The Night My Mom Met Elvis

A cherished family photo held some mysteries — until a random Facebook message helped clear them up

Trey Barrineau,

AARP

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Published August 13, 2025

young elvis presley posing for a photo with three teenage girls

The author’s mother, left, was a rising high school senior when this photo of her with a not-yet-famous Elvis Presley was snapped 70 years ago this month in Sheffield, Alabama. The other two girls in the photo were a mystery to the author’s family for years — until recently.

Courtesy Trey Barrineau

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that a picture can often be worth much more than a thousand words. Like this one, taken after a concert in Sheffield, Alabama, in August 1955.

That’s my mother, Patsy Ruth, with two young women and Elvis Presley — before he was a global superstar. (That’s Mom on the left, holding Elvis’ hand and smiling softly. She’s two weeks shy of her 18th birthday; Elvis is 20.) It’s a great snapshot of “the King” — curled lip, slick hair and all — a few months before he released “Heartbreak Hotel” and transformed into what conductor Leonard Bernstein called “the greatest cultural force in the 20th century.”

This unique memento has been a big part of our family lore for 70 years. However, Mom never shared many details about that night, so the identities of the other two girls and the photographer were a mystery — one we weren’t overly invested in solving. After all, what more did people need to know? It’s a picture of Elvis with Patsy Ruth. Enough said.

But as I’ve learned more about the image, I’ve discovered that it might hold greater significance for members of another family — and their stories add surprising elements to the tale.

An assist from social media

About 15 years ago, I posted a scan of the photo I call “our family heirloom” on a personal website. A couple of years later, Lesley Mathis of Nashville, a nurse practitioner and an associate vice president with IKS Health, was clicking through pictures of Elvis on Google Images when she came across one that made her gasp.

It was this photo — which also hangs in her home.

She looked me up on Facebook and sent a personal message.

“I was shocked,” Lesley said. “I figured I was the only one that had that photo. … I have always wondered who the other girl was in the picture.”

Likewise, Lesley was able to tell us about the other girls in the image. It turns out they were sisters. That’s Lesley’s grandmother, Lynda, on the right, and her great-aunt, Sue, front and center.

And here’s the kicker: Lesley’s grandfather, Jimmy Lee Conner, took the picture. He and Lynda were sweethearts then, and they married in June 1956, right after Lynda finished high school. (While researching this article, I discovered that she was a classmate of my mother’s in Haleyville, Alabama, a town about 45 miles south of Sheffield.)

two young people posing for a wedding portrait

Photographer Jimmy Lee Conner and Lynda Sugg on their wedding day in June 1956. They were already dating when he snapped the picture of Elvis.

Courtesy Lesley Mathis

Lesley said Jimmy Lee’s dad owned a photography shop in Sheffield, so the young man often had a camera with him. But she said he sometimes used creative tactics to take photos in places like the Sheffield Community Center, a 2,000-seat event complex that hosted a wide range of gatherings and performances through the years, including Elvis’ appearance in August 1955. (The building is now part of an apartment complex.)

According to Lesley, Jimmy Lee used to scoot past concert security using a fake press pass — something he did more than once, she said. She added that he made his bluff more convincing by borrowing the biggest professional-grade cameras he could find in his father’s studio — “the kind that required two hands to operate and looked like something a real news photographer would use,” she said.

Live from Sheffield

When Jimmy Lee snapped this picture in August 1955, Elvis wasn’t a household name, but he was a red-hot regional act. His electrifying performances were generating frenzy across the South, fueled by a grueling touring schedule that eventually saw him play 331 shows that year. Many of those stops were in places like the Sheffield Community Center, where Elvis played five times during three separate visits in 1955.

While that seems like a lot of time to invest in a semirural part of Alabama, there was a strategy behind it.

Sam Phillips, the visionary dubbed “the father of rock ’n’ roll” after launching Sun Records in 1952 and discovering Elvis in 1954, considered the area around Sheffield an essential market for up-and-coming performers. (The fact that Phillips was born and raised in the neighboring town of Florence, and worked at local radio stations for a few years before his fateful move to Memphis in 1945, may have been a factor as well.)

“The feeling was that you hadn’t made it until you had played the Sheffield Community Center,” he once said, according to the 2022 book The Sonic Swagger of Elvis Presley. “Today, that’s hard to believe, but that’s how it was.”

The tour that landed in Sheffield that hot August night was called the All-Star Jamboree — and Elvis wasn’t the main attraction. Webb Pierce, the headliner, was probably America’s most popular country artist at the time (he had 13 No. 1 hits during the 1950s). A late addition to the undercard that night was a 23-year-old singer from Arkansas named Johnny Cash.

Elvis caused quite a stir during that August appearance. He “outdid top man Pierce. … When Presley appeared at the climax of the card, pandemonium broke loose. Bopsters, oldsters, and just plain music fans cheered,” according to a review published the next day in The Florence Times. (As for Cash, the newspaper wrote that he was “simply great.”)

Offstage, my mom said Elvis was gregarious and friendly to the fans who swarmed around him. Others who met him that evening agreed. Lesley said her grandfather told her, “Elvis was incredibly kind and very approachable that day. … He was super friendly and sat and chatted with them for a while.”

Rumors and speculation

The original photo of Elvis and my mom has always been a conversation starter — though for some of my relatives, Elvis’ fame may have pushed them to take those conversations in exaggerated directions.

Like my grandfather. A freight engineer with the Illinois Central Railroad, he loved to tell his work buddies that Elvis came by their house “all the time” to date Patsy Ruth. In an email to me a few years ago, a distant cousin in Alabama wrote that “it has always been said that Elvis was sweet on Patsy Ruth. But Patsy Ruth wasn’t sweet on Elvis.” (Maybe it was his body language in the photo that inspired this hyperbole — he does appear to be leaning toward my mom and pulling her close.)

The truth, however, is much less salacious — as far as we know. Mom only ever said she took a picture with Elvis — that’s it. If there were more to her chance meeting with him, she kept it a secret.

“I think Mom would have mentioned it if they had dated,” my sister told me recently. “She never claimed to have gone out with Elvis.” My father, who was married to Patsy Ruth for more than 30 years, said the same thing.

A poignant revelation

Throughout her life, Mom was never a stereotypical Elvis superfan. She did own a few of his albums, but there were no black velvet shrines to him in our house.

However, like most of the world, she was shocked when he died on Aug. 16, 1977, almost exactly 22 years after he paused for a picture with her in Alabama. That date was also Mom’s 40th birthday — and if you remember the ’70s, that meant jokey birthday cards about death, cakes with funeral themes and bouquets of black balloons.

I was just 11 years old, but I remember her being more stunned than sorrowful that day. Perhaps the demise, at 42, of the larger-than-life personality who once briefly clasped her hand was an intimate reminder that youth is fleeting and life is fragile.

Sadly, my mother’s death came much too early as well. She was just 53 when cancer took her from us in 1991. Despite that, Patsy managed to touch many lives as an award-winning public school teacher, friend, mentor, spouse, mother and poet. (One of her poems, “The Good Thing About Cancer,” was reprinted in Bernie Siegel’s 1993 book How to Live Between Office Visits, a guide to helping cancer patients navigate their emotional well-being during treatments.)

The other girls in the photo aren’t with us anymore, either, and they touched many lives as well. Sue, who passed away in 2023 at 87, was a homemaker and longtime volunteer with the American Cancer Society who had four children. Lynda, who died on New Year’s Day 2002 at 62, worked various jobs outside the home while raising two children.

And Jimmy Lee, the photographer, passed away in 2017 at 81. He ended up running his own camera shop in Union City, Tennessee, for many years. (No word on what became of those fake press passes.)

But before he died, he confessed a secret that serves as a sweet, surprising coda to this story:

He told his granddaughter that he had a huge crush on my mom.

“Not too long before he passed away, I was asking about the photo, and he said that he always wanted to date your mom because she was always so beautiful,” Lesley said. “I reckon he kept this to himself. … He was very fond of your mother.”

How long did he hold that crush? Was he still in its thrall when he spray-painted “Jimmy Loves Lynda” on a water tower in Sheffield, a pitch-perfect anecdote about small-town sweethearts that Lesley shared with me? It seems there are some mysteries I’ll never solve, and probably never should.

Discovering the full story of this photo has taught me an important lesson, though. While flat, static images steer your memories and wishes in one direction, the 3-D realities of life are guaranteed to knock you off course in surprising ways.

I guess that’s another thing you learn as you get older.

Sheffield, Muscle Shoals and Music History

For most towns the size of Sheffield (population roughly 10,000), a performance by someone like Elvis Presley would rank as a watershed moment. But most towns aren’t Sheffield. It’s part of northwest Alabama’s musically rich Muscle Shoals region, a collection of communities along the Tennessee River that includes Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia and Florence.

Besides being the birthplace of Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis, the area’s tuneful history runs the gamut from America’s earliest forms of popular music in the 19th century to the rise of rock, soul and R&B in the 20th century.

In 1873, African American composer W.C. Handy, “the father of the blues,” was born in Florence. His prolific songwriting popularized the blues — which he called “the sound of a sinner on revival day” — and helped lay the foundation for all contemporary American music.

And just a few years after Elvis played Sheffield, an unlikely group of local songwriters and session musicians began cranking out some of the greatest rock and soul records of all time at FAME Studios and, later, the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. (Each is roughly two miles from where Elvis performed in 1955.) Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Cher and many other artists recorded some of their career-defining hits not in New York or Los Angeles, but in a relatively obscure corner of Alabama.

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