Eddie Bond, a rockabilly singer and radio host who once told a teenage Elvis Presley that he would be better off driving a truck than trying to make it in music, died on Wednesday at his home in Bolivar, Tenn. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Lisa Seawright, who said his health had been failing since a fall in 2011.

Mr. Bond was almost 21 and already established on the music scene in Memphis when a 16-year-old fellow band member, Ronnie Smith, invited Presley to audition to sing with the group in May 1954 at the Hi Hat Club on South Third Street. Presley, 19, drinking a Coke with his girlfriend, Dixie Locke, waited nervously to go on.

“Bond came over to the table to say hello,” Peter Guralnick wrote in “Last Train to Memphis,” the first volume of his two-volume Presley biography. “He asked Elvis what he did for a living, and Elvis said he drove a truck for Crown Electric, but Dixie was embarrassed for him because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the table.”