had tried to help him, but they had no
experience in getting the media to run the story.
Ed believed the disc should be in an Elvis
museum for all to see. He knew it was very
important to the Presley story, and a very valuable
artefact in its own right.
That’s where this writer comes into the story.
Late in 2008, Dennis Duggan, a Boeing engineer
based in Seattle, and his brother Anthony Duggan
(an Elvis fan in County Cork, Ireland who had
befriended Ed Leek, after hearing him on the
national Irish radio service RTE back in 1988)
emailed me requesting help with the media.
The Duggan brothers had read and heard about
my success in kickstarting the Elvis Festival in Elvis’s
birthplace, Tupelo Mississippi and then getting a
life-sized bronze statue of Elvis as a boy
commissioned by Henry Dodge of the Elvis Presley
Foundation there.
It had taken just one letter from me, proposing
that a statue of Elvis as a boy might be good for the
city’s tourism. I’d sent it to the imaginative Mayor
of Tupelo, Mississippi, Larry K Otis. The Mayor
received my letter on Elvis’ birthday, 8 January
2001. A statue of “Elvis at 13” by the gifted
sculptor Michiel Van der Sommen was unveiled on
8 January 2002. The story appeared in newspapers
at the time in America and around the world.
Michiel, a Dutchman, lives in Greensboro, North
Carolina. He spent a week here in Ireland as our
guest in June 2003. Later that year, after an
invitation from the then-Mayor of Tupelo, we met
Michiel again, close to his artistic bronze
representation of the young Elvis. The statue stands
near his modest birthplace, a far cry from
Graceland, 90 miles to the north in Memphis.
Before contacting the media about Ed Leek, late
in 2008, I first listened to his story about his
friendship with Elvis from a tape he had sent to
Anthony Duggan. The story Ed told on the tape
was music to my ears, so I consequently telephoned
him, then living in Avon Park Florida with Susan.
After verifying the details of his Elvis story and
chatting about this and that, we exchanged emails
and then Ed sent me a pile of newspaper cuttings
and photos of the whole My Happiness saga.
Since that first telephone call, I must have
made maybe two dozen more to Ed over the
past 18 months, as he valiantly fought cancer.
Ed was optimistic to the end and eager to see
the acetate find the best of homes.
It’s a mystery to Elvis fans as to why
Graceland, EPE, the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of
Fame and other organisations have so far not
responded to the story. Surely the acetate disc
is an item they would be only too happy to
acquire? In August 1988 the American
Goldmine magazine first revealed that the My
Happiness acetate had been discovered, and
again, in January 2009, that it was up for sale.
The disc has been specutively valued at up to
200,000 dollars. Ed tended to exaggerate its
value, but we all know the market rules. One
thing that’s certain is that it’s a priceless part of
the history of popular music – and rock’n’roll
in particular. C’mon Elvis fan, Sir Paul
McCartney – we know you’re drooling!
A footnote to the My Happiness story is that Elvis
never again recorded the song or even performed it at
any of his concerts.