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his friends. She was allowed to stay only after a tearful appeal by Dodger.)
    Dodger had so many stories to tell about Elvis’ singing as a child. She told us, “We always took Elvis to church with us and he would sing and clap his little hands and shout ‘hallelujah.’ I can still see him getting so excited when the singing would start that he would run down to the front of the church near the choir and just go crazy with excitement! He would stand there, facing the audience, and swing back and forth to the beat of the music, totally oblivious to everyone’s smiling stares.” She went on, “He got his singing naturally. Both Gladys and Vernon had beautiful singing voices. They were both very musically talented in their own rights. Gladys had also been an excellent dancer in her younger days, and I’m sure that had something to do with the way Elvis learned to move.”
    I learned, from listening to Dodger, that Gladys had been an excellent cook. She proudly explained that she had personally helped teach Gladys how to cook after Gladys and Vernon got married.
    Dodger went on to explain that she herself had been forced to learn to cook at a very young age because her family had been so poor and she had had to earn money for the family by cooking for people in the neighborhood who were sick and could not cook for themselves. I remember her telling me one morning, “I cooked for black and white folks alike, it didn’t matter. When you’re poor, like we were, we all tried to help each other. I had to learn to cook just so we could survive.”
    Dodger told me about the first time she tried to cook. She said it was when she was seven or eight years old. She explained to me that her mother had gone somewhere to visit and that she decided she would surprise her mother by making some cornbread for her when she returned home.
    She told me, “I did not know how to fix it, but I remembered my mother mixing things together, so I mixed corn meal and water together and cooked it. When momma got home, I told her, ‘I’ve fixed some cornbread for you.’ Momma took a bite of it and politely said, ‘This is really good, but next time try putting some lard and flour in it.’”
    Grandma said, “After that, she decided it was time to teach me how to cook. She would stand me up on a wooden box next to the stove and let me watch her as she fixed meals for the family. She cooked in what I call the old southern style, which means ‘low and slow’. I taught that method to Gladys, and that’s the style of cooking little Elvis grew up on. He loved that style of cooking up to the day he died.”
    Dodger taught me, over the years I was at Graceland, how to cook certain foods. She taught me how to cook things like fried green tomatoes, fried lettuce, old fashioned tomato soup, and ham gravy. She insisted on eating ham hocks only when they were cold. Pork, she taught me, was only good when it was cooked long and slow, until it was nice and tender.
    On another occasion, she related to me how she had experienced different food cravings with each of her children while pregnant. We were sitting around the kitchen counter having coffee one morning when she told me about it.
    “When I was pregnant with Vernon,” she told me, “I had a craving for snuff. With Gladys, (one of her daughters) it was fish, while Vester made me crave whiskey.” She then laughed as she finished with Nash. “She made me crave dirt!”
    She went on to say, “Vernon and Delta were more like their daddy, Jessie, and Vester, Gladys and Nash took more after me.”
    She said, “My mother would always call on me to do things, because I found it easy to catch on to things. I would always get up first in the morning and get the fire going in the stove. Then we all had to get up and help saw wood, feed and milk the cows, gather eggs, and feed the chickens. It was a tough life back then growing up. The problem with today’s kids is that they have it too easy.”
    I would