Elvis Goes Back to Church

Elvis Goes Back to Church

The little-known Southern Mississippi songwriters behind Presley's greatest Gospel album

By William Browning

Advertisement for Elvis Presley's album release How Great Thou Art, featured in Cashbox magazine in 1967.

In the summer of 1966, when Elvis Presley went into a Nashville studio to record his ninth studio album, his career was waning. His 1965 album Elvis for Everyone!—a hodge-podge of abandoned singles from the course of his career—was hselling poorly. It had been years since he made a proper album, opting instead to put out mediocre soundtracks for mediocre films he starred in. And the public had not taken to those, either. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan had redefined popular music, the Beatles had gotten hot, and Presley had turned thirty-one, ancient for a rock star. Facing a professional crossroads, Presley—whose sex appeal and robust vocals had defined rock music a decade earlier—made the curious decision to record, of all things, a batch of gospel songs.

Released in early 1967, How Great Thou Art sold more than three-quarters of a million units and won the Grammy for Best Sacred Performance—Presley’s first. The album’s success should not have come as a surprise. Gospel had always been Presley’s favorite music to sing, and for good reason: his first public performances occurred inside his mother’s church in Tupelo, and he carried memories of singing hymns with his father. In reconnecting with the music of his Mississippi childhood, Presley not only gave his sagging career a boost, but reignited a passion for music in himself and in his fans.

What has always gone unnoticed is that Presley gave a subtle, perhaps even inadvertent, nod to his home state when choosing the songs that would make up How Great Thou Art. Of the thirteen gospel songs that make up the album, two were written by Mississippi natives. They were both Christian songwriters from south Mississippi who each had one song recorded by Elvis Presley in RCA Studio B in Nashville on May 27, 1966. The similarities end there, though. In almost every other imaginable way, their little-known stories are polar opposites, as are the stories of the songs they wrote that came to anchor one of the twentieth century's greatest gospel albums.

"Without Him"

One morning in 1961, a seventeen-year-old high school senior named Mylon LeFevre sat in his Fresno, California dorm room thinking about the Bible verse John 15:5, which states, “Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” LeFevre later said that while pondering the verse, a melody “bubbled up” from inside him, and he wrote the lyrics to a song. He called it “Without Him.” It was the first song he ever wrote.

Born in the U.S. Naval Base Hospital on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1944, LeFevre was the son of Urias and Eva Mae LeFevre, both of whom were part of the legendary singing LeFevres, a family musical act that would be inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame in 1998. After graduating from high school, Mylon LeFevre joined the U.S. Army. In 1962, he hitchhiked from his military base in Columbia, South Carolina to Memphis, Tennessee to sing at the National Quartet Convention with his parents. That night, in Ellis Auditorium, while still wearing his military uniform, LeFevre sang “Without Him.” One of the spectators was Elvis Presley, an Army veteran himself.

Five years later, when Presley's version of “Without Him” closed side one of How Great Thou Art, LeFevre received a royalty check for $90,000—the equivalent of more than $800,000 today. The song went on to appear on more than 120 other albums. That type of money and success led to trouble for LeFevre. “I made so many wrong choices,” he said. “I let music become an idol in my life.”

Though he never quit the entertainment business—playing rock music and touring with Pink Floyd, The Who, and Black Sabbath—LeFevre spent much of the 1970s mired in drug addiction before getting sober in 1980. “At thirty-five,” he said, “I had to start over and ask Him to forgive me.” For a while he worked as a janitor at a Christian church in Georgia before eventually reentering the music business as a Christian artist.

Today, LeFevre is a 78-year-old minister based in Texas.

"Where Could I Go?"

The other song on How Great Thou Art penned by a south Mississippi native has a story that is much more mysterious.

J.B. Coats was born in the community of Gitano in Jones County in 1901. A local music teacher named Val Sumrall taught him to read shape notes, and, by the age of fourteen, Coats was leading singing schools—rural gatherings led by instructors contracted to teach the basics of music and singing, usually over the course of ten days. Coats taught singing schools on the Gulf Coast and in the Mississippi Delta for the rest of his life.

During the day he worked as an educator in a public school near Gitano, teaching three grades. On the side, Coats, a deeply religious man, composed hymns, eventually compiling more than 150, each one of which he believed God delivered directly to him.

In 1940, Coats (or perhaps Stamps-Baxter Music and Printing Company, the pub lishing entity he wrote for) filed a copyright for a composition he wrote which con sisted of three quatrains that each ended with the refrain, “Where could I go but to the Lord?” Coats named the song “Where Could I Go?” It has since become a gospel staple.

Almost a decade ago, a man named Austin Bhebe claimed in a blog post that Coats wrote the song after a dying neighbor, who when asked where he would spend eternity, replied to Coats: “Where could I go but to the Lord?” While it is an absorbing story, the dying man’s name was reportedly Joe Keyes, and an exhaustive search for a “Joe Keyes” or “Joseph Keyes,” who died in Jones County during Coats’s lifetime turned up problems. Someone named Johnie Keyes died in 1934, but the spelling of the first name suggests it may have been a woman and, besides, there is no reason to believe “Johnie” would have gone by “Joe.” Someone actually named Joe Keyes died in 1942, but that was two years after a copyright was filed for “Where Could I Go?” Bhebe, who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, did not respond to a message, and his post did not state where he got his information.

Still, there are reasons to believe his story might be true. Edsel Coats, one of J.B. Coats’s sons, said his father “received inspiration among the people in ‘the old country church atmosphere.’” Coats being stirred to write the hymn after a touching bedside exchange with a dying man would certainly fall into that category. A more intriguing reason to believe Bhebe is that in his blog post, he claimed that Coats actually wrote the hymn “some years” after Keyes’s remark, when he was “away from home teaching a singing school.” This aligns perfectly with a story told by a seventy-four-year-old man who lives on the other side of the world from Kenya.

Wayne Bush, of Washington Parish, Louisiana, claims that Coats composed the song on the grounds of Isabel Baptist Church in the Louisiana community of Isabel. According to Bush, several women a generation older than he said the church hired Coats to conduct a singing school and, during a lunch break, while relaxing beside an artesian well in the shade of an oak tree, he scribbled the lyrics on the side of his lunch sack. In the official Isabel Baptist Church meeting minutes, Bush found a note proving Coats was indeed hired to teach a singing school. But that was in 1953, thirteen years after the copyright was filed. Of course, the church could have hired Coats multiple times, including in the 1930s. Still, where verified truth is concerned, the circumstances surrounding the writing of “Where Could I Go?” remain as elusive as the inspiration.

Several popular versions of “Where Could I Go?” were recorded in the 1940s and ’50s, including one by the Harmonizing Four, a group Presley is known to have liked. The song most likely ended up on the second side of How Great Thou Art because Presley remembered singing it with his father during his childhood.

Coats never heard Presley’s version. He died in 1961, six years before the release of How Great Thou Art, and is buried in the tiny Coats family cemetery in Gitano beside his wife, Alice. Lyrics from his most famous song are chiseled into his tombstone, but a mistake appears to have been made.

The inscription is a quatrain that begins with the first two lines of the second verse, then presents the third line of the third verse, before closing with the refrain.

Neighbors are kind, I love them ev’ry one, We get along in sweet accord; Yet when I face the chilling hand of death, Where could I go but to the Lord?

There is temptation to view this mix up as egregious, especially when considering that Coats is said to have viewed his lyrics as poetry, always taking great care in their composition. But it is doubtful that a simple man from a rural community who lived the quiet life of a teacher and wrote Christian hymns in his spare time would have cared for very long. So, no matter.