My son has a good singing voice and is musically talented. Still, I’ve never pushed him to get into the singing business. It is a tough field that can be very hard and discouraging.
A case in point is a kid named Aaron. He was twenty and had been singing in small-town schoolhouses, gyms, and other venues around Texas and Louisiana. One hot summer night, Aaron was at the local baseball field at Gladewater. (Gladewater is a small east Texas town near where I live in Tyler.) Aaron was excited to sing at a concert there, but only twenty people showed up to hear him. At the halfway point, Aaron took his customary break. He decided to not return to the “stage.” It was an August evening and hot. More importantly to Aaron, everyone in the audience, all twenty of them, appeared indifferent to Aaron’s music and effort. They hurt Aaron’s feelings.
Aaron had two guys backing him up in the band. One was Scotty, and he gave Aaron a pep talk, urging him to go back out for the concert’s second half and offer every ounce of effort he had. Aaron did. He performed with electric energy. Now, the handful of people were wondering what in the world he had drunk or taken during the musician’s break. Rather than growing excited, they left for home in bewilderment at the end of Aaron’s concert.
This lack of success might have disheartened Aaron into quitting. It would have been natural for him not to want to sing anymore, but he pressed on. He even revisited Gladewater that November. More people attended that concert at the school gym, but Aaron never returned to that little town.
He couldn’t. Security could not be guaranteed in such a small community, and Aaron would’ve been mobbed. You see, two months later, Aaron had a song that rose to number one on the pop charts–Heartbreak Hotel. Things were never the same for Aaron, Elvis Aaron Presley.
It takes a lot of work to get started. Everybody’s got to begin somewhere. And that somewhere is usually at the bottom. You pay your dues. You work your craft. You do your job well. You hang in there.
Young life contains some hidden clues that should prepare us for adulthood. You enter elementary school as a first grader and graduate after a few years at the top. Then, you enter middle or intermediate school at the bottom. Slowly, year by year, you rise to the top. You graduate and begin high school. In my high school (like many others), being a Freshman meant you were at the bottom. Four years later, you graduate at the top–a senior. Then, if you attended college, you started at the bottom again–as a freshman. And so it goes.
Relative to others, Elvis became successful rather quickly. Some singers spend years toiling before they “make it.” But I’ve seen enough of these venues and small towns in East Texas where Elvis played for the few years before he scored a hit to make me admire him for his persistence. Elvis was more Aaron than Elvis before he made it big.
I know the odds are that none of us will capture lightning in a bottle like Elvis did. From what I read about his life and death, I would say that is a good thing. We don’t need to be Elvis; we only need to be the best version of ourselves. To achieve that, we need to practice dogged determination. As the great golfer Bobby Jones once said, “No virtue in this world is so oft rewarded as perseverance.”
For further reading: Elvis in Texas The Undiscovered King 1954-1958, by Lori Torrance with Stanley Oberst
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