Mystery Train by Little Junior Parker

From The Independent archive: Robert Webb on ‘Mystery Train’ by Little Junior Parker

Elvis’s inspiration: Little Junior Parker (Redferns via Getty)

This was the song that brought Elvis Presley to Sun records, his first label. In 1953, Elvis was a driver for the Memphis Crown Electric Company, delivering appliances and listening to a local man, Herman “Little Junior” Parker, on the truck’s radio. “Mystery Train” was Parker’s current R&B hit. The spectral, hypnotic song, built around a steady, loping rhythm, actually sounds like a steam train: 16 funereal-black coaches carrying his baby off, as Parker says.

Written by Parker, with Sun's president Sam Phillips, it was the first major hit for the label.

“It was a feeling song,” Phillips said. “I mean, it was a big thing, to put a loved one on a train: are they leaving you for ever? Maybe they'll never be back.”

Presley was curious. “He really liked it and chased down where it was done and all this stuff,” recalled Phillips. “He later told me that was the main reason he got up enough courage to come in and ask if he could make a record.”

It was another year before he covered the song in a faster, more spontaneous version, with an extra verse and a groove borrowed from “Love Me Baby”, the flip side of the Parker single. It was Presley’s fifth and final release for Sun, in the summer of 1955. Gone were Parker’s gimmicky train sounds, replaced with the tangy guitar of Scotty Moore, Bill Black’s piston-pumping bass and a springy production.

Elvis laughed at the end of the take, thinking he’d screwed up. Phillips knew he’d cut one of the finest rockabilly performances of the era. “It was the greatest thing I ever did on Elvis,” he said and that he couldn’t choose between the two versions: “If you don’t like both, there’s something badly wrong with you.”