Elvis Presley
“Before Elvis, there was nothing.” — John Lennon
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Members and colleagues ⏳🌊
- FamilyGladys Presley
A mother who poured everything into her one surviving son; her death in 1958 left Elvis with a lifelong wound.
- ProducerSam Phillips
The owner of Sun Records, he heard a new sound in a playful jam during a break and sent the first recording out into the world.
- ManagerColonel Tom Parker
The manager who held the reins of his career from 1955 to the very end, steering him toward films and Las Vegas while taking a large share of the earnings.
- InfluenceJohn Lennon
He took up rock and roll after hearing Elvis, and in 1965 he visited Elvis's Bel Air home with the other Beatles and played music with him.
- FamilyPriscilla Presley
They met while he was stationed in West Germany, married in 1967 and divorced in 1973. After his death she led the effort to open Graceland to the public.
- FamilyLisa Marie Presley
Their only daughter, born in 1968, later became a singer. She died in 2023 and was buried with him at Graceland.
I. The boy from Tupelo · 1935–1948
(Birth) He was born in January 1935 in East Tupelo, Mississippi, before dawn on January 8, in a two-room shotgun house his father, Vernon, had built with his own hands. His twin brother, Jesse Garon, came first, stillborn; Elvis Aaron followed. His mother, Gladys, poured everything into the son she had left, and those close to Elvis said he lived his whole life conscious of his brother's absence. (Poverty) In 1938 his father was sent to Parchman Farm for altering the amount on a check he had received for a hog, and the family lost the house. During the nearly nine months without Vernon, mother and son grew closer still. Even after his release, Vernon never held a steady job, and the family moved between relatives' homes and rented rooms. For the rest of his life, that poverty left Elvis with an obsession with money and security. (Church) The boy's first music came from the Pentecostal Assembly of God church. The hymns the congregation sang while swaying and the fervent preaching imprinted themselves on his ears and his body. In 1945, at ten, he entered a children's singing contest at the Mississippi–Alabama Fair and sang "Old Shep," a ballad about an old dog, placing fifth. On his birthday the next year he got a guitar at Tupelo Hardware; the story goes that he had wanted a rifle, but his mother steered him toward the guitar. (Radio) Living near a Black neighborhood, he heard the blues, and he learned guitar chords from a country singer at the local station WELO. Church gospel, Black blues and white country were mixing inside a single boy with no boundaries between them. In November 1948 the family left for Memphis, Tennessee, in search of work.
II. The shy boy of Memphis · 1948–1954
(Public housing) In Memphis the family drifted from one rooming house to another until, in 1949, they moved into the Lauderdale Courts housing project. At Humes High School Elvis was shy, something of a loner, but he stood out: he greased his hair and swept it back long, and he bought the flashy clothes Black musicians wore at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street. After graduating in 1953, he drove a truck for Crown Electric. (Absorption) In those years his ears knew no borders. He took in everything — rhythm and blues on the Black station WDIA, country on the Grand Ole Opry, the all-night gospel sings at Ellis Auditorium, the smooth ballads of Dean Martin. What he admired most were gospel quartets like the Blackwood Brothers. (Recording) In the summer of 1953 he paid four dollars at the Memphis Recording Service, run by Sam Phillips, to record two songs. The widely told story is that it was a gift for his mother, but the timing does not match her birthday, so it remains uncertain. Marion Keisker in the office wrote down his name, and the following summer Phillips teamed him with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. (Chance) On the night of July 5, 1954, during a break after the ballads had refused to come together, Elvis began fooling around with a sped-up version of Arthur Crudup's blues "That's All Right," and the other two jumped in. Phillips did not let the sound slip by. A few days later, when DJ Dewey Phillips played the song over and over on WHBQ, the phones lit up. He brought Elvis to the station and had him say which high school he attended — reportedly to let listeners who had taken him for a Black singer know that he was white.
A bit of horseplay during a stalled session's break became his first single. Recasting Arthur Crudup's blues in a light, giddy country beat, it is the starting point of the Sun Records era.
- Scotty Moore played a Gibson ES-295 using a technique in which the thumb plucks the bass strings while the other fingers pick the chords at the same time (Travis picking). Follow, from start to finish, the sound of a single guitar handling both rhythm and ornament.
- There are no drums. Bill Black pulled the strings of his upright bass so they snapped against the fingerboard (slap bass), producing a percussive click along with the low notes. Listen for that dry sound behind each bass note and you will hear where the song's beat comes from.
- The short echo that trails right behind the voice (slapback echo) was created by Sam Phillips using the time lag between the record and playback heads of a tape recorder, and it became the signature of the Sun Records sound.
- In the later section, where Elvis hums high in meaningless syllables, the heaviness of the original blues gives way to the playfulness of a twenty-year-old.
III. Sun Records and the Colonel · 1954–1955
(Sun) At Sun Records, Elvis released five singles over a year and a half. Usually one side was a Black blues or rhythm-and-blues number and the other a white country song. The flip side of his first single turned Bill Monroe's slow bluegrass waltz "Blue Moon of Kentucky" into a bouncing romp. Binding two Southern traditions onto a single disc, these records created a sound that could not be filed under either — the sound that would later be called rockabilly. (Stage) In October 1954 he appeared once on the Grand Ole Opry, but the response was lukewarm, and according to one story an official told him to go back to driving a truck. On the Louisiana Hayride, by contrast, he became a regular, and young audiences screamed at the way his legs shook as he sang. At a 1955 show in Lubbock, Texas, a high-school-age Buddy Holly opened for him, and around this time, watching Elvis, Holly turned from country toward rock and roll. When drummer D. J. Fontana joined, the trio became a quartet. (The Colonel) That year Tom Parker, who managed the country singer Hank Snow, came calling. "Colonel" was an honorary title bestowed by the governor of Louisiana. Parker won over Gladys, who worried her son would be worked too hard, and in November RCA Victor bought Elvis's contract from Sun Records for $35,000 — about $40,000 counting back royalties. For a newcomer it was an unheard-of price. Phillips used the money to keep his company alive and put his energy into Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. With the deal, Elvis set out on the road from Southern star to national commodity.
A song from his last single at Sun Records, it transformed Junior Parker's dark blues into a hurtling train song. It is the peak the trio reached just before he left for RCA.
- The repeating guitar figure in the intro was borrowed, at Phillips's suggestion, from another Junior Parker song. Listen to Scotty Moore's bass-string riff rolling along like train wheels.
- With no drums, Bill Black's bass and Elvis's acoustic guitar strumming make a rhythm like the chugging of a steam locomotive. The way the two instruments lock together is the engine of the whole song.
- Elvis sings this tale of a train carrying a lover away faster and brighter than the original, yet he stretches out the final notes, leaving a trace of loneliness.
- At the very moment the song ends, a brief whoop from Elvis remains on the recording — a moment where you can feel the excited air of the studio.
IV. The explosion of 1956 · 1956–1958
(Explosion) "Heartbreak Hotel," recorded in January 1956 at RCA's Nashville studio, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart in little more than three months. Beginning that same month, he appeared in turn on the Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show and on the television shows of Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan. In June, on The Milton Berle Show, the scene in which he slowed the ending of "Hound Dog" to half-time and swiveled his hips provoked a storm of condemnation; Steve Allen then put him in a tuxedo and had him sing to a basset hound. On his third Sullivan appearance, in January 1957, the cameras showed him only from the waist up. (Defense) Newspapers and clergy cast him as the symbol of juvenile delinquency. Elvis said his movements came naturally with the music and that he did not consider them vulgar, explaining that he had learned them from the stage shows of church gospel singers. On December 4, 1956, he dropped by Sun Studio and sang gospel and country on the spot with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, with Johnny Cash joining them briefly. On this recording, later known as the "Million Dollar Quartet," he seems more at ease than anywhere else. (Success) After his first film, "Love Me Tender," he made "Jailhouse Rock," and the songs written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller sharpened his delivery. In 1957 he bought Graceland, a mansion south of Memphis, for $102,500 and moved his parents in. (Loss) In March 1958 he was drafted into the Army. Parker urged him to serve as an ordinary soldier rather than take the privileges of the entertainment corps. On August 14, while he was in basic training, word came that his mother had died of hepatitis. Those who were with him said that at the funeral he could not leave the side of the casket and wept.
His first recording at RCA and his first national No. 1. Unlike the bright sound of Sun Records, it opened the explosion of 1956 with a dark, deep resonance, depicting an imaginary hotel where lonely people gather.
- The broad, dark reverb was reportedly created by placing a speaker and a microphone in the studio's hallway. Compare it with the short echo of the Sun records and you will clearly hear how the sound changed with the move to RCA.
- Each verse uses a technique in which the band strikes once and stops (stop time). The moments when the guitar and bass drop out and only Elvis's voice remains in the gap are the source of the song's tension.
- The song is built on an eight-bar blues frame. In the instrumental break, don't miss Scotty Moore's raw guitar followed by Floyd Cramer's barroom piano.
- Elvis mumbles low, then quavers and draws out the final notes as if sobbing. This delivery, like the monologue of someone abandoned, struck the teenagers of the day as shocking.
The song behind the Milton Berle Show uproar. Recorded right after the condemnation poured in and released back to back with "Don't Be Cruel," the single held the top of the charts all through the summer of 1956.
- Listen to D. J. Fontana's drums pouring out machine-gun snare rolls (fills) at the end of each verse. He recalled learning this kind of accent backing strip-show acts.
- Scotty Moore's two guitar solos are sharp and rough — closer to sound bursting out than to tidy playing.
- It is recorded that the song was taken more than thirty times until Elvis was satisfied. In the background, the Jordanaires' handclaps and chorus drive the beat forward.
- Big Mama Thornton's 1952 original was a slow, sticky blues. Elvis turned it into a fast, aggressive number, basing it on the playful version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys he had seen in Las Vegas.
V. West Germany and Hollywood · 1958–1967
(Army) In October 1958 he was posted to the 3rd Armored Division at Friedberg, West Germany (today's Germany), and, granted permission to live off base, took a house in nearby Bad Nauheim with his father, his grandmother and friends. Biographers write that it was around this time, during field maneuvers, that a sergeant first gave him amphetamines. It was here, too, that he met Priscilla Beaulieu, the stepdaughter of an Air Force officer. (Return) Discharged in March 1960, he went straight to Nashville and recorded “Elvis Is Back!” His voice had deepened, and his range had widened to move between blues and ballads. “It's Now or Never,” in the manner of an Italian canzone, and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” went to number one, and he appeared on a television special hosted by Frank Sinatra, who had once disparaged rock and roll, the two of them trading songs. (Films) After that, Parker bound him to the movies. Following the great success of “Blue Hawaii” in 1961, two or three similar pictures appeared every year, each setting a dozen or so songs against an exotic backdrop. The soundtracks were recorded in haste, and Elvis, who had wanted serious roles, grew steadily listless. Parker took 25 percent of his earnings, and as much as half on side deals. (Encounters) In August 1965 the Beatles visited his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, and played guitar and bass with him, but no recording survives. In 1966 he recorded Bob Dylan's “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” which Dylan later called his most treasured cover of any of his songs. In 1967 he won his first Grammy for the gospel album “How Great Thou Art,” and on May 1 of that year he married Priscilla in Las Vegas.
His comeback record, cut in Nashville right after his discharge, is ranked by many critics as his finest studio album. Before he was bound to the movie formula, his matured voice moved freely between blues and ballads.
- The featured song on this card, “Reconsider Baby,” is a Lowell Fulson blues with a long tenor saxophone solo by Boots Randolph. It lets you hear how deep Elvis had grown as a blues singer.
- This was his first stereo album, so the instruments are split between left and right. On headphones, the places of the guitar, the piano and the backing vocals are distinct.
- “Fever” leaves the accompaniment spare, with only Bob Moore's bass, finger snaps and percussion. Over that open space Elvis's low voice flows almost in a whisper.
- Compare his voice, lower and fuller than before his army service (a baritone), with his earlier recordings. In place of teenage giddiness, it carries an adult's weight.
VI. The comeback · 1968–1973
(Daughter) On February 1, 1968, his only child, Lisa Marie, was born. That April Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and in June Robert Kennedy. For a thirty-three-year-old singer who, trapped in the movie formula, had not stood before an audience in nearly seven years, it was a year in which private life and national tragedy came crashing in all at once. (Special) Steve Binder, the director in charge of the NBC special, proposed showing Elvis's roots instead of the Christmas-carol broadcast Parker wanted. Dressed in black leather, Elvis sat in a circle on a small stage with Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana and jammed. The closing number, “If I Can Dream,” had been written overnight by songwriter Earl Brown for a man shaken by the assassinations, and he sang it in a white suit, throwing his whole body into it. The December 3 broadcast was the highest-rated program of the week. (Memphis) In January 1969 he recorded in Memphis for the first time in 14 years. “In the Ghetto,” made at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio, is a song about the cycle of poverty and violence, and he insisted on releasing it even as his entourage, wary of social statements, urged him not to. “Suspicious Minds” became the last American number one of his lifetime. (Las Vegas) In July he began his first regular engagement in 8 years at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, backed by a band led by guitarist James Burton, a gospel chorus and an orchestra. In December 1970 he went to the White House and asked President Nixon for a narcotics agent's badge. In January 1973 the satellite broadcast “Aloha from Hawaii” aired in many countries, and in October of the same year he and Priscilla divorced.
A song from his first Memphis sessions in 14 years, it became the last American number one of his lifetime.
- Midway through, the tempo suddenly slows and the song shifts into a connecting passage (the bridge) that sways in threes (6/8 time). Follow how the tension briefly eases, then drives back up into the original beat.
- The false ending near the close, where the sound dwindles and then swells again (a fade-out), was added later by producer Felton Jarvis. Chips Moman, who ran the session, is said to have disliked it.
- Over the solid rhythm of the Memphis players, horns, strings and a female chorus were layered on afterward (overdubbing). Listen to the sound thicken layer by layer as it heads into the chorus.
- On the Las Vegas stage he stretched this song out for several minutes, dropping to his knees and sweeping across the stage. It is worth comparing footage of a 1970 show with the studio version.
VII. Nights at Graceland · 1973–1977
(Money) In 1973 Parker struck a deal with RCA that sold the future royalty rights to everything Elvis had recorded up to then for a lump sum of $5.4 million. Parker took a large share of it, and Elvis lost all future income from those recordings. In the estate litigation after his death, the court-appointed attorney reported that the deal had been grossly unfavorable to Elvis. (Health) He suffered from glaucoma, high blood pressure, intestinal ailments and weight gain, and lived on sedatives, painkillers and stimulants prescribed by several doctors. More and more often he lost the lyrics onstage or rambled on between songs. Red West and Sonny West, bodyguards fired in 1976, published a book about his drug use the following year, and Elvis is said to have been deeply distressed even before it came out. (Successors) Younger musicians who idolized him came to call. In 1974 members of Led Zeppelin met him in Los Angeles. Elton John recalled being shocked at how frail Elvis looked when they met at a concert in 1976. That April, Bruce Springsteen climbed the wall at Graceland after a Memphis show and was caught by a guard and sent away. (The end) His last concert was at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis on June 26, 1977. That month, taping a CBS special, he sat at the piano and sang “Unchained Melody.” On the afternoon of August 16 he was found collapsed in a bathroom at Graceland and was pronounced dead at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. He was forty-two. The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, but how much the large quantities of prescription drugs contributed is still debated. He was buried beside his mother in Graceland's Meditation Garden, and Lisa Marie, who died in 2023, was laid to rest in the same garden.
He sang this at the piano while taping a CBS special two months before his death. His body was failing, but it remains a kind of testimony that his voice alone never betrayed him, right to the end.
- At the heart of the accompaniment is the piano Elvis plays himself. Striking plain, somewhat rough chords, he drives the beat along with the song.
- In the footage, his old friend Charlie Hodge stands beside the piano holding the microphone for him. The sight alone shows how much he needed something to lean on in his final years.
- Though he seems short of breath, he pushes the final high note long and hard. Listen to the end of the song, the moment his voice climbs highest.
- The version on the posthumous album “Moody Blue” is known to be a recording from a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that April, with accompaniment overdubbed.
Lesser-known stories
(Audition) Around 1954 Elvis auditioned for the Songfellows, a young gospel quartet nurtured by the Blackwood Brothers, and was turned down. Biographers say he had long dreamed of joining a gospel quartet. Just before he became the emblem of rock and roll, the place he truly wanted was the church stage, but the episode was soon eclipsed by the explosive success that followed. That all three of his Grammys were for gospel records can be read in the same light. (Jet) In 1957 a rumor spread that Elvis had made a remark insulting Black people. The Black magazine “Jet” sent reporter Louie Robinson to a film set to check for himself, and reported that Elvis had never said any such thing and had never even been to the place named in the rumor. In that interview Elvis said he had learned from Black musicians. The rumor kept circulating, and the article was long forgotten until biographers brought it back to light. (Borders) Elvis's performances outside the United States were almost entirely limited to Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver, Canada, in 1957. Colonel Parker's real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk; an illegal immigrant from Breda in the Netherlands, he had no U.S. passport. The fact became official in the early 1980s, when Parker himself asserted in the estate litigation that he was not an American citizen, and biographers cite it as the reason he turned down offer after offer of overseas tours. (Twin) His twin brother, Jesse Garon, was buried in an unmarked grave in Tupelo. Elvis spoke of his brother often throughout his life, and a memorial plaque honoring him was later placed beside the family in Graceland's Meditation Garden.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Rockabilly
(Meaning) A blend of rock and hillbilly. Hillbilly was a disparaging term for the people of the mountains of the American South, and was once also the name for the country music they enjoyed. (In rock) The early rock and roll created in the mid-1950s by young white Southerners who mixed country music with the bouncing beat of Black rhythm and blues. Its hallmarks are electric guitar, a double bass with strings slapped by hand, and vocals coated in a short echo. Just as mixing tteokbokki with cream pasta gave rise to a new flavor, rosé tteokbokki, two musics from different neighborhoods combined into an entirely new sound.
Rhythm and blues
(Meaning) A combination of rhythm (beat) and blues (melancholy songs). It came into wide use in 1949, when the music magazine Billboard renamed its Black music chart from race records to this term. (In rock) Music made in the 1940s and '50s by Black American musicians who added a strong beat, saxophone and piano to the blues to make it good for dancing. Many of the first songs Elvis sang were in this style. Think of it as music that tells a sad story yet, like a jump-rope rhythm, gets your body moving first. (Elsewhere) Today R&B usually refers to the smooth pop music of the 1990s onward, quite different from the sound of Elvis's era.
Slapback echo
(Meaning) Slapback means smacking against something and bouncing back, and an echo is a reverberation. (In rock) An echo that follows the original sound once, after a very short interval. Sam Phillips of Sun Records created the effect by having a tape recorder play back what it had just recorded a split second later, and it became the signature of Elvis's early recordings. Like the near-instant thwack that comes back when you hurl a ball hard against a gym wall, that brief rebound makes the voice sound bigger and more excited.
Slap bass
(Meaning) Slap means to smack. (In rock) A technique of pulling the strings of a person-high double bass hard and letting go, so that they strike the wooden fingerboard with a click. Because it produces low notes and a percussive sound at once, Bill Black's bass did the drums' job as well in Elvis's early, drumless trio. It is like stretching a rubber band and letting go: you hear a twang along with the snap against your finger. (Elsewhere) Since the 1970s, a different electric-bass technique of striking the strings with the thumb has gone by the same name.
Stop time
(Meaning) A beat (time) that stops (stop). (In rock) A technique in which the accompaniment repeatedly strikes only the start of the beat and then stops, with the voice or a solo filling the gap. In “Heartbreak Hotel,” it is the moment the accompaniment drops out and only the voice is left hanging in the air. As in freeze tag, when “it” shouts “Freeze!” and everyone stops but one, the remaining sound seems all the louder because everything else has stopped.
Fade-out
(Meaning) To fade means for a color or a sound to grow faint. (In rock) A way of ending a song not abruptly but by gradually lowering the volume until it disappears. “Suspicious Minds” is famous for its false fade-out, in which the sound dwindles and then swells again. It is like a friend's voice growing fainter as they move away across the schoolyard, then louder as they run back. (Elsewhere) In film and video, it refers to the picture gradually darkening as a scene ends.
Gospel
(Meaning) From the Old English godspel, “good news.” The Sino-Korean word bogeum (福音) likewise means 'blessed sound,' so the two words mean the same thing. (In rock) Songs sung in praise of faith in American churches, especially the fervent choirs and quartets of Black and white churches. Elvis loved this music above all others his whole life, and all three of his Grammys were for gospel records. The heat of a whole class swaying and singing a cheer in one voice on school sports day is close to the mood of this music. (Elsewhere) In English, “gospel truth” means a truth beyond any doubt.