Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8,
1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural
icons of the 20th century, he is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or
simply "the King".
Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee with his family when he was
13 years old. His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song
with producer Sam Phillips at Sun
Records. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty
Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was an early popularizer of rockabilly,
an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country
music and rhythm and blues. RCA Victor
acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who managed the singer for more
than two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak
Hotel", was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in
the United States. He was regarded as the leading figure of rock
and roll after a series of successful network television appearances and
chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually
provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of
influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously
popular—and controversial.
In November 1956, Presley made
his film debut in Love Me Tender. In 1958, he was drafted
into military service. He resumed his recording career two years later,
producing some of his most commercially successful work before devoting much of
the 1960s to making Hollywood films and their accompanying soundtrack albums,
most of which were critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break
from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed televised
comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las
Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours.
In 1973, Presley featured in the first globally broadcast concert via
satellite, Aloha from Hawaii. On August
16, 1977, he suffered a heart attack in his Graceland
estate, and died as a result. His death came in the wake of many years of
prescription drug abuse.
Presley is one of the most
celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century. Commercially
successful in many genres, including pop, blues and gospel,
he is one of the best-selling solo artists in the
history of recorded music, with estimated record sales of around 600 million
units worldwide.[5] He
won three Grammys, also receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame.
Childhood in
Tupelo
Presley was born on January 8,
1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Gladys Love (née
Smith; 1912 – 1958) and Vernon Elvis Presley (1916 – 1979),
in the two-room shotgun house built by Vernon's father in preparation
for the child's birth. Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was
delivered stillborn
35 minutes before his own birth.
Jesse was buried in an unmarked grave at Priceville Cemetery in Tupelo.
After Presley became famous, he asked people on several occasions to try and
find the whereabouts of Jesse but to no avail since no papers marked the spot.
Presley became close to both parents and formed an especially close bond with
his mother. The family attended an Assembly
of God, where he found his initial musical inspiration. Although he was in
conflict with the Pentecostal church in his later years, he never
officially left it.
Rev. Rex
Humbard officiated at his funeral, as Presley had been an admirer of
Humbard's ministry.
Presley's ancestry was
primarily a Western European mix, including German,Scots-Irish, Scottish,
and some French
Norman. Gladys would often tell the family that before the Civil War, her great-great-grandmother, Morning
Dove White, was a 'full-blooded Cherokee Indian',
although some genealogists doubt the claim.Elaine
Dundy in her book Elvis
and Gladys, claims that Presley's great-great-grandmother Nancy Burdine
Tackett was Jewish, citing a third cousin of Presley's, Oscar Tackett.
However, there is no evidence that the Presley family shared this belief and
the syndicated columnist Nate Bloom has challenged the cousin's account, which
he calls a "tall tale".
Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the
small family. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evincing little
ambition.The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance.
The Presleys survived the F5 tornado in the 1936 Tupelo–Gainesville tornado
outbreak. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of kiting a
check written by the landowner, Orville S. Bean, the dairy farmer and
cattle-and-hog broker for whom he then worked. He was jailed for eight months,
and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley
entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his instructors regarded
him as "average".
He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher
with a rendition of Red Foley's country
song "Old
Shep" during morning prayers. The contest, held at the
Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, was his first
public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the ten-year-old Presley stood on a
chair to reach the microphone and sang "Old Shep". He recalled
placing fifth.
A few months later, Presley received his first guitar for his birthday; he had
hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle.
Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his
uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I
took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But
I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."
OLD SHEP
Entering a new school, Milam,
for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as a loner. The
following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He played and
sang during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who
played hillbilly
music. The family was by then living in a largely African-American
neighborhood.
A devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the
Tupelo radio station WELO,
Presley was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger
brother, a classmate of Presley's, who often took him into the station. Slim
supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques.
When his protégé was 12 years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air
performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but
succeeded in performing the following week.
Teenage life
in Memphis
In November 1948, the family
moved to Memphis, Tennessee. After residing for nearly a
year in rooming houses, they were granted a two-bedroom
apartment in the public housing complex known as
the Lauderdale Courts.
Enrolled at L. C. Humes High School, Presley received only a
C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher told him he had no aptitude
for singing, he brought in his guitar the next day and sang a recent hit,
"Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me", in an effort to prove otherwise.
A classmate later recalled that the teacher "agreed that Elvis was right
when he said that she didn't appreciate his kind of singing."He was usually too shy to perform openly, and was occasionally bullied by
classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy".
In 1950, he began practicing guitar regularly under the tutelage of Jesse Lee
Denson, a neighbor two-and-a-half years his senior. They and three other
boys—including two future rockabilly pioneers, brothers Dorsey
and Johnny Burnette—formed a loose musical collective
that played frequently around the Courts.
That September, he began ushering at Loew's State Theater.
Other jobs followed, including Precision Tool, Loew's again, and MARL Metal
Products.
During his junior year,
Presley began to stand out more among his classmates, largely because of his
appearance: he grew out his sideburns and styled his hair with rose oil and
Vaseline. In his free time, he would head down to Beale
Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and
gaze longingly at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky
Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing them.
Overcoming his reticence about performing outside the Lauderdale Courts, he
competed in Humes's Annual "Minstrel" show in April 1953. Singing and
playing guitar, he opened with "Till I Waltz Again with You", a
recent hit for Teresa Brewer. Presley recalled that the performance
did much for his reputation: "I wasn't popular in school ... I failed
music—only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent
show ... when I came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and
whispering and so forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how
popular I became after that".
Presley, who never received
formal music training or learned to read music, studied and played by ear. He
also frequented record stores with jukeboxes and
listening booths. He knew all of Hank Snow's
songs,
and he loved records by other country singers such as Roy Acuff,
Ernest
Tubb, Ted
Daffan, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmie
Davis, and Bob Wills.
The Southern gospel singer Jake Hess,
one of his favorite performers, was a significant influence on his
ballad-singing style.
He was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings downtown,
where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected the influence of
African-American spiritual music.
He adored the music of black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Like some of his peers, he may have attended blues venues—of necessity, in the segregated South, on only
the nights designated for exclusively white audiences.
He certainly listened to the regional radio stations, such as WDIA-AM, that
played "race records": spirituals, blues, and the modern, backbeat-heavy
sound of rhythm and blues.
Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African-American musicians
such as Arthur Crudup and Rufus
Thomas.B.B. King
recalled that he had known Presley before he was popular, when they both used
to frequent Beale Street.
By the time he graduated from high school in June 1953, Presley had already
singled out music as his future.
1953–1955:
First recordings
Sam Phillips
and Sun Records
Presley in a Sun
Records promotional photograph, 1954
In August 1953, Presley walked
into the offices of Sun Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of
studio time to record a two-sided acetate
disc: "My Happiness"
and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin".
He would later claim that he
intended the record as a gift for his mother, or that he was merely interested
in what he "sounded like", although there was a much cheaper, amateur
record-making service at a nearby general store. Biographer Peter
Guralnick argues that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered. Asked
by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of singer he was, Presley
responded, "I sing all kinds." When she pressed him on who he sounded
like, he repeatedly answered, "I don't sound like nobody." After he
recorded, Sun boss Sam Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young
man's name, which she did along with her own commentary: "Good ballad
singer. Hold."
In January 1954, Presley cut a
second acetate at Sun Records—"I'll Never Stand In Your Way"
and
"It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You"—but again nothing came of it.
Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the
Songfellows. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't
sing."
Songfellow Jim
Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate
an ear for harmony at the time.
In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck
driver.
His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he
contact Eddie
Bond, leader of Smith's professional band, which had an opening for a
vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck
driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer".
Phillips, meanwhile, was
always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience the
sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused. As Keisker reported,
"Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had
the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'"
In June, he acquired a demo recording of a ballad, "Without You",
that he thought might suit the teenage singer. Presley came by the studio, but
was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as
many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to
invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield
"Scotty" Moore and upright
bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a
recording session.
The
session, held the evening of July 5, 1954, proved entirely unfruitful until
late in the night. As they were about to give up and go home, Presley took his
guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right".
Moore recalled, "All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song,
jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he
started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think,
had the door to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said,
'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said,
'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'" Phillips quickly began
taping; this was the sound he had been looking for.
Three days
later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey
Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red, Hot, and
Blue show.
Listeners began
phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that
Phillips played the record repeatedly during the last two hours of his show.
Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended in
order to clarify his color for the many callers who had assumed he was black. During the next
few days, the trio recorded a bluegrass number, Bill Monroe's "Blue
Moon of Kentucky", again in a distinctive style and employing a
jury-rigged echo
effect that Sam Phillips dubbed "slapback". A single was
pressed with "That's All Right" on the A side and "Blue Moon of
Kentucky" on the reverse.
First
national TV appearances and debut album
On January 10, 1956, Presley
made his first recordings for RCA in Nashville.[
Extending the singer's by now customary backup of Moore, Black, and Fontana,
RCA enlisted pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarist Chet
Atkins, and three background singers, including first tenor Gordon Stoker
of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill out the sound.
The session produced the moody, unusual "Heartbreak
Hotel",
released as a single on January 27.
Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS's Stage Show for six appearances over two
months. The program, produced in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big
band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy
Dorsey. After his first appearance, on January 28, introduced by disc
jockey Bill
Randle, Presley stayed in town to record at RCA's New York studio. The
sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl
Perkins' rockabilly anthem "Blue
Suede Shoes".
In February, Presley's "I Forgot to Remember to Forget",
a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top of the Billboard
country chart.
Neal's contract was terminated and, on March 2, Parker became Presley's
manager.
On March 12, 1956,
Elvis purchased a one-story ranch-style house with two-car
attached garage
in a quiet residential neighborhood on Audubon Street in Memphis. The home was
profiled in national magazines, and soon became a focal point for fans, media
and celebrities to visit.
Elvis lived here with his parents between March 1956 and March 1957.
RCA Victor released Presley's eponymous debut album on March 23. Joined by
five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently recorded tracks
were of a broad variety. There were two country songs and a bouncy pop tune.
The others would centrally define the evolving sound of rock
and roll: "Blue Suede Shoes"—"an improvement over Perkins'
in almost every way", according to critic Robert
Hilburn—and three R&B numbers that had been part of Presley's stage
repertoire for some time, covers of Little
Richard,
Ray
Charles, and The Drifters. As described by Hilburn, these
"were the most revealing of all. Unlike many white artists ... who
watered down the gritty edges of the original R&B versions of songs in the
'50s, Presley reshaped them. He not only injected the tunes with his own vocal
character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead instrument in all three
cases."
It became the first rock-and-roll album to top the Billboard chart, a
position it held for 10 weeks.[93]
While Presley was not an innovative guitarist like Moore or contemporary
African American rockers Bo Diddley and Chuck
Berry, cultural historian Gilbert B. Rodman argues that the album's cover
image, "of Elvis having the time of his life on stage with a guitar in
his hands played a crucial role in positioning the guitar ... as the
instrument that best captured the style and spirit of this new music."
Milton Berle
Show and "Hound Dog"
Presley made the first of two
appearances on NBC's Milton Berle Show on April 3. His performance,
on the deck of the USS Hancock in San Diego,
prompted cheers and screams from an audience of sailors and their dates.
A few days later, a flight taking Presley and his band to Nashville for a
recording session left all three badly shaken when an engine died and the plane
almost went down over Arkansas.
Twelve weeks after its original release, "Heartbreak Hotel" became
Presley's first number-one pop hit. In late April, Presley began a two-week
residency at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino on the Las
Vegas Strip. The shows were poorly received by the conservative,
middle-aged hotel guests—"like
a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party," wrote a critic for Newsweek.
Amid his Vegas tenure, Presley, who had serious acting ambitions, signed a
seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures.
He began a tour of the Midwest in mid-May, taking in 15 cities in as many days.
He had attended several shows by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys in
Vegas and was struck by their cover of "Hound
Dog", a hit in 1953 for blues singer Big
Mama Thornton by songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.[
It became the new closing number of his act.
After a show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, an urgent message on the
letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J.
Edgar Hoover. It warned that "Presley is a definite danger to the
security of the United States. ... [His] actions and motions were such as
to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. ... After the show, more
than 1,000 teenagers tried to gang into Presley's room at the
auditorium. ... Indications of the harm Presley did just in La Crosse were
the two high school girls ... whose abdomen and thigh had Presley's autograph.
The second Milton Berle
Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another
hectic tour. Berle persuaded the singer to leave his guitar backstage,
advising, "Let 'em see you, son."
During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of
"Hound Dog"
with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding
version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.
Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy.
Newspaper critics were outraged: Jack Gould
of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley
has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called
that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in
a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the
body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells
of the burlesque runway."
Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music
"has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one
Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an
exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism
that should be confined to dives and bordellos".
Ed
Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared
him "unfit for family viewing".
To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as
"Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish
expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."
The next day, Presley
recorded "Hound Dog", along with "Any
Way You Want Me"
and "Don't Be Cruel".
The Jordanaires sang harmony, as they had
on The Steve Allen Show; they would work with Presley through the 1960s.
A few days later, the singer made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis at
which he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna
change me none.
I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight."[ In August, a judge in Jacksonville,
Florida, ordered Presley to tame his act. Throughout the following
performance, he largely kept still, except for wiggling his little finger
suggestively in mockery of the order. The single pairing "Don't
Be Cruel" with "Hound Dog" ruled the top of the charts for 11
weeks—a mark that would not be surpassed for 36 years. Recording sessions for
Presley's second album took place in Hollywood during the first week of
September. Leiber and Stoller, the writers of "Hound Dog,"
contributed "Love Me."
Each of the three Presley singles
released in the first half of 1957 went to number one: "Too Much",
"All Shook Up",
and "(Let Me Be
Your) Teddy Bear".
Already an international star, he was
attracting fans even where his music was not officially released. Under the
headline "Presley Records a Craze in Soviet", The New York Times
reported that pressings of his music on discarded X-ray plates were commanding
high prices in Leningrad.Between film shoots and
recording sessions, the singer also found time to purchase an 18-room mansion
eight miles (13 km) south of downtown Memphis for himself and his parents:
Graceland. When he reported to the film
studio for his second film, the Technicolor Loving You,
released in July, "The makeup man said that with his eyes he should
photograph well with black hair, so they dyed it."[ Loving You,
the accompanying soundtrack, was Presley's third straight number one album. The
title track was written by Leiber and Stoller, who were then retained to write
four of the six songs recorded at the sessions for Jailhouse Rock,
where Presley was buried next to his mother.
Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the country and UK pop charts
Following an attempt to steal
the singer's body in late August, the remains of both Presley and his mother
were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
WIKI & YOUTUBE
WIKI & YOUTUBE
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