Dewey Phillips At The Chisca

The Hotel Chisca, nine stories of red brick at South Main and Linden, now Dr. M.L. King Jr. Avenue, housed the radio studio where Memphis first heard Elvis Presley. Station WHBQ moved to the hotel's mezzanine in 1953, bringing Dewey Phillips and his show Red, Hot and Blue, on the air since late 1949. Phillips, no relation to Sam, was a white disc jockey from Crump, Tennessee, who had come from the record counter at W.T. Grant and played rhythm and blues at night to an audience of both races, in a city that kept nearly everything else apart. Days after the session of July 5, 1954, Sam Phillips brought him an acetate of That's All Right. Dewey played it, the telephones lit up, and he played it again. Gladys Presley said her son had set the radio and gone to the movies, where he was found at the Suzore No. 2 and brought downtown. Dewey sat him in front of a microphone and asked where he went to school. Elvis said Humes, which told listeners something the record had not: Humes was a white school, and many had assumed he was Black. When Elvis asked when the interview would start, Dewey told him the microphone had been open the whole time. About 6,000 local orders were in hand before the record was pressed. Phillips was fired in 1958 and died in 1968 at 42. The hotel closed in the early 1970s, served as the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ until the 1990s, stood empty and reopened in 2015 as The Chisca on Main, with 161 apartments.