The man who controlled the biggest career in music history did not come from Hollywood, or Nashville, or any record company. He came from a traveling carnival — and the way he made his living before Elvis Presley is so outrageous that people assume it’s a joke. It isn’t. Colonel Tom Parker caught ordinary brown sparrows, painted them yellow, and sold them to the public as canaries.
That was one of his gentler schemes. His most famous act was billed as “Colonel Tom Parker and His Amazing Dancing Chickens.” He would put live chickens into an enclosure with a floor of straw or sawdust — and hidden underneath it, a hot plate. Then he’d start the music. As the metal heated up, the birds began hopping frantically from foot to foot to avoid burning themselves, and the paying crowd watched what looked for all the world like poultry dancing to a tune. The song, by several accounts, was “Turkey in the Straw.”
The carnival world he came from ran on a simple idea. There are “carnies” — the insiders — and there are “marks,” the people who hand over their money. Parker learned early that the product barely mattered. What mattered was the pitch. He also worked a palm-reading booth, and reportedly sold hot dogs with no sausage in the middle, on the reasonable assumption that a customer wouldn’t chase him down over a bun.
Here’s The Truth About Elvis Presley’s Manager
And this is where it stops being funny. One of his reported schemes was to read the obituaries, find recently widowed women, and turn up at their front doors claiming their late husband had ordered an expensive inscribed Bible as a final gift — then charge an inflated price. Grieving women paid, moved by a gesture that had never happened.
Almost nothing he said about himself was true either. He wasn’t a colonel — the title was honorary, handed to him in 1948 by the Governor of Louisiana. He wasn’t called Tom Parker. And he wasn’t American. He was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Breda, in the Netherlands, and had come to the United States without papers. Before the carnivals he’d had a spell in the Army that ended badly, and he worked as a dog catcher in Tampa and an elephant groomer for a circus. He also tried and failed to start a pet cemetery and a pony circus.
Then in 1955 he met a young singer from Memphis, and every one of those carnival instincts turned out to be worth a fortune. Parker didn’t sell Elvis’s music. He sold Elvis — plastering the country in bracelets, lipstick, sneakers, record players and even teddy bear perfume, in what’s often described as one of the first marketing campaigns aimed squarely at teenagers.
He also took 50 percent of everything Elvis earned, an unheard-of cut. He talked amiably about his old carny days for the rest of his life; he seemed to be proud of them. And there’s a bitter little joke that Elvis fans have been repeating ever since the truth came out: for over twenty years, the man with the hot plate had one more dancing chicken — and it was the King of Rock and Roll.