Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Presley and Gladys Love Smith Presley. His identical twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn, and Elvis grew up as an only child in a household that struggled through the Depression years of the rural South ^[1]. The family attended an Assembly of God church, where the young Presley absorbed the gospel singing that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Money was scarce. Vernon worked a string of odd jobs and served a brief jail term in 1938 for altering a check, an episode that forced Gladys and Elvis to move in with relatives ^[2]. For his eleventh birthday, Elvis received a guitar from the Tupelo Hardware Company, reportedly because his mother thought it a safer gift than the rifle or bicycle he had wanted. He carried it to school and picked out songs by ear, taking informal guidance from relatives and a local pastor.

In November 1948 the Presleys relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, in search of steadier work. They settled in public housing at Lauderdale Courts, and Elvis enrolled at Humes High School ^[1]. Memphis exposed the teenager to an unusually wide range of music: the blues of Beale Street, white and black gospel programs on the radio, hillbilly music, and the pop crooning of singers like Dean Martin. He graduated from Humes in 1953 and took a job driving a truck for Crown Electric while nursing an ambition to sing.

In the summer of 1953, Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service, the storefront operation attached to Sam Phillips's Sun Records, and paid to cut an acetate of two ballads, ostensibly as a gift for his mother ^[3]. Phillips's assistant Marion Keisker noted the young singer's name. Nearly a year later, in the summer of 1954, Phillips paired Presley with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black for a tryout session.

The session on July 5, 1954, produced the recording that changed his life. During a break, Presley began fooling with an uptempo version of Arthur Crudup's blues number "That's All Right," and Phillips, hearing exactly the hybrid sound he had been searching for, taped it ^[3]. Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips played the record repeatedly on his WHBQ show, and listener response was immediate. Sun released four more Presley singles over the following year, pairing blues numbers with reworked country songs, a blend that came to be called rockabilly.

Presley toured relentlessly through the South in 1954 and 1955, joining the Louisiana Hayride radio program after a lone, poorly received appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. His swiveling stage manner provoked audiences into a frenzy that older performers had never seen ^[1]. In August 1955, the Memphis promoter turned manager Colonel Tom Parker took control of his career, and that November Parker negotiated the sale of Presley's Sun contract to RCA Victor for 35,000 dollars, an unprecedented sum for a singer with no national hit ^[4].

Any account of Elvis Presley achievements begins with 1956. His first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel," recorded in Nashville in January of that year, reached number one on the Billboard pop chart and sold over a million copies ^[4]. A run of hits followed at astonishing speed: "Don't Be Cruel," "Hound Dog," "Love Me Tender," and "All Shook Up" among them. Television appearances on the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, Steve Allen, and Ed Sullivan shows carried his image into millions of homes and made him the most talked-about entertainer in the United States ^[2].

Hollywood moved quickly. Presley made his film debut in the Civil War drama Love Me Tender in November 1956, and over his career he starred in 31 feature films, including Jailhouse Rock (1957), King Creole (1958), and Blue Hawaii (1961) ^[5]. Though critics dismissed most of the later musical comedies, the pictures were reliably profitable and kept his songs on the charts through the 1960s, when he largely stopped touring.

His recording legacy is enormous by any measure. The Recording Industry Association of America has certified more gold, platinum, and multi-platinum titles for Presley than for any other solo artist ^[6]. He won three Grammy Awards, all for gospel recordings, including the 1967 album How Great Thou Art, and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1971 at age 36 ^[4]. In 1986 he was among the first ten inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which credits him with bringing rock and roll into the commercial mainstream ^[3]. His 1968 NBC television special, commonly called the Comeback Special, revived his performing career, and his January 1973 concert Aloha from Hawaii was beamed by satellite to audiences across Asia and later shown in dozens of countries ^[5].

Presley was drafted into the United States Army in 1958 and served as a regular soldier rather than in an entertainment unit, a decision Parker encouraged to protect his mainstream image. He spent most of his hitch with the Third Armored Division in Friedberg, West Germany, and was discharged in March 1960 with the rank of sergeant ^[2]. His mother Gladys, to whom he was intensely devoted, died in August 1958 while he was in basic training, a loss friends said he never fully absorbed ^[1].

While stationed in Germany, Presley met Priscilla Beaulieu, the fourteen-year-old stepdaughter of an Air Force officer. She later moved to Memphis, and the couple married in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967. Their only child, Lisa Marie Presley, was born on February 1, 1968 ^[2]. The marriage ended in divorce in October 1973, though the two remained on cordial terms.

In 1957 Presley purchased Graceland, a colonial-style mansion on Highway 51 South in Memphis, for just over 100,000 dollars, and it remained his home for the rest of his life ^[7]. He surrounded himself with a circle of friends and employees nicknamed the Memphis Mafia, indulged tastes for cars, horses, and karate, and gave away money and gifts with legendary freedom. He was known among intimates as a restless night owl, deeply attached to gospel music and to books on religion and spirituality.

After the success of the 1968 television special, Presley returned to live performance. He opened at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in July 1969 to record-breaking attendance, and residencies there, along with punishing tours of American arenas, dominated the rest of his career ^[5]. The same period produced some of his strongest late recordings, including "Suspicious Minds," his final number one pop hit, and "In the Ghetto," both cut at American Sound Studio in Memphis in 1969 ^[4].

The 1970s brought decline behind the spectacle. Presley's dependence on prescription drugs, supplied in enormous quantities by his personal physician, worsened through the decade, and his weight and health deteriorated visibly ^[8]. He continued to tour almost constantly, sometimes performing while plainly unwell, and his final concert took place in Indianapolis on June 26, 1977.

On the afternoon of August 16, 1977, Presley was found unresponsive in a bathroom at Graceland and was pronounced dead at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. He was 42. The official cause was given as cardiac arrhythmia, though the role of polypharmacy in his death became the subject of long medical and legal dispute ^[8]. Tens of thousands of mourners gathered outside Graceland, and President Jimmy Carter issued a statement noting that Presley had permanently changed the face of American popular culture ^[2].

The essential Elvis Presley facts sketch a career of rare scale: hundreds of millions of records sold worldwide, more than one hundred singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and an influence acknowledged by nearly every rock performer who followed ^[6]. Musicians from the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen have described hearing his early records as a formative shock. His singing carried Southern gospel, blues, and country phrasing into the center of global popular music, and his stage presence established the template of the rock star.

Graceland opened to the public in 1982 and now draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, making it one of the most visited private homes in the United States ^[7]. The mansion was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006. His birthplace in Tupelo is preserved as a museum, and the United States Postal Service issued a hugely popular Elvis stamp in 1993 after a national vote on which portrait to use.

Scholars continue to debate his place in the racial history of American music, weighing charges that white performers profited from black musical forms against testimony from contemporaries about his open admiration for the blues and gospel artists he learned from ^[3]. What no serious Elvis Presley biography disputes is the reach of the transformation he set in motion. Nearly five decades after his death, his catalog still sells, his image remains among the most recognizable on earth, and the title he never claimed for himself, the King of Rock and Roll, endures in common speech ^[1].