The story of Elvis Presley

Tupelo to Memphis

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on the eighth of January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Gladys and Vernon Presley. He arrived about half an hour after his twin brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn. That loss hung over the family and bound Elvis tightly to his mother. Vernon drifted from one odd job to the next, and the Presleys often relied on neighbours and government food aid. In 1938 things got worse. Vernon was found guilty of altering a check and spent eight months in jail, and the family lost their home. They worshipped at an Assembly of God church, and Gladys later remembered her two year old sliding off her lap, running up the aisle and standing in front of the choir, trying to sing along with them.[1] [2] [3]

His first public performance came on the third of October 1945, at a singing contest at the Mississippi Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Ten year old Elvis sang Old Shep, a sentimental ballad about a boy and his dog, and remembered finishing fifth. A few months later he got his first guitar for his birthday, and two uncles and the family pastor showed him the basics. He was still painfully shy about singing in front of people. At school he was teased as a trashy kid who played hillbilly music. His hero was a local radio singer called Mississippi Slim, whose younger brother was in his class. Slim showed him chord shapes and put the twelve year old on the air twice. The first time Elvis froze with stage fright. The following week he went through with it.[1]

In November 1948, when Elvis was thirteen, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. At L. C. Humes High School he was a shy boy who was sometimes bullied as a mama's boy, and he got a C in music. When his music teacher told him he had no aptitude for singing, he brought his guitar into class and sang for her to prove the point. By his junior year he had begun to stand out, with long sideburns and carefully styled hair. He would wander down to Beale Street, the heart of the Memphis blues scene, and gaze at the flashy clothes in the window of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year he was wearing them. In 1953 he sang at the school's annual variety show, and was amazed at how popular it made him overnight.[1]

Elvis never learned to read music, but he soaked up everything by ear. He knew every Hank Snow song, loved Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb and Bob Wills, and idolised the gospel singer Jake Hess of the Statesmen Quartet. He went to the all night gospel singings downtown, where the Statesmen's bass singer jiggled his legs until women in the audience screamed. On the radio he found WDIA, which played what were then called race records, spirituals, blues and rhythm and blues. Local black musicians like Arthur Crudup and Rufus Thomas shaped much of what he would later record. When the songwriters Leiber and Stoller met him a few years later, they were astonished by how much blues he knew, and admitted he knew far more than they did about country and gospel. He graduated in June 1953 with his mind made up.[1]

The Sun sessions

In the summer of 1953 Elvis walked into the Memphis Recording Service, the little studio at 706 Union Avenue run by Sam Phillips, and paid to cut a two sided disc of My Happiness and That's When Your Heartaches Begin. He was eighteen and driving a truck for a living. The office manager, Marion Keisker, heard something in his voice and quietly switched on a tape recorder so she could play it to her boss. Nothing came of it for months. He cut a second disc in January 1954, and failed auditions for a gospel quartet called the Songfellows and for a local band. Then in June Phillips called him in to try a ballad from a demo he had found. Elvis could not do it justice, but Phillips asked him to sing whatever else he knew, and liked what he heard.[1] [2]

Phillips paired him with two local musicians from a country band called the Starlite Wranglers, the guitarist Scotty Moore and the upright bass player Bill Black. On the evening of the fifth of July 1954 the three of them worked through ballads and country songs for hours, and nothing caught fire. Late that night, as they were about to give up, Elvis started fooling around with That's All Right, a 1946 blues by Arthur Crudup. Bill joined in slapping his bass, Scotty followed on guitar, and Phillips stuck his head out of the control room to ask what on earth they were doing. None of them knew. He told them to find a starting point and do it again, and hit record. It was the sound he had been searching for. Black reportedly joked that if it got on the radio, they would all be run out of town.[1] [2] [3]

Phillips took the recording to his friend Dewey Phillips, no relation, who hosted the wild Red, Hot and Blue show on WHBQ. Three days after the session Dewey played it, and the phones lit up so fast he spun it again and again for the rest of the night. He hauled the nervous nineteen year old into the studio for an interview and asked which high school he went to. It was a quiet trick. In segregated Memphis, the answer Humes told listeners that the singer many of them assumed was black was in fact white. Within days the trio cut Bill Monroe's bluegrass waltz Blue Moon of Kentucky, sped up into something new and wrapped in the echo Sam called slapback. It became the other side of the single, and for months it was actually the more popular of the two.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The trio played its first public show at the Bon Air club on the seventeenth of July 1954. Later that month, at the Overton Park Shell, nerves and rhythm made Elvis shake his legs inside his wide cut trousers, and young women started screaming. He did not understand why, until Scotty told him it was the way he shook his left leg. In October he made his only appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, whose manager told Sam Phillips the boy was not bad but did not suit the show. The rival Louisiana Hayride took him instead, and signed him for a year of Saturday nights. Billed as the Hillbilly Cat and the Memphis Flash, he became a regional star, and the Hayride's house drummer, D. J. Fontana, joined the band.[1] [2] [3]

Radio was wary. According to his manager Bob Neal, country disc jockeys thought he sounded too black and rhythm and blues stations thought he sounded too hillbilly. But the crowds kept growing. In early 1955 Neal introduced him to Colonel Tom Parker, a former carnival man who managed the country star Hank Snow. Parker booked Elvis on Snow's tour and by August was his special adviser. Sam Phillips knew his little label could not take Elvis national, and set his price at forty thousand dollars, an unheard of sum. On the twenty first of November 1955 RCA Victor paid it. Elvis was twenty and still legally a minor, so his father signed the papers. Phillips invested some of his windfall in a young motel chain called Holiday Inn.[1] [2] [3]

Nineteen fifty six

Elvis made his first RCA recordings in Nashville on the tenth of January 1956, with Scotty, Bill and D. J., the pianist Floyd Cramer, Chet Atkins on guitar, and backing singers including Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires. The session produced Heartbreak Hotel, a brooding, echo soaked song written by a Florida schoolteacher and publicist, Mae Boren Axton, with Tommy Durden. When Axton first played Elvis the demo in a Nashville hotel room, he made her play it ten times and had it memorised. Radio was slow to bite, and RCA's producer Steve Sholes nervously phoned Sam Phillips late one night to ask whether they had signed the wrong man. Phillips told him they had not. Twelve weeks after its release, Heartbreak Hotel became Elvis's first number one pop hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Colonel Parker was already marching him onto national television, starting with six appearances on the Dorsey brothers' Stage Show from late January. In March RCA released his first album, simply called Elvis Presley. It mixed leftover Sun tracks with new recordings, including a tougher take on Carl Perkins's Blue Suede Shoes and covers of Little Richard, Ray Charles and the Drifters, with guitar rather than piano leading the way. It became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard chart, and stayed there for ten weeks. On the third of April he appeared on The Milton Berle Show from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hancock in San Diego. A few days later his plane to Nashville lost an engine and nearly came down over Arkansas.[1] [2]

His second Berle appearance, on the fifth of June, lit the fuse. Berle persuaded him to leave his guitar backstage, and halfway through Hound Dog Elvis slowed the song to a grinding crawl and moved his hips in a way network television had never shown. The reviews were savage. The New York Times said he had no discernible singing ability, and the Daily News compared his act to something from a burlesque club. Ed Sullivan declared him unfit for family viewing, and the papers christened him Elvis the Pelvis, a nickname he called childish. After one show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a letter was even sent to the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, warning that Elvis Presley was a danger to the security of the United States.[1]

Steve Allen booked him next, on the first of July, and set out to tame him. Elvis wore a tuxedo and sang Hound Dog to a real basset hound in a top hat, which he later called the most ridiculous performance of his career. The next day he recorded Hound Dog and Don't Be Cruel, and that single spent eleven weeks at number one, a record that stood for thirty six years. Allen had beaten Sullivan in the ratings, so Sullivan changed his mind and paid an unprecedented fifty thousand dollars for three appearances. The first, on the ninth of September 1956, was hosted by the actor Charles Laughton because Sullivan was recovering from a car crash. Around sixty million people watched, more than eighty percent of the television audience that night.[1] [2]

His film debut followed in November. A western called The Reno Brothers was renamed Love Me Tender after his new ballad, which had drawn a million advance orders, and four songs were squeezed into what had been a straight acting role. Critics panned it and audiences flocked to it. On the fourth of December Elvis dropped by Sun Studio while Carl Perkins was recording with a young Jerry Lee Lewis on piano. A jam session of mostly gospel and country songs broke out, Johnny Cash posed for photographs, and the engineer Jack Clement let the tape roll. The local paper called it the Million Dollar Quartet. By the end of the year Presley merchandise had earned twenty two million dollars, and Elvis alone accounted for more than half of RCA's singles sales.[1] [2] [3]

Graceland, the draft and a mother's death

In January 1957 Elvis made his third and last Sullivan appearance, and this time the cameras really did stay above his waist. He closed with the gospel song Peace in the Valley, and Sullivan told the nation he was a real decent, fine boy. On the nineteenth of March he bought Graceland, a colonial style mansion on the southern edge of Memphis, for one hundred and two thousand five hundred dollars, and moved his parents in. That year Frank Sinatra attacked rock and roll as music made by cretinous goons. Elvis answered politely that he admired the man, but thought he should not have said it. The crowds grew wilder. A Detroit paper warned that going to see Elvis could get you killed, and in Vancouver the audience destroyed the stage.[1] [2]

The songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller became his lucky charm. They wrote most of the songs for Jailhouse Rock, and Leiber marvelled that Elvis learned any demo they gave him in about ten minutes. Elvis is credited with choreographing the famous prison dance number himself, and during filming one of his dental caps came loose and lodged in his lung, costing him a night in hospital. Then came tragedy. His co star Judy Tyler and her husband were killed in a car crash days after filming ended, and Elvis was too upset to attend the premiere. Late in 1957 Scotty Moore and Bill Black, still on small weekly wages while Elvis became a millionaire, resigned by letter. He hired them back weeks later, but only on a per show basis.[1] [2] [3]

On the twentieth of December 1957 Elvis received his draft notice. Parker could have steered him into Special Services, the Army's entertainment branch, but persuaded him to serve as an ordinary soldier to win over the parents who hated him. He was allowed to finish the film King Creole first, then was inducted on the twenty fourth of March 1958, with the press on hand for the famous Army haircut. During training at Fort Hood, Texas, his mother fell gravely ill. Gladys had been drinking heavily and taking diet pills, and her liver was failing. Elvis was at first refused emergency leave and threatened to go absent without leave before it was granted. He reached her bedside in Memphis on the twelfth of August. Two days later she died, aged forty six.[1] [2] [3]

Elvis collapsed with grief several times around the funeral and ordered that nothing in her room be changed. In October 1958 he shipped out to West Germany, serving with an armored division at Friedberg and living off base in nearby Bad Nauheim with his father, grandmother and friends. A sergeant introduced him to amphetamines on manoeuvres, and he became practically evangelical about them, the start of a lifelong dependence on pills. He also took up karate. He gave his Army pay to charity and bought television sets for the base. On the thirteenth of September 1959, at a party at his house, an airman introduced him to Priscilla Beaulieu, the stepdaughter of an Air Force officer. He was twenty four. She was fourteen.[1] [2] [3]

The Hollywood years

Elvis came home in March 1960. On the way his plane refuelled at Prestwick in Scotland, the only time he ever touched British soil, and a train carried him south past crowds at every stop. Within weeks he recorded the album Elvis Is Back, and the same sessions produced It's Now or Never, built on the Neapolitan song O Sole Mio, and Are You Lonesome Tonight?, both number one hits. In May he appeared on a television special hosted by Frank Sinatra, the same man who had sneered at rock and roll. Parker demanded one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for about eight minutes of singing, more than Sinatra himself was paid for the whole show. Sinatra agreed.[1] [2] [3]

Parker then steered him almost entirely into the movies. Elvis wanted serious roles, but when the dramas Flaming Star and Wild in the Country did less business, the formula took over: cheap musical comedies in exotic places, often three a year. He made twenty seven films in the 1960s. Critics mostly hated them, but nearly all of them made money, and the producer Hal Wallis called a Presley picture the only sure thing in Hollywood. The soundtrack songs got worse as the decade went on, and Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires remembered Elvis backing away from the microphone because the material was so bad. After a benefit concert in Hawaii in March 1961, raising money for the USS Arizona memorial, he did not perform in public again for seven years.[1] [2] [3]

By the mid 1960s the Beatles and the British bands had overtaken him. From 1964 to 1968 he had just one top ten hit, Crying in the Chapel, a gospel song he had recorded years earlier. Gospel remained his refuge. His 1967 album How Great Thou Art won him his first Grammy, and all three of his competitive Grammy wins would come for religious recordings. In October 1965 his old bass player Bill Black died of a brain tumour at thirty nine. Elvis stayed away from the funeral, fearing he would turn it into a media circus, and visited the family privately instead. Parker, meanwhile, raised his own share. From January 1967 he took fifty percent on some of Elvis's deals, telling critics that Elvis was his only client.[1] [2] [3]

Priscilla had moved to Memphis in 1963, two months before her eighteenth birthday, with her parents' reluctant permission. She finished school at a Catholic girls' academy and gradually moved into Graceland. Elvis, meanwhile, had affairs with several co stars, most famously the rumoured romance with Ann-Margret on Viva Las Vegas, and denied them all to Priscilla. Shortly before Christmas 1966 he proposed, reportedly after Parker reminded him of the morals clause in his RCA contract. They married on the first of May 1967 in an eight minute ceremony in a suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, followed by a press conference that Parker arranged. Their only child, Lisa Marie, was born on the first of February 1968, nine months to the day after the wedding.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The comeback

By 1968 Elvis was deeply unhappy. His singles were barely scraping the top forty. Parker sold NBC a Christmas special and pictured him in a tuxedo singing carols, but the director Steve Binder had other ideas. After watching Elvis jam with friends in his dressing room, Binder built a section where he sat on a small square stage surrounded by fans, swapping songs and jokes with Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana. Dressed in black leather, Elvis played and sang with a hunger nobody had seen in years. Parker failed to hand out the tickets he had promised, so the crew rounded up people from a restaurant across the street. The special aired on the third of December 1968 and was the most watched show of the season.[1] [2] [3]

The closing song grew out of national grief. Robert Kennedy was shot during rehearsals, two months after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, and Elvis was shaken by both. Binder had a new song written overnight, If I Can Dream, and when Parker objected, Binder played it straight to Elvis, who insisted on singing it. After seeing the finished show, Elvis told Binder it was the greatest thing he had ever done, and promised never again to sing a song he did not believe in. In early 1969 he went to American Sound Studio in Memphis with the producer Chips Moman and cut In the Ghetto and the album From Elvis in Memphis, which the critic Dave Marsh called a masterpiece.[1] [2]

Those sessions also produced Suspicious Minds, a flop for its writer Mark James that became Elvis's eighteenth and final American number one. It almost did not happen. Elvis's publishers demanded half of Moman's publishing rights, and Moman threatened to stop the session until RCA sided with him. On the thirty first of July 1969 Elvis opened at the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas, with a new band led by the guitarist James Burton and two gospel vocal groups. He walked on without an introduction and got a standing ovation before he sang a note. At the press conference, when a reporter called him the King, he pointed to Fats Domino in the room and said that was the real king of rock and roll.[1] [2] [3]

Las Vegas became his home base, and in 1970 he began wearing the jumpsuits that became his trademark and returned to touring for the first time since 1957. That August a caller threatened to kill him on stage unless fifty thousand dollars was paid. The FBI took it seriously, and Elvis went on with a Derringer in his boot and a pistol in his waistband. Nothing happened. That December, after a row with Priscilla and his father about his spending, he flew to Washington, wrote a letter to President Nixon on the plane and delivered it to the White House gate early in the morning. On the twenty first of December 1970 he met Nixon, offered to help fight the drug culture, and talked the President into giving him a narcotics bureau badge.[1] [2] [3]

Aloha and the unravelling

In June 1972 Elvis played four sold out shows at Madison Square Garden, the first performer to fill the arena four times in a row, and that summer Burning Love became his last top ten hit. Parker, inspired by the television coverage of Nixon's trip to China, then staged Aloha from Hawaii. On the fourteenth of January 1973, at half past midnight Honolulu time, Elvis performed live by satellite to prime time audiences across Asia and the Pacific, with delayed broadcasts in Europe and an American special in April. He had slimmed down for it, wore a white jumpsuit studded with an American eagle, and threw his cape into the crowd at the end. The concert raised seventy five thousand dollars for a cancer fund named after the Hawaiian songwriter Kui Lee.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His marriage had already fallen apart. Elvis had a string of affairs, and in 1971 one of them, with Joyce Bova, led to a pregnancy and an abortion that he never knew about. Priscilla, meanwhile, fell for the karate champion Mike Stone. The couple separated in February 1972, and that summer Linda Thompson, a former Miss Tennessee, moved into Graceland. In 1973, when four men rushed the stage at a Las Vegas show, apparently just overexcited fans, Elvis became convinced Stone had sent them to kill him. He raged for days that Stone must die, and his bodyguard Red West was alarmed enough to find out what a contract killing would cost, before Elvis let it drop. The divorce was finalised on the ninth of October 1973, and the couple left court arm in arm.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By then his health was collapsing. In 1973 he overdosed on barbiturates twice, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first, and late that year he was hospitalised with an addiction to the painkiller pethidine. His doctor, George Nichopoulos, later said Elvis felt that getting drugs from a doctor meant he was not a common junkie. Yet 1973 was also his busiest year, with one hundred and sixty eight concerts. That September, after Elvis attacked the Hilton chairman from the stage, he and Parker had a furious row. Elvis fired him, Parker announced that he quit, and demanded two million dollars. Within two weeks they had patched it up. The same year Parker sold RCA the rights to Elvis's entire back catalogue for five point four million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

Chances to break free kept slipping away. In 1975 Barbra Streisand offered him the male lead in her remake of A Star Is Born, the serious role he had always wanted. Parker answered with demands for a million dollars and half the profits, and the part went to Kris Kristofferson. Promoters in Saudi Arabia and South America offered millions for concerts abroad, and Parker turned every one down. Apart from a few shows in Canada in 1957, Elvis never performed outside North America. His decline was visible on stage. As early as 1974 a keyboard player watched him fall to his knees getting out of a limousine. In July 1976 his father fired three bodyguards, Red West, his cousin Sonny West and Dave Hebler, and the three began writing a book about everything they had seen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last year

In November 1976 Elvis began dating Ginger Alden, a twenty year old from Memphis who had grown up in beauty pageants, and two months later he proposed with a ring whose centre stone came from his own TCB ring. A Christmas wedding was planned for 1977. On stage, though, he was struggling badly. Overweight and dulled by medication, he forgot lyrics and cut shows short, and in March he could not get out of his hotel bed for a concert in Baton Rouge. He suffered from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon. Filmed in Omaha that June for a CBS special, his voice sounded small and uncertain. He gave his final concert at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis on the twenty sixth of June 1977.[1] [2] [3]

That summer the fired bodyguards published their book, Elvis: What Happened?, the first public account of his drug use. Elvis was devastated and had even offered money to stop it. Early on the eighth of August he rented the whole Libertyland amusement park in Memphis for himself and about ten friends. It was his last public appearance. On the sixteenth of August he was due to fly to Portland, Maine, to start another tour. In the early hours he played racquetball at Graceland with Ginger, his cousin Billy Smith and Billy's wife Jo. Then he sat at the piano in the racquetball building and sang a couple of songs, though accounts differ on which one was the last, before walking into the house to go to bed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That afternoon Ginger found him unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and he was pronounced dead at Baptist Memorial Hospital at half past three. He was forty two. People at Graceland later said it was obvious he had been gone for hours. President Jimmy Carter said Elvis had permanently changed the face of American popular culture. Thousands filed past his open casket, and one of his cousins accepted eighteen thousand dollars to secretly photograph the body for the National Enquirer, which put it on its best selling cover ever. On the eighteenth of August, the day of the funeral, a car crashed into a crowd of fans outside the gates, killing two young women. Around eighty thousand people lined the route to Forest Hill Cemetery.[1] [2]

He was buried beside his mother, but after an attempt to steal his body, both coffins were moved to the Meditation Garden at Graceland on the second of October. The cause of death became a scandal of its own. While the autopsy was still under way, the Memphis medical examiner Jerry Francisco announced a heart problem and insisted drugs played no role. Lab reports two months later found fourteen drugs in his system, ten of them in significant amounts. In 1980 Dr. Nichopoulos was charged with overprescribing. In the first eight months of 1977 alone he had prescribed more than ten thousand doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics in Elvis's name. A jury acquitted him, but his medical licence was later revoked for good.[1] [2] [3]

The afterlife of the King

Colonel Parker did not slow down. Asked what he would do now, he reportedly said he would just go right on managing him. He flew to New York to prepare merchandise deals before going to the funeral, where mourners noticed him in a Hawaiian shirt and baseball cap, keeping away from the casket. In 1980 a lawyer appointed to protect the young Lisa Marie investigated his management and called his fifty percent commission extortionate compared with the usual fifteen to twenty. The estate sued him, and in 1983 a settlement saw RCA pay him two million dollars for his rights to Elvis's recordings and contracts. Parker kept gambling heavily in Las Vegas. He died there in 1997, aged eighty seven, with an estate reportedly worth barely a million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

The estate itself was in trouble. Vernon Presley died in 1979 and Elvis's grandmother Minnie Mae in 1980, leaving Lisa Marie as the sole heir. Graceland cost half a million dollars a year to run, taxes were due, and her inheritance had shrunk to about a million dollars. Priscilla, now a trustee, studied other historic homes and hired a chief executive, Jack Soden. Graceland opened to the public on the seventh of June 1982 and earned back its investment within about a month. It became the second most visited house in America after the White House, and in 2006 a National Historic Landmark. By the time Lisa Marie inherited on her twenty fifth birthday in 1993, the estate was worth an estimated one hundred million dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lisa Marie grew up between Los Angeles and Graceland, and was nine when her father died. She later said her mother's boyfriend Michael Edwards behaved inappropriately towards her and sexually assaulted her as a teenager, an allegation she repeated in her posthumous memoir. In 1994, twenty days after divorcing the musician Danny Keough, she married Michael Jackson. That marriage ended in 1996, and a later one to Nicolas Cage lasted one hundred and seven days before he filed for divorce. She released three albums of her own, starting with the gold selling To Whom It May Concern in 2003, and recorded virtual duets with her father. She also spoke openly about an addiction to opioids that began after the birth of her twin daughters in 2008.[1]

Grief closed in on the family. On the twelfth of July 2020 Lisa Marie's son Benjamin Keough, twenty seven, died by suicide in California, and he was buried in the Meditation Garden. His mother never recovered. On the tenth of January 2023 she attended the Golden Globes, where Austin Butler won for playing her father. Two days later she went into cardiac arrest at home and died aged fifty four. The coroner found a bowel obstruction caused by scarring from weight loss surgery years earlier. She was buried beside Benjamin. Her daughter, the actress Riley Keough, became owner of Graceland, and in 2024 had to fight off a forged claim that her mother had pledged the house against a loan. A Missouri woman, Lisa Jeanine Findley, was arrested and charged over the scheme.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Elvis's legacy keeps renewing itself. He is estimated to have sold five hundred million records. A 2002 remix of A Little Less Conversation, first recorded for the comeback special, went to number one in more than twenty countries. In 2018 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Baz Luhrmann's 2022 biopic Elvis, starring Austin Butler, earned more than two hundred and eighty million dollars, and while making it Luhrmann found sixty eight boxes of forgotten concert footage in the Warner Bros archives. That became EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, which premiered in Toronto in September 2025. Little Richard once called Elvis an integrator who opened the door for black music. As of 2026, fans still gather at Graceland with candles every August.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley and Gladys Presley. Gladys was the centre of his world. Even as an adult he spoke to her in baby talk and pet names, and as a boy she rarely let him out of her sight. His fame frightened and isolated her, and she drank heavily and took diet pills. Her death in August 1958, while he was in the Army, devastated him. He designed her headstone himself, with both a cross and a Star of David.[1] [2] [3]

Elvis Presley and Colonel Tom Parker. Parker, a Dutch born former carnival man, built Elvis into a global business, took up to half of his earnings, pushed him into formula films and kept him from touring abroad. Elvis once called him a brilliant man. They fell out bitterly in 1973 and nearly split, but never did. Peter Guralnick compared them to a married couple who should have walked away but lacked the courage.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley. They met in Germany in 1959, when he was twenty four and she was fourteen, and she moved to Memphis in 1963. They married in 1967 and had Lisa Marie in 1968, but separated in 1972 after affairs on both sides. They stayed close after the divorce. Priscilla later rescued his estate by opening Graceland to the public in 1982.[1] [2] [3]

Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips. Phillips was searching for a white singer who could carry the feel of black music to a wider audience, and found him in a shy truck driver. He produced the Sun records that launched rockabilly, then sold the contract to RCA in 1955 for forty thousand dollars. When RCA panicked early on, Phillips reassured them they had signed the right man.[1] [2] [3]

Elvis Presley and Scotty Moore. Scotty's guitar defined the early records, and he briefly served as Elvis's first manager. But he and Bill Black stayed on small wages while Elvis got rich, and resigned in 1957 feeling walled off by the entourage. They were hired back, but drifted apart. The 1968 comeback special was the last time Scotty played with Elvis, and the last time he ever saw him.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Lisa Marie Presley. His only child was born in 1968 and was nine when he died. He named his Convair jet the Lisa Marie. She became sole heir, inherited the estate at twenty five, and later sang virtual duets with him on records and videos. She was buried near him at Graceland in 2023.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Red West. A friend from Humes High, Red drove the band in 1954, became Elvis's first bodyguard, played bit parts in sixteen of his films and wrote songs he recorded, including Separate Ways. Fired by Vernon Presley in 1976, he cowrote the tell all book published just before Elvis died, which hurt Elvis deeply.[1] [2] [3]

Elvis Presley and Linda Thompson. A former Miss Tennessee, Linda met Elvis at one of his late night private film screenings in July 1972 and lived with him for about four years. They split around Christmas 1976 because she wanted a normal life, but stayed friends. She later became a successful songwriter, cowriting I Have Nothing for The Bodyguard.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Ginger Alden. Elvis began dating Ginger in November 1976 and proposed two months later, planning a Christmas wedding in 1977. She was the one who found him on his bathroom floor at Graceland. He left her nothing in his will, and she later sold her story to a tabloid and wrote a memoir, Elvis and Ginger.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret. His co star in Viva Las Vegas in 1963 was the subject of a heavily publicised romance that Elvis denied to Priscilla. In her memoir Ann-Margret called him her soulmate but revealed little, beyond a round pink bed he bought her. She stayed close to him for the rest of his life and attended his funeral.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and George Nichopoulos. Dr. Nick began treating Elvis in 1967 for saddle sores and became his full time physician in 1970. He claimed he tried to wean Elvis off drugs, even making placebos, yet he prescribed thousands of doses in his name. Acquitted in 1981, he later lost his licence permanently, and served as a pallbearer at Elvis's funeral.[1] [2]

Elvis Presley and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The writers of Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and Don't became his good luck charm in 1957, effectively producing the Jailhouse Rock sessions. They were astonished by his knowledge of blues, country and gospel. Stoller said Parker and the entourage later walled Elvis off from them, and King Creole in 1958 was their last close collaboration.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Elvis Presley

• Elvis used both spellings of his middle name, Aron and Aaron, during his lifetime. Conspiracy theorists made much of the Aaron on his Graceland gravestone. In fact he used both spellings interchangeably, and wrote Aaron in his own hand on his divorce certificate.[1]
• Paul McCartney owns the upright bass that Bill Black played on Elvis's early records. Linda McCartney gave it to Paul as a birthday present in the late 1970s. He played it on the 1995 Beatles track Real Love and in his own version of Heartbreak Hotel.[1]
• While filming Jailhouse Rock, one of Elvis's dental caps came loose and lodged in his lung. He spent a night in hospital before filming resumed the next day. The same film's famous prison dance sequence is credited to his own choreography.[1]
• Elvis's only time on British soil was a refuelling stop at Prestwick airport in Scotland in 1960. His Army flight home from Germany stopped to refuel. Because he never left the airport, he was never legally in the United Kingdom.[1]
• Colonel Parker's Dutch sister recognised him in a magazine photo at her hairdresser's in 1960. Nel Dankers van Kuijk was flicking through a Belgian women's magazine in Eindhoven when she saw Elvis waving from a train, and her long lost brother standing behind him.[1] [2]
• When his Dutch brother visited, Parker boasted of painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries. Ad van Kuijk flew to America in 1961. Parker refused to be photographed with him, but took him to meet Elvis, and shared little beyond old carnival tricks.[1] [2]
• Elvis's first pink Cadillac burned up by the roadside in Arkansas in June 1955. A brake lining failed on the 1954 Cadillac. He bought a new one that July and had it repainted in a custom shade called Elvis Rose, then gave it to his mother, who never had a driving licence.[1]
• Otis Blackwell, who wrote Don't Be Cruel and All Shook Up, said he never met Elvis in person. Blackwell said so on Late Night with David Letterman. He had first given Don't Be Cruel to Frankie Valli's group, then asked for it back so Elvis could record it.[1]
• Ginger Alden's engagement ring used the centre stone from Elvis's own TCB ring. The diamond was about eleven and a half carats. Their wedding was set for Christmas Day 1977.[1]
• Dr. Nichopoulos was shot in the chest while watching a football game in 1979. He was not seriously hurt and nobody was ever arrested. He later suggested it must have been an angry Elvis fan.[1]
• Elvis named a converted Convair 880 airliner after his daughter, Lisa Marie. He spent more than a million dollars refurbishing it in 1975. It is on display at Graceland alongside his smaller jet, Hound Dog Two.[1] [2]
• The first known Elvis impersonator was performing in 1954, the same year Elvis made his first record. Carl Cheesie Nelson of Texarkana built a local radio following with Elvis's Sun songs and even performed alongside him. Andy Kaufman's impression was reportedly Elvis's own favourite.[1]
• The tale that Elvis entered an Elvis lookalike contest and came third is a myth. The Weekly World News ran it in 2005. It probably echoes a similar, equally unfounded story about Charlie Chaplin.[1]
• The critic Dave Marsh credits Scotty Moore with inventing the power chord on Jailhouse Rock. Keith Richards said that when he heard Heartbreak Hotel, everyone else wanted to be Elvis, but he wanted to be Scotty.[1]
• Elvis's Christmas Album became the best selling Christmas album ever in the United States. Recorded in 1957, it eventually sold more than twenty million copies worldwide. Leiber and Stoller wrote Santa Claus Is Back in Town on the spot at the session.[1]
• Bootleg Elvis records pressed on discarded X ray plates sold for high prices in Leningrad. The New York Times reported the trade in 1957, when his music was not officially released in the Soviet Union.[1]
• Parker sold I Love Elvis and I Hate Elvis badges at the same time. It was one of many merchandising tricks. By the end of 1956 more than seventy eight Presley products had earned twenty two million dollars.[1]
• On How Great Thou Art, Elvis sang every part of a four part gospel arrangement himself. The discographer Ernst Jorgensen described him as a one man quartet, from the bass introduction up to the operatic climax. The 1966 recording won him his first Grammy.[1]
• Before Aloha from Hawaii, Elvis lost about twenty five pounds in a month. The producer Marty Pasetta bluntly told him to lose weight. His eagle jumpsuit carried about six thousand five hundred stones, and he gave its belt away during rehearsals, forcing a rush replacement.[1]
• The photo of Elvis with Nixon is said to be the most requested item at the US National Archives. The Guardian reported it outstrips requests for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In their meeting Elvis also criticised the Beatles as anti American.[1]
• After meeting Nixon, Elvis toured FBI headquarters and offered himself as an undercover agent. He never met J. Edgar Hoover, but received a letter from him on the fourth of January 1971 acknowledging the offer.[1]
• Gladys Presley's headstone, designed by Elvis, carries both a Christian cross and a Star of David. It was stored in the Graceland archives for years and only placed in the Meditation Garden in 2018.[1]
• The Wilburn Brothers turned down Heartbreak Hotel, calling it strange and almost morbid. A local singer, Glenn Reeves, also dismissed the title as silly before agreeing to sing the demo in Elvis's style.[1]
• Elvis's last studio recordings were made in the Jungle Room at Graceland. In 1976 RCA turned the den into a recording studio, and most of his final albums, including Moody Blue, were cut there.[1] [2]
• Dolores Hart, who gave Elvis his first screen kiss, later became a Benedictine nun. She starred with him in two films, then left Hollywood five years after her last picture with him. A 2011 documentary tells her story.[1]
• After a Queen concert in the late 1970s, young Lisa Marie gave Freddie Mercury one of her father's scarves. It was her first rock concert, at the Forum in Inglewood, a year or two after Elvis died.[1]
• Bill Black's Combo opened for the Beatles on their 1964 American tour, at the Beatles' own request. Black himself was too ill to go. He died of a brain tumour the following year, aged thirty nine.[1]
• In 1956 Elvis flopped in Las Vegas, where a critic compared him to corn liquor at a champagne party. Parker cut the four week booking to two. Elvis returned to Las Vegas in 1969 and broke attendance records.[1] [2]
• Hal Wallis said he would rather try to close a deal with the Devil than with Colonel Parker. Wallis produced nine Elvis films, and still called a Presley picture the only sure thing in Hollywood.[1] [2]
• For the comeback special's sit down shows, rubber mats were placed under the musicians' feet. Producers worried that toe tapping would spoil the recording. Between shows, the costume team dried his sweat soaked leather suit with hair dryers.[1]
• Freddie Bell said he encouraged Elvis to record his version of Hound Dog. Bell's Las Vegas lounge act had reworked the song, and Scotty Moore admitted the band copied the arrangement. Bell said he did not feel bad about it at all.[1]
• Joe Esposito, Elvis's road manager, met him in the Army in West Germany. They had both trained at Fort Hood without meeting. Esposito was co best man at Elvis's wedding and worked for him for seventeen years.[1] [2]
• Charlie Hodge, who handed Elvis his scarves on stage, recommended guitarist James Burton for the 1969 band. Hodge met Elvis on the troopship to Germany, lived at Graceland for seventeen years, and helped escort the remains of Elvis and Gladys back to Graceland.[1] [2]
• Sonny West's 1970 wedding had Elvis as best man and Priscilla as matron of honour. The same month, Sonny accompanied Elvis to the White House and appears in the official photos with Nixon.[1]
• Muhammad Ali wore a robe that Elvis gave him before two fights in 1973. They became friends that year, and Ali was among the early celebrity visitors to Graceland in 1978.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.