In the autumn of 1970, a 24year-old musician named Ray Hollis was traveling on a Greyhound bus from Memphis to Nashville with a broken guitar. The guitar was a 1962 Martin D18. The headstock had cracked when the bus driver loaded it roughly into the luggage compartment at the Memphis terminal. Ry had watched it happen and said nothing because the driver was bigger than him and the bus was leaving and he had no money for a replacement.
He sat in his seat for the 6-hour journey with the guitar case across his knees and the specific silence of a person who has just watched something important break and cannot afford to fix it. What happened next involved Elvis Presley, a service stop at a gas station outside of Jackson, Tennessee, a conversation that lasted 20 minutes, and a decision that Ray Hollis did not fully understand until he received a phone call 40 years later. 40 years.
Ray Hollis had grown up in Memphis. He was the third of five children in a family that had come north from Mississippi in the early 1950s as part of the great migration. The decadesl long movement of black Americans from the rural south toward the cities of the north and the urban south in search of work and dignity and the possibility of a life that was not constrained by the specific brutality of Jim Crow.
His father worked at a meatacking plant. His mother cleaned offices downtown. Ry grew up in the Foothomes housing project in South Memphis in the specific geography of a city that was divided more sharply than most by lines that had no signs but that everyone understood. He had taught himself guitar at 14 by listening to records, blues primarily, the music that had come up from the Delta into Memphis, and had become in the hands of the people who lived in his neighborhood, something that could be performed on street corners and in church basement and at the small clubs that lined Beiel Street. He was good, genuinely good, the kind of good that people who heard him mentioned to other people. At 24, he had made a decision. Nashville. He was going to Nashville to try to get
session work. He had a name, one name, given to him by a musician who had worked sessions and who had said that this particular contractor hired people who could play and didn’t ask questions about where they’d come from. He had $40. He had a guitar with a cracked headstock. He had nothing else. The bus stopped at a gas station outside of Jackson, Tennessee for a driver change and a 15-minute break.
Passengers filed off to use the restrooms and buy coffee from the vending machine inside. Ry stayed on the bus for a moment, then changed his mind and got off. He stood in the parking lot with his guitar case. The night air was cold and clear. A car pulled into the gas station. A large car, a Lincoln Continental, dark blue with Tennessee plates.
Two men got out. One went inside. The other stood by the car. Ry didn’t recognize him immediately. It was dark. The man was wearing civilian clothes, plain trousers, a jacket. He was looking at Rey with the uncomplicated interest of someone who has nothing better to do for 15 minutes. That a guitar case.
The man said. Ry said it was. Where are you headed? Nashville, Ry said. What’s in Nashville? Ry told him about the session work, about the contractor, about the fact that he could play and needed someone to give him a chance to prove it. The man nodded. Can I see it? He said, “The guitar.” Ry opened the case.
In the parking lot light, the cracked headstock was visible. The man looked at it for a moment. Then he looked at Ry. How’d it break? bus driver,” Ry said. The man reached into the guitar case and gently lifted the guitar out. He turned it over. He ran his thumb along the crack in the headstock with the specific attention of someone who understands what they are looking at.
“This is a good guitar,” the man said. “This can be fixed.” He handed it back. “What’s your name?” the man asked. Ry told him, “Play something,” the man said. Ry looked at him. It was a gas station parking lot. It was 10:30 at night. His guitar had a cracked headstock. He played something, a blues figure, something he’d been working on for months, a finger-picking pattern built around a minor 7th that had a particular quality of questioning in it, like a conversation that keeps circling back to the same unresolved point. He played for about 2 minutes in the cold parking lot under the fluorescent light of the gas station canopy with a bus full of people visible
through the windows, drinking coffee and waiting to leave. When he stopped, the man was quiet for a moment. You’re good, the man said. You already know that Nashville is going to give you a hard time. He said, not because of the playing, because of other things. You know what I mean? Rey knew what he meant.
But you go anyway, the man said. And you keep going because what you’ve got doesn’t go away just because someone makes it hard. The bus driver appeared at the door of the gas station. 2 minutes, he called. Ray closed the guitar case. He thanked the man. He picked up the case and walked back to the bus. He did not ask the man’s name.
It was dark. It was a gas station. In his experience, men in parking lots at 10:30 at night who asked to hear you play were a specific kind of person. Music people, the kind who were everywhere in Tennessee, and you didn’t always know their names. He got on the bus. He looked out the window as it pulled out of the parking lot.
The Lincoln Continental was still there. The man was watching the bus leave. 3 days after Ray arrived in Nashville, he was given a session, then another, then another. He worked sessions in Nashville for 22 years. He played on recordings that reached number one on multiple charts. He played on recordings that won Grammy awards.
He played on recordings that are considered by music historians who track these things among the finest Nashville session work of the 1970s and 1980s. He had the guitar repaired the week he arrived in Nashville. He played it for 20 years. He did not know who the man at the gas station had been.
He had thought about it occasionally over the years. the Lincoln, the Tennessee plates, the way the man had handled the guitar with the ease of someone who had spent his life around instruments, the specific things he had said, not because of the playing, because of other things. You know what I mean? He had a theory. He didn’t share it.
It seemed too large, too unlikely, the kind of thing that sounds delusional when you say it out loud. In 2010, Ray Hollis received a phone call. It was from a researcher working on a comprehensive biography of Elvis Presley. The researcher had been interviewing people who had encountered Elvis during his touring years.
Not the famous encounters, not the documented ones, but the small unrecorded moments. The researcher had come across a reference in the travel log of Elvis’s road manager from the fall of 1970. A brief notation, a gas station stop outside Jackson, Tennessee. Elvis talking to a young musician on a Greyhound bus. The researcher had a date and a description.
A young black man with a guitar case, a broken guitar, a conversation of about 20 minutes. Ray Hollis sat with his phone in his hand for a long time. After that call, he thought about the parking lot, the cold air, the fluorescent light. The man who had lifted the guitar out of the case with the ease of someone who understood it.
The man who had said, “What you’ve got doesn’t go away just because someone makes it hard.” In 2011, Ray Hollis gave an interview to the same researcher. He described the conversation in detail. He said he had played a blues figure in a gas station parking lot at 10:30 at night. He said the man had listened for the full 2 minutes without moving.
He said he had always known on some level who it was. He had just not been ready to say it because saying it meant accepting that Elvis Presley had stood in a parking lot in Jackson, Tennessee, and listened to an unknown 24year-old play blues guitar and told him to keep going and that the keeping going had worked.
Ray Hollis retired from session work in 1994. He teaches guitar in Memphis. He still has the Martin D18 with the repaired headstock. He plays it every day. He was asked in the 2011 interview what he would say to Elvis if he could. He was quiet for a long moment. I’d say he was right, Ry said. It didn’t go away, and I kept going.
The 20 minutes in a gas station parking lot in the fall of 1970 lasted 40 years and then
