When Fay Hancock was young, she attended an Elvis concert at which the famed rock-and-roller took a scarf, wiped his brow and gave it to her.

A week ago, that happened again.

Looking down at her from the stage of the Arcade Theater in Ferriday, “Elvis” addressed Hancock personally as he handed her a second scarf.

“We had a good time, didn’t we babe?” he said.

Hancock didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah!” she responded with a smile.

“Elvis” was — in this case —Hancock’s childhood friend, Roger McCranie.

Hancock and McCranie have a special connection through the music of Elvis. Growing up in a shotgun shack near the Natchez bluff, the teenage Hancock — wheelchair bound by cerebral palsy — introduced her younger neighbor, McCranie, to a type of music he’d never heard before. She was 16 and he was 5, but they found a common bond in a kind of music that was best danced to in blue suede shoes.

McCranie danced; Hancock watched. “Love Me Tender,” “Hound Dog,” Teddy Bear” and “Don’t Be Cruel” came to be the soundtrack of McCranie’s childhood, and Hancock served as the disc jockey.

“With the cerebal palsy, she’d shake so bad you’d think she was going to break the 45 record, but she’d get the record on, and we’d both just enjoy it,” McCranie said.

“It was very exciting. It was music I had never heard before, and it was just magical to me. Elvis’ music was different than anything else, and even though I was only 5, it marked my memory. It seared into my heart his music.”

Eventually, Hancock’s family moved away and McCranie lost touch.

But the gift of music his friend had given him stayed with him, and during the 1980s and 1990s he traveled around the country doing Elvis tribute shows. At one time, McCranie said, he was considered one of the top 10 Elvis impersonators in international competitions.

“I made it to the top 10 in the world, and it all started when I was 5, listening to Elvis on her record player,” he said.

While McCranie took the gospel of Rock ’n‘ Roll around the country, Hancock remained constant with her love for Elvis, fostering a fandom that few can rival. Hancock said her favorite song in the Elvis catalogue is “My Way.”

“Even to this day, when somebody wants to give Fay something and they don’t know what to give her, you give her Elvis,” Fay’s sister-in-law and caretaker Peggy Hancock said.

Fay’s devotion to one man’s music even inspired a second Elvis impersonator, her nephew Thomas Hancock.

The story even sounds familiar.

“It all started when Thomas was little,” Peggy Hancock said. “She’d play the music, and he would dance and slide across the floor.”

Through the years, McCranie wondered what had happened to his old friend, the one who had managed to have such an influence on his life with only the spin of a record. He eventually hung up the mantle of Elvis impersonator, working as a hair stylist in Natchez, though he’d do an occasional benefit from time to time.

One day about two years ago, he was cutting the hair of a customer when the customer mentioned a relation to Hancock.

McCranie leapt at the chance to see his old friend. She was living at The Columns in Jonesville, he found out, and though she had trouble talking, her mind was still sharp.

“It had been 20 or 30 years since I had seen her when I found her in the nursing home in Jonesville,” he said. “I was really happy to find her again.”

One day, McCranie was visiting Fay when he mentioned he would be singing a few Elvis songs with the Gene King Band at the Arcade Theater’s monthly opry-style show.

“I am talking with her about it, and the next thing I know, one of the nurses hears it and gets interested, takes my name and number, and later called me and said they had gotten confirmation from (Fay’s) family to take her to the Ferriday show,” he said. “She was all excited about it.”

When he knew his friend, now 72, would be at the show, McCranie said he knew he had to re-enact the Elvis scarf incident. It was an important thing to her, and her love of Elvis had been an important part of his life, he said.

“It was really neat, something I couldn’t explain being so young, but it meant a lot to me,” he said. “Seeing her over the years, it always goes back to when I was 5 and her introducing me to Elvis.”

And so when he handed Fay a red scarf after gyrating across the stage to “Polk Salad Annie,” it wasn’t just a scarf. It was a testimony about a girl, a boy and the music with which they couldn’t help falling in love.