Marion Keisker's Front Desk

Marion Keisker kept the front room of the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue, the small studio Sam Phillips opened in January 1950. She was his only assistant at the start, and already a known Memphis radio voice, first on WREC as a child and back there from about 1946. In the summer of 1953 an eighteen-year-old just out of Humes High School came in and paid $3.98 to cut an acetate of two ballads. As Keisker later told it, she asked who he sounded like and he said he didn't sound like nobody. She said Phillips was out, that she ran the session herself, and that she started a tape partway through so her boss could hear the boy. By her account she also kept a note on him: good ballad singer, hold. Who deserves the credit is one of the longest arguments in Memphis music. Phillips said little in public for decades, and told Rolling Stone in 1986 that he would like to credit Marion, but that it was simply him. Peter Guralnick, in his 2016 biography of Phillips, could find no one she had recorded. Those he asked all agreed she could have run the lathe and probably did, but none could recall seeing her do it. Keisker held to her account until her death in 1989. The telephone call is better attested. In late June 1954, after Phillips heard a demo of a ballad called Without You, Keisker called Elvis and asked him to come back. She left Sun in 1957, joined the Air Force as a captain and ran the Armed Forces television station at Ramstein in Germany. The 1953 acetate sold in January 2015 to Jack White for about $300,000.