Introduction
Elvis Presley (born January 8, 1935, Tupelo, Mississippi, U.S.—died August 16, 1977, Memphis, Tennessee) was an American popular singer widely known as the “King of Rock and Roll” and one of rock music’s dominant performers from the mid-1950s until his death. Presley revolutionized popular music with his electrifying performances and enduring influence on generations of recording artists. His meteoric rise from poverty to stardom followed by his death at age 42 contributed to his becoming a mythical figure in American pop culture.
Presley grew up dirt-poor in Tupelo, Mississippi, moved to Memphis as a teenager, and, with his family, was off welfare for only a few weeks when producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records, a local blues label, responded to his audition tape with a phone call. Several weeks worth of recording sessions ensued with a band consisting of Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black. Their repertoire consisted of the kind of material for which Presley would become famous: blues and country songs, Tin Pan Alley ballads, and gospel hymns. Presley knew some of this music from the radio, some of it from his parents’ Pentecostal church and the group sings he attended at the Rev. H.W. Brewster’s Black Memphis church, and some of it from the Beale Street blues clubs he began frequenting as a teenager.
Presley was already a flamboyant personality, with relatively long greased-back hair and wild-colored clothing combinations, but his full musical personality did not emerge until he and the band began playing with blues singer Arthur (“Big Boy”) Crudup’s song “That’s All Right Mama” in July 1954. They arrived at a startling synthesis, eventually dubbed rockabilly, retaining many of the original’s blues inflections but with Presley’s high tenor voice adding a lighter touch and with the basic rhythm striking a much more supple groove.
Colonel Tom Parker and national celebrity
Presley’s management was then turned over to Colonel Tom Parker, a country music hustler who had made stars of Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow. Parker arranged for Presley’s song catalog and recording contract to be sold to major New York City-based enterprises, Hill and Range and RCA Victor, respectively. Sun received a total of $35,000; Elvis got $5,000. He began recording at RCA’s studios in Nashville, Tennessee, with a somewhat larger group of musicians but still including Moore, Black, and Fontana, and began to create a national sensation with a series of hits: “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and “Love Me Tender” (all 1956), “All Shook Up” (1957), and more.
Presley’s immediate influence and impact
Presley became the teen idol of his decade, greeted everywhere by screaming hordes of young women, and, when it was announced in early 1958 that he had been drafted and would enter the U.S. Army, there was that rarest of all pop culture events, a moment of true grief. More important, he served as the great cultural catalyst of his period. Elvis projected a mixed vision of humility and self-confidence, of intense commitment and comic disbelief in his ability to inspire frenzy. He inspired literally thousands of musicians—initially those more or less like-minded Southerners, from Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins on down, who were the first generation of rockabillies, and, later, people who had far different combinations of musical and cultural influences and ambitions. From John Lennon to Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan to Prince, it was impossible to think of a rock star of any importance who did not owe an explicit debt to Presley.
Beyond even that, Presley inspired his audience. “It was like he whispered his dream in all our ears and then we dreamed it,” said Springsteen at the time of Presley’s death. You did not have to want to be a rock and roll star or even a musician to want to be like Elvis—which meant, ultimately, to be free and uninhibited and yet still a part of the everyday. Literally millions of people—an entire generation or two—defined their sense of personal style and ambition in terms that Elvis first personified.
As a result, he was anything but universally adored. Those who did not worship him found him despicable (no one found him ignorable). Preachers and pundits declared him an anathema, his Pentecostally derived hip-swinging stage style and breathy vocal asides obscene. Racists denounced him for mingling Black music with white (and Presley was always scrupulous in crediting his Black sources, one of the things that made him different from the Tin Pan Alley writers and singers who had for decades lifted Black musical styles without credit). He was pronounced responsible for all teenage hooliganism and juvenile delinquency. Yet, in every appearance on television, he appeared affable, polite, and soft-spoken, almost shy. It was only with a band at his back and a beat in his ear that he became “Elvis the Pelvis.”
Military service, movies, and mainstreaming
In 1959, while stationed in West Germany—where he served as a soldier rather than joining the Special Services entertainment division—Presley met Priscilla Beaulieu, who was 14 years old at the time (Presley was 24). They started a romantic relationship that continued after Presley returned to the United States in 1960. When he resumed his musical career, those who regarded him as commercial hype without talent expected him to fade away. Instead, he continued to have hits from recordings stockpiled just before he entered the army.
Presley picked up pretty much where he had left off, churning out a series of more than 30 movies—from Blue Hawaii (1961) to Change of Habit (1969)—over the next eight years, almost none of which fit any genre other than “Elvis movie,” which meant a light comedic romance with musical interludes. Most had accompanying soundtrack albums, and together the movies and the records made him a rich man, although they nearly ruined him as any kind of artist.
Presley did his best work in the 1960s on singles either unconnected to the films or only marginally stuck into them, recordings such as “It’s Now or Never (‘O Sole Mio’)” (1960), “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Little Sister” (both 1961), “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return to Sender” (both 1962), and “Viva Las Vegas” (1964). Presley was no longer a controversial figure: he had become one more predictable mass entertainer, a personage of virtually no interest to the rock audience that had expanded so much with the advent of the new sounds of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan.
By 1968 the changes in the music world had overtaken Presley—both movie grosses and record sales had fallen. In December his one-man Christmas TV special aired: a tour de force of rock and roll and rhythm and blues, it restored much of his dissipated credibility. In 1969 he released a single having nothing to do with a film, “Suspicious Minds”; it went to number one. He also began doing concerts again and quickly won back a sizable following, although it was not nearly as universal as his audience in the 1950s; in the main, it was Southern and Midwestern, working-class, and overwhelmingly female. For much of the next decade, he was again one of the top live attractions in the United States. (For a variety of reasons, he never performed outside North America.) Presley was now a mainstream American entertainer, an icon but not so much an idol.
Marriage, reclusion at Graceland, and death
In 1967 he married Priscilla Beaulieu without much furor. The next year he became a parent with the birth of their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley eventually grew apart separating in 1972 and divorcing the following year.
Presley made no more movies, although there was a good concert film, Elvis on Tour (1972). His recordings were of uneven quality, but on each album he included a song or two that had focus and energy. Hit songs were harder to come by—“Suspicious Minds” was his last number one and “Burning Love” (1972) his final Top Ten entry. But, thanks to concerts, spectaculars best described by critic Jon Landau as an apotheosis of American musical comedy, he remained a big money earner. He now lacked the ambition and power of his early work, but that may have been a good thing: he never seemed a dated relic of the 1950s trying to catch up to trends but was just a performer, unrelentingly himself.