DJ Fontaine

Lore & Background

Shreveport in the mid-1950s was a city where the airwaves carried gospel, country, and rhythm-and-blues, but the boundaries between those formats were policed by programming departments and by the social order of the Jim Crow South. DJ Fontaine, a Black disc jockey at KXAS, operated in a space where his choices in the booth carried weight beyond mere entertainment. When a 45-rpm disc arrived—pressed in Memphis by a small independent label, bearing the name of a white teenager who sang like the gospel men he grew up hearing—Fontaine recognized something in the vocal crack and the backbeat that made the hair on his arms rise. He slipped it under the needle during his set, and the recording's energy bled into the studio, into the signal, into the receivers of thousands of listeners who had no idea a twenty-year-old from Tupelo had just crossed into their living rooms.

The aftermath was not instantaneous, but it was real. Callers started asking for that 'new kid.' Program directors at sister stations began requesting the same Sun Records catalog. Within months, the name Presley had migrated from a Memphis curiosity to a regional talking point, and the chain of radio airplay that Fontaine helped ignite would eventually reach Nashville, then the national charts, then the world. In Elvis lore, Fontaine is the first link in that chain—the human decision, made in a small room with a microphone and a turntable, that said 'yes, this one goes on the air.'

Fontaine's story also carries a dimension that Elvis fandom sometimes overlooks: the quiet labor of Black radio personalities in the 1950s who, despite their own marginalization, used their platforms to give visibility to music that defied the color-coded playlists of the era. His airplay of Elvis was not merely a programming choice; it was a small, deliberate act of saying that this sound belonged to everyone listening, regardless of the station's assumed audience.

In Their Own Story

The studio smelled of warm vacuum tubes and the faint sweetness of a coffee gone cold in the mug beside the script notes. Fontaine adjusted the headphones, felt the familiar weight of them settle over his ears, and glanced at the disc in his hand. The label was plain—Sun Records, a name he didn't recognize. He set the needle down. The first chord of the guitar hit the studio monitors like a slap, and the voice that followed was nothing he'd programmed, nothing his boss would have green-lit. He let it run. The backbeat thumped through the floorboards. Somewhere out in Shreveport, a kid in a Chevy pickup turned his radio up. Fontaine smiled, reached for the next disc, and didn't stop the song until the last note faded into the hiss of the turntable. He made a note in his logbook: 'New artist. Good. Play again.'

Reader's Guide

DJ Fontaine was a Black radio disc jockey working at KXAS in Shreveport, Louisiana, during the mid-1950s. His relationship to Elvis was not one of personal friendship or management but of transmission: he was the first known radio voice to put Elvis's Sun Records sessions onto the airwaves for a live audience. The pivotal moment came in 1954, when he played 'That's All Right' during his broadcast, introducing the song to listeners across northeast Louisiana who had never encountered that particular blend of country twang, gospel fervor, and rockabilly drive.

Why a fan needs to know him: the story of Elvis's rise is often told as a Memphis story—Sam Phillips, the Sun studio, the recording sessions. But a record only becomes a phenomenon when someone plays it for an audience. Fontaine was that first 'someone.' His decision was made in a small studio, under the constraints of a segregated South where a Black DJ's programming choices were scrutinized, and it opened a channel that would carry Elvis from a regional curiosity to a national force.

He is not a household name the way Phillips or Parker or Parker are, but in the genealogy of how the King reached the world, Fontaine is the first relay. Fans who understand that the 1950s radio landscape was not neutral—who that a Black man in a Shreveport booth had to make an active, career-risking choice to play a crossover artist—gain a richer, more honest picture of how Elvis's music actually traveled. Fontaine's name belongs in the first chapter, not the footnotes.

Did You Know?

• DJ Fontaine was a Black radio personality working in the segregated American South, making his decision to air Elvis's records a significant cultural choice in the 1950s.
• The song he is most associated with airing, 'That's All Right,' was the flip side of 'Blue Moon of Kentucky' on Elvis's first Sun Records single.
• KXAS in Shreveport was a regional station, meaning Fontaine's airplay initially reached a localized audience before the story spread to other markets.
• Fontaine's 2012 passing prompted a wave of retrospective recognition from the Elvis community, with many fans and historians publicly crediting him as the first link in the King's radio chain.