Letter from the editor
By Dan Mahoney
Reciprocity.
In December 1956, at Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were hanging out together playing music. They were young and at various stages of (super)stardom except for Jerry Lee Lewis, who was unknown but who had more than enough ego to match the other musicians. About an hour into this jam session, Sam Philips, head of Sun Studios, hit the record button on what came to be known as the Million Dollar Quartet session. Between one of the songs, Presley talks about seeing a young man performing Don't Be Cruel in Las Vegas—a young, unknown Jackie Wilson—and being blown away by the performance. One thing that struck Presley was the way Wilson intoned the word telephone in the line, If you can't come around, at least please telephone... Presley tells the other musicians that he liked Wilson's version of the song more than his own.
You can see the influence Wilson's performance had on Presley if you google "Elvis on Ed Sullivan 1957" and watch Presley sing Don't Be Cruel one month later. Presley uses Wilson's stylized telephone and the smile that brightens his face afterward is unmissable. I love that. The smile of a young Elvis Presley directed to a young Jackie Wilson coming to us via YouTube in 2025 when the world feels as upside down as it may have felt in 1956 when the struggle for Civil Rights was ongoing, and war was raging in the Middle East, simmering in Vietnam. I'm not saying that a smile from Elvis Presley is enough to heal the world, but it is a reminder that—upside down or not—life moves on and we move on with it.
For me the act of teaching carries with it the utopian idea that someday, 15 or 20 years after being at COA, a student will remember the class when we discussed a poem by Jane Mead about travelling alongside a truck loaded with chickens in cages, and how that poem was horrifying and miraculous and meant something. Or maybe a student years after graduating will think of herring gulls or velvet worms or palm-wine music or schist... But the idea that people will still be thinking and remembering and building new connections to old knowledge is a boon to me because it's why each of us made the choice to come to COA. We wanted to weave webs of meaning. We wanted to build the reciprocal.
Neither Presley nor Wilson would make it out of their 40s, but we have the music and the performances. If you have not communed with the voice and music of Jackie Wilson in a while, I suggest you find some speakers and turn (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher up as loud as you can stand. Swim in that wall of sound. Wrap yourself in that voice. This is a gift!
Dan
