In January 1954, a fifteen-year-old girl at a church function in Memphis spotted a boy she couldn’t stop looking at. He was nineteen, shy to the point of silence, and had a strange haircut and clothes nobody else in the congregation would have dared to wear. Her name was Dixie Locke. His name was Elvis Presley — and at that moment he was nobody—no record deal. No fans. No money. He drove a truck for an electrical company. What she fell for was a boy, not a star, and that’s exactly what makes her story different from every other one you’ve heard.
The church was the First Assembly of God in Memphis, and Elvis went there for one reason: gospel music. The famous Blackwood Brothers quartet sang there, and Elvis worshipped them. Dixie noticed him, and quickly worked out that he was far too shy ever to come and talk to her. So she did something clever. She stood where he could hear her and loudly made plans with her friends to go roller skating that Saturday night at the Rainbow Rollerdrome.
He turned up. That was the beginning. Her description of him from those days is the best thing anyone has ever said about the young Elvis Presley: “I thought he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen. He was a very shy person, but when he started singing, he put so much into putting the music across that he kind of lost himself. He threw himself into it completely.”
Dixie Locke Emmons, Elvis’ girlfriend in the early stages of his career
They saw each other three or four times a week. And here’s what makes Dixie unique among all the women in his life: she was there when it happened. She was dating Elvis in the summer of 1954, when he walked into Sun Studio and accidentally recorded “That’s All Right” during a coffee break. She wasn’t dating a famous man. She was dating a boy who suddenly, bewilderingly, started being played on the radio. Funnily enough, she wasn’t even a rock and roll fan — her favorite singers were Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. As she pointed out years later, there was no such thing as rock and roll at the time.
His parents adored her. Gladys Presley grew genuinely close to Dixie, who spent a lot of time at the house when Elvis was away. Vernon Presley said it out loud years afterward: “Gladys and I thought maybe they would get married, because Dixie was a mighty likable girl, and Elvis thought a lot of her.” The two of them had actually talked about marrying after her high school graduation.
Then fame arrived and pulled them apart. He was on the road constantly. He was possessive about what she did while he was gone. They argued, broke up, got back together, and finally drifted apart for good around 1955. Dixie has always refused to describe it as a breakup: “I cannot look back and remember Elvis and I ever specifically breaking up, because we didn’t.” Whatever came next, she said, they knew in their hearts they were tied to each other.
There’s one last scene, and it’s the one that stays with you. The final time Dixie saw Elvis was the day after his mother’s funeral in 1958 — she went to Graceland to sit with him while he grieved for Gladys.
Decades later she told the whole story to biographer Peter Guralnick, who called it one of the most emotional interviews he had ever done, and said afterward that the two of them walked away from that church basement almost shaken by it. In 2021, Dixie finally wrote her own book about it. The girl who made sure a shy truck driver overheard her roller skating plans had held that story for sixty-seven years.