A new shopping center opened and Elvis performed at the Katz Drug Store Lamar-Airways Shopping Center in Memphis to a large crowd of teenagers.
They did it on a makeshift stage built on a truck in the center’s large parking lot, and it was performed by Elvis’s former Humes High School classmate, George Klein.
Still relatively unknown outside of Memphis, the Memphis Press-Scimitar misspelled Elvis’ name again, this time with two S’s in Presley.
Johnny Cash was in the audience and after the show he met Elvis for the first time.
Opal Walker was a young woman from Memphis at the time who was at the show that night and took three photographs that have since been reprinted in countless books and articles.
They are the only known photos of the appearance there, although none show Elvis’s actual performance in which he sang his only released single to date: “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
Johnny Cash, fresh out of the Air Force, married and moved to Memphis, was also in the audience that night.
In an autobiography he wrote: “…the first time I saw Elvis, I saw him singing from a flatbed truck at the opening of a Katz Pharmacy on Lamar Avenue, two or three hundred people, mostly teenagers, had come out to see him.” .
With only one single under his belt, he sang those two songs over and over again.
That’s the first time I met him. Vivian and I approached him after the show and he invited us to his next date at Eagle’s Nest.”
Source: Daily Elvis
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Photos: Opal Walker/Scotty Moore
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