The Musical Memoirs Takes a Detour to Graceland 

There weren’t many famous people from the little town  my mother grew up in.

One of her childhood friends became a running back with the New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Viking before losing his final game – a deadly contest of Russian roulette – at the age of 27. And before my mom was born, Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” lived about 20 minutes away from her birthplace.

But otherwise, Dyersburg, Tenn, was a quiet river town with no connections to fame. Which is why it was interesting when my mom’s friend Jane wound up a regular at Elvis Presley’s place.

Jane had married someone with connections in the entertainment business. So she would often get invited to parties at Graceland. When we lived in the Chicago area, Jane would occasionally visit, brandishing gifts and wearing her fur coat, with stories about her parties at Elvis’s place. I don’t remember a whole lot of details from those stories, though for some reason I remember her talking about meeting Rita Coolidge.

So for years afterward, every time I would hear Your Love if Lifting Me (Higher and Higher), Coolidge’s cover of the great Jackie Wilson song, I would think of my mom’s friend.

Jane and her husband eventually split, and she returned to the quiet lifestyle she had known in Dyersburg. Except that quiet lifestyle was brutally interrupted one day.

She was in her home when a man crashed through the window of a second floor bedroom. With a knife in hand, he sexually assaulted Jane, who was then in her 50s. When he was done, he continued to hold her hostage, and based on his comments, Jane was certain he planned to kill her. So for the next several hours, she worked to gain his trust. And – in an act many might consider unthinkable – even willingly had sex with him in an attempt to stay alive.

Somehow Jane managed to convince the guy that she wasn’t going to turn him in for his heinous deeds. And remarkably, the guy simply walked away, thinking he had a new love interest. Of course, Jane called the police immediately after, and the guy was later sent to prison.

When Jane told us this story, I couldn’t believe it. (My mom’s trucker husband – yes, his name was actually Earl – would later offer a pretty insensitive comment about the consensual sex). On the one hand, it was a terrible ordeal. On the other hand, it was an amazing survival story.

Jane was back on the road to happiness, with plans to get married, in 2005 when she went to a hospital for a very minor ailment and abruptly died under mysterious circumstances.

Leon Russell wrote a song about Rita Coolidge called “Delta Lady.” But, of course, we had our own Delta Lady. And while she never achieved fame herself, her stories about Elvis made her a celebrity in our house.

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