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Elvis And Parents

Elvis was we and we him

By Bryce Martin

Born in the Kansas Ozarks (look it up). When knee high to a grasshopper I became exposed to the sayings, taboos, and stories most often associated with Midwest and Southern culture and language. As a young burrhead I witnessed horse-team pulling matches held in pastures with local farmers in faded Big Smith overalls and beet red faces, days long Indian pow-wows, Negro baseball teams, convict rodeos, sorghum cooking, cattail harvesting, most often while licking on a horehound candy stick. I took that background to Bakersfield, California, fitting  right in with the large population of displaced Dust Bowlers with similar backgrounds.

Oh, and my favorite meal is still a bowl or plate of white beans seasoned with ample chunks of hamhocks and sprinkled with sweet onions and cornbread. Yes, dear Lord, that is a meal!

My grandmother Edna May sipped her coffee from a saucer, my grandfather Poppy spit the juice from his Tinsley plugs into a rusted red Folger's Mountain Grown tin while we (back when I was knee high to a grasshopper) listened to the Grand Ole Opry from their big blonde radio on the parlor table that got its juice from a car battery since they had no electricity. I listened enough times to know that Rod Brasfield was from a place in Tennessee called Hohenwald and that biscuits would never be right without the aid of Martha White. That, though, was only partly right. They wouldn't really be right unless they came from Grandma's skilled hands and her special clabbered milk that had sat on a window sill until how many days she deemed it ready. Young, I hadn't given much thought as to how people from where I hailed measured up against the rest of the country. Somehow, though, I had the feeling people in places like California and New York, especially in those places, were more sophisticated than people I knew and grew up with as a poor boy of Tennessee heritage and growing up rural on the Missouri/Kansas state line. I couldn't judge how we fit into the picture, until Elvis came along. You ain't nothin' but a houn' dawg... The hell you beller. Elvis sang and spoke our language. Us white, God-fearing country folks. And people all over liked his ways. We not only liked Elvis, we were Elvis and he was us. For Elvis to be so popular being the same as us meant we had to be right with our ways and ideas, otherwise how could so many people from so many places far and near be so accepting of Elvis? We must have been the envy of the nation in those early Elvis days, weeks and months, especially to those folks in California and New York who were not like us but after taking in a good dose of Elvis and knowing how white, God-fearing and country he was, wished they could be just like us. I was certain those who were not of our sort were cultivating every opportunity to become so. Who wouldn't want to be Elvis, or as much like Elvis as they could reasonably expect to become. Thanks to Elvis, I felt better about myself and about how the world was and how it should be. I felt better just knowing all I'd been taught to believe up to this point had been correct and now I could start concentrating on what I wanted to do in this world and this life. Thanks to Elvis. ...