He was part of the Elvis Presley story: Tommy Van Sandt knew singer before he was The King

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By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus

The day Billy Stallings and Trey Miller showed up on the doorstep of Tommy Van Sandt’s home in Killen, Stallings wasn’t certain they’d be warmly received. Still, he had a lead on a story he wanted answers to, and Van Sandt was the person he needed to see.

“I believe the Lord lines things up, and that day ended up being a banner day,” Stallings recalled. “You know, we showed up unannounced, and sometimes people aren’t that willing to let you come in and chat without knowing anything about you. I’ve found that usually, when you bring up Elvis, people are willing to talk, and that was definitely the case with the Van Sandts.”

What could this 86-year-old man from Killen know about Elvis?

As it turned out, Tommy Van Sandt had several stories about personal encounters with Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s, before the pelvis-shaking Rockabilly singer was dubbed the “King of Rock and Roll.”

Van Sandt was 16 years old, working at his father’s radio station, WJOI in Florence, when he first met Elvis in 1955.

“You know, Sam Phillips and my Daddy were friends,” Van Sandt said of the Florence native and Sun Records founder who is credited for discovering Elvis in 1953.

“Daddy had just started WJOI, and so, Sam called Daddy and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new guy I want you to hear,’ and so Daddy says, send him on,” Van Sandt said. “So, Elvis came with his guitar.”

Van Sandt, who had begun working for his father, Joe T. Van Sandt, at the radio station, was in the studio that day. In fact, it was Tommy Van Sandt who cut the demo of Elvis singing “Shake, Rattle and Roll” to an acetate record that day.

“Just him and his guitar,” Van Sandt said with a smile.

It was a photo of that very record that brought Stallings and Miller to the Van Sandts home nearly 70 years after it was created.

Stallings, known online as “The Spa Guy” for his YouTube channel in which he documents lesser-known stories of Elvis — like this tale of the recording in Florence just as the singer was on the cusp of finding fame — happened to be in the Shoals the day he found out the “Shake, Rattle and Roll” cover existed.

While tracing threads of those Elvis stories have taken Stallings around the world, from Memphis to Germany, where Elvis had been stationed during his time in the Army, Stallings admits he was visiting north Alabama with his wife and friends without any inkling that the trip would lead him on another Elvis chase.

It’s a hobby that Stallings said dates back to about 1976, when he was 13 years old. He’d been invited over to a neighbor’s house and shown a collection of Elvis records. The neighbor also sold a cassette, “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite,” to Stallings for a dollar.

“At that time, I knew who Elvis was. He was a household name,” Stallings said. “I knew that he sang ‘Hound Dog’ and shook his leg. That was what I thought of when I thought of Elvis. Well, I watched that cassette, and then I started reading about him. Then he died in 1977.”

Stallings remembered seeing photos, news articles, magazine features — everywhere he looked, he found Elvis stories.

“I just fell in love with the Elvis story,” Stallings said. “As an adult, I wanted to go to all these places. If I found a photo of Elvis, I wanted to visit the place that it was taken and find out the story behind the photo. There’s always more to the story.”

That statement certainly proved true on Stallings’s recent trip to Florence.

The day he and his wife checked into their Florence hotel, which stands on the site of a former Holiday Inn that once housed the Rolling Stones for several nights while they were recording songs across the river at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Stallings wondered to himself, ‘Did Elvis ever record here?’”

Stallings was visiting with a fellow vlogger, Trey Miller, whose YouTube channel, Globetrotting with Trey, also dives into hidden stories and landmarks with an Elvis connection.

“I mentioned it to Trey, we did some digging, and eventually we found a photo of that demo recorded at WJOI Radio,” Stallings said. “What struck me about the record — and I mention this in my video talking with Tommy — was his name on the record, Van Sandt. I immediately thought of Ronnie Van Zant, you know, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Of course, he spells his name a little differently. I mentioned it to my sidekick, Trey, and we wondered if there was any connection, and we started looking around for details about Tommy.”

That search first led them to a building once owned by Van Sandt in the Seven Points area of Florence. Now a boutique, the owner told Stallings and Miller they could find Van Sandt at a home address in Killen she provided.

Deciding not to give up, the two men drove out past Shoals Creek Bridge and took a chance with a knock on the front door. They found Van Sandt eager to share his story — some details of which even his wife, Diane, hadn’t heard until he began to retell them to the camera.

“Elvis came here for three shows,” Van Sandt said. “The first show, he was a backup for Web Pierce.”

The show, Tommy’s Turntable, was one Van Sandt got started at WJOI when he was just a teen. He hosted the show every Saturday morning from 10 to noon.

“Elvis showed up with his guitar, and you know, brought me the record,” Van Sandt said. “I played it, and everybody just loved it. I interviewed him. We talked on air and whatever, and I said, ‘Do you want to go to lunch?’”

As Van Sandt recalls the story, he and Elvis had just enough money between the two of them to “pay for a bean pot.”

“So, we did,” Van Sandt said with a laugh. “We went up to Ramon’s Restaurant. He said, ‘I’ve got to keep a dollar for gas to go back to Memphis. He needed $1 to get from here to Memphis.”

The following Saturday, Elvis returned to play another show at WJOI. This time, Van Sandt said, several young girls from Coffee High School turned up to dance in the studio while he was there.

Elvis returned one more time and played with hit singers who’d already found fame, like Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins.

“But he was the number one,” Van Sandt recalled. “Right after that, shooting off like a rocket he went off.”

In November of that year, Elvis’s contract with Sun Records was sold to RCA for an unprecedented $35,000 plus a $5,000 bonus for the singer. Sometime after the sale, Elvis sent Van Sandt a Christmas card, which was the last direct correspondence the Florence radio host would have with “The King.”

“I never knew Elvis would become Elvis,” Van Sandt said with glistening eyes. He still smiles when he and his wife share what happened to the Christmas card.

“He gave it away trying to impress a girl,” Diane Van Sandt said, laughing and turning to her husband, “I said, ‘You fool!’”

Both the Van Sandts said they were delighted with the surprise visit from Stallings and Miller, and Tommy was grateful they seemed so interested in his story.

“That’s why I do what I do,” Stallings said. “We find out things you’d never know — stories about people who were part of the Elvis story. It just feels great to share some of this history, like what we found talking with Tommy. It was just an amazing gift for us to talk to him.”

WANT TO WATCH?

Billy Stallings, known on YouTube as the Spa Guy, recorded a series of videos around the Shoals, uncovering some local history involving Elvis Presley, including a recent interview with Tommy Van Sandt, who recorded Elvis in Florence in 1955.