Elvis Aaron (or Arona) Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American musician and actor. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley at the age of thirteen moved with his family to Memphis, Tennessee. He began his career there in 1954 as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong backbeat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited performances. With his commercial breakthrough in 1956, he was recognized as the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll. Presley had a versatile voice and unusually wide success encompassing many genres, including country, pop ballads, gospel, and blues. In November 1956, he made his film debut in Love Me Tender.
After two years of military service beginning in 1958, Presley returned to the studio and reinforced his popularity by recording some of his most commercially successful material. He staged few concerts, however, and proceeded to devote most of the 1960s to making unmemorable Hollywood movies and soundtrack albums. In 1968, after seven years away from the stage, he returned to live performance in a celebrated comeback television special which led to a string of successful tours and concert residencies, notably in Las Vegas. In 1973, Presley staged the first global live concert via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii, seen by approximately 1.5 billion viewers. It remains the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history. Prescription drug abuse severely compromised the singer's health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at the age of 42.
Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century popular culture. He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music, with sales of approximately 1 billion units worldwide. Among many honors, he was nominated for 14 competitive Grammys (winning 3 times) by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36. He has been inducted into four music halls of fame.
Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Elvis and Gladys Love Presley. In the two-room shotgun house built by his father in readiness for the birth, Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn. Growing up as an only child, Presley became close to both parents and formed an unusually tight bond with his mother. The family lived just above the poverty line and attended an Assembly of God church where he found his initial musical inspiration.
Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix—Scots-Irish, with some French Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee and, according to family accounts, one of her great-grandmothers was Jewish. Gladys was regarded as the dominant member of the small family by relatives and friends. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evidencing little ambition. The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance. In 1938, Vernon, along with one of Gladys's brothers and another friend, was jailed for altering a check written by the farmer on whose land he had built the family home and who retained ownership of the property until repayment of a loan. During Vernon's eight-month incarceration, Gladys lost the house, and she and her son moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley entered the 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, saw the singer's 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, for his eleventh birthday, Presley received his first guitar. He had wanted a considerably more expensive bicycle. 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, you know."
Presley listened regularly to Mississippi Slim’s show on the Tupelo radio station WELO. Slim's younger brother, a classmate of Presley's, described him as "crazy about music". Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as shy and a loner; the following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He would play and sing 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; they often had trouble keeping up with the rent, and changed residences frequently. Mississippi Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques. When his protégé was 12 years old, he scheduled two on-air performances by the young singer. Overcome by stage fright the first time, Presley was unable to perform, but succeeded in doing so the following week.
In November 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. After residing for nearly a year in rooming houses, they gained admission to a two-bedroom apartment in the city-run public housing complex known as the Courts. Presley was enrolled at Humes High School, where he received a C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher told him he couldn't sing, he brought his guitar to class the next day and sang a recent hit, "Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me" in an effort to prove otherwise. Classmate Katie Mae Shook recalled that the teacher "agreed that Elvis was right when he said that she didn't appreciate his kind of singing." That incident aside, he was generally perceived as too shy to perform openly. He was occasionally bullied by classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy". Sometime in 1950, Presley began practicing guitar regularly in the laundry room under the family apartment. His tutor was 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, Presley began ushering at Loew's State Theater to boost the family income, but his mother made him quit as she feared it was affecting his school work. Other jobs followed during his school years: Precision Tool, Loew's again, MARL Metal Products.
During his junior year, he 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. On his own 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 Courts, he competed in Humes's "Annual Minstrel" show in April 1953. Singing and playing guitar, he opened with Teresa Brewer's "Till I Waltz Again With You". The performance seems to have done much for his popularity at school.
Presley, who never received formal music training or learned to read music, studied and played by ear. He 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 Presley's favorite performers, was a significant influence on his ballad-singing style. Presley was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings downtown, where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected the clear 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, only on nights designated for exclusively white audiences. He certainly listened to the regional radio stations that played "race records": spirituals, blues, and the backbeat-driven music known as 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 knew Presley before he was popular when they both used to frequent Beale Street. By the time he graduated high school in June 1953, Presley already seems to have singled out music as his future.
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 he intended the record as a gift for his mother, or was merely interested in what he "sounded like", though there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at a nearby general store. Biographer Peter Guralnick argues that he chose Sun with 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 whom 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."
Presley cut a second acetate a few months later, in January 1954—"I'll Never Stand In Your Way" and "It Wouldn't Be The Same Without You"—but again nothing came of the recording session. Not long after, he auditioned for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows: rejected by the group, he explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing." Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that Elvis 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, who was leader of Smith's professional band and was looking for a singer. This Presley did, and he was given a tryout session at the Hi Hat club on May 15. Bond rejected him after the first session, 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 the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused to a broader audience. 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'". When he acquired a demo recording of "Without You" and was unable to identify the vocalist, she reminded him about the teenaged singer. She called Presley on June 26. However, Presley was not able to do justice to the song. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many songs as he knew and, impressed enough by what he heard, he invited two local musicians, guitarist Winfield "Scotty" Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to audition Presley. Though they were not greatly impressed, they asked him to attend a studio session the following evening. The session proved almost entirely unfruitful, but late in the evening, as they were about give up and go home, Presley 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 flip.
Moore became Presley's official manager on July 12 and, along with Black, began playing regularly with him. They gave brief performances on July 17 and July 24 to promote the Sun single at the Bon Air, a rowdy music club in Memphis.[50] On July 30 the trio made their first paid appearance at the Overton Park Shell, with Slim Whitman headlining. A combination of his strong response to rhythm and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements, causing young women in the audience to start screaming. Moore recalled, "During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild". Black, a natural showman, whooped and rode his bass, hitting double licks that Presley would later remember as "really a wild sound, like a jungle drum or something".
Soon after the trio's first show, DJ and promoter Bob Neal became their new manager and Moore and Black left their old band, the Starlite Wranglers. From August through October, the group played frequently at the Eagle's Nest club and returned to Sun Studio for more recording sessions. Presley's stage presence quickly grew more focused and confident. According to Moore, "His movement was a natural thing, but he was also very conscious of what got a reaction. He'd do something one time and then he would expand on it real quick." Presley made his lone appearance on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry on October 2. Performing "Blue Moon of Kentucky", he drew only a mild response. Tillman Franks, talent coordinator for Louisiana Hayride, called Phillips to ask if he could book "that black boy with the funny name." The show, broadcast out of Shreveport to 190 radio stations in 13 states, took place on October 16. During Presley's first set, the reaction was muted; before the second began, Franks advised Presley, "Let it all go!" He and his bandmates did, inspiring shouts and applause from the crowd. House drummer D.J. Fontana brought a new element to the sound, complementing Presley's movements with accented beats that he had mastered playing in strip clubs. In November, Presley signed a contract for a year's worth of appearances on the Hayride, every Saturday night. Between their Shreveport and Memphis gigs, his trio began playing regularly in new locales such as Houston, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas.
In early January 1955, Neal signed a formal management deal with Presley. Neal at the time was establishing a connection with "Colonel" Tom Parker, whom he considered the best promoter in the music business. Parker—Dutch-born, though he claimed to be from West Virginia—had successfully managed top country star Eddy Arnold. In 1948, he had arranged to acquire an honorary colonel's commission from country singer turned Louisiana governer Jimmie Davis. He was now managing the new number-one country star, Hank Snow, with whom he was partners in a booking agency. In late January, Parker booked Presley on the Hank Snow Tour for a stretch the following month. Presley, via his regular Hayride appearances, constant touring, and well-received record releases, was already a substantial regional star, from Tennessee to West Texas. Phillips, though he clashed personally with Parker, shared Neal's assessment of him as a promoter and felt the need for someone who could bring Presley the sort of national attention that now seemed within reach. At the same time, he was aware that Sun's limited distribution capacity meant that his own ongoing involvement was threatened by Parker's relationship with the much bigger RCA Victor label.
When Snow's tour reached Odessa, Texas, in February, a nineteen-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. ... I just didn’t know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it." Presley made his television debut on March 3 on the KSLA-TV broadcast of Louisiana Hayride. Later that month, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, which aired nationally on CBS. By August, Sun had released ten sides credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill"; on the most recently recorded ones, the trio were joined by a drummer. Some of the songs, like "That's All Right", were in what one Memphis journalist described as the "R&B idiom of negro field jazz"; others, like "Blue Moon of Kentucky", were "more in the country field", "but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both". This was the blend that came to be known as rockabilly. At the time, Presley was variously billed and labeled in the media as "The King of Western Bop", "The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash".
Presley renewed Neal's management contract on August 15, 1955, simultaneously appointing Parker as his special adviser on a one-year renewable deal. The group maintained an extensive touring schedule throughout the second half of the year. Neal recalled, "it was almost frightening, the reaction that came to Elvis from the teenaged boys. So many of them, through some sort of jealousy, would practically hate him. There were occasions in some towns in Texas when we'd have to be sure to have a police guard because somebody'd always try to take a crack at him. They'd get a gang and try to waylay him or something." The band had grown: drummer D.J. Fontana, whom the band was familiar with from their many Hayride appearances, joined as a full member. Moore and Black had convinced Presley to hire Fontana in part by agreeing to share the cost of his salary. Beginning in October, Parker informed them, they were being put on salary as well; instead of each receiving 25 percent of the act's gross income, they were now paid $200 weekly when on the road and half that as retainer during downtime. In business terms, the act was now Presley, solo. In mid-October, they played a few shows in support of Bill Haley, whose "Rock Around the Clock" had been a number one hit the previous year. Presley was thrilled to share a bill with such a major star. Haley observed that Presley had a natural feel for rhythm, and advised him to sing fewer ballads if he wanted to wow the crowds.
Several record companies had shown interest in signing Presley and, by the end of October, three major labels had made offers of up to $25,000. On November 21, Parker and Phillips negotiated a deal with RCA Victor to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an unprecedented $40,000, $5,000 of which was a bonus for the singer for back royalties owed to him by Sun Records. Presley, at 20, was still a minor, so his father had to sign the contract. Parker also cut a deal with Hill and Range Publishing Company to create two separate entities, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music, to handle all of Presley's songs and accrued royalties. The owners of Hill and Range, brothers Julian and Jean Aberbach, agreed to split the publishing and royalties rights of each song equally with Presley. Hill and Range, Presley, or Parker's partners then had to convince unsecured songwriters that it was worthwhile for them to give up one third of their due royalties in exchange for the kudos of having their compositions recorded by Presley. One result of these dealings was that Presley was given credit as cowriter on several songs where he had no hand in the writing process. By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.
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 Gordon Stoker of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill out the sound. The session produced "Heartbreak Hotel/I Was The One", which was released on January 27.
To increase the singer's exposure, Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS's Stage Show for six appearances over two months. The program, shot in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. For his first appearance, on January 28, Presley was introduced by Cleveland DJ Bill Randle. He stayed in town and, on January 30, recorded at RCA's New York studio. The sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl Perkins' rockabilly anthem "Blue Suede Shoes". Public reaction to "Heartbreak Hotel" was sufficiently strong that RCA released it as a single in its own right on February 11. The same month, 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 management contract was terminated after Presley's parents expressed a wish for Parker to become the sole representative for the singer's recording contract. Parker became Presley's manager on March 2.
On March 23, RCA Victor released Presley's self-titled debut album. 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 new 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 Presely's stage repertoire for some time, covers of Ray Charles, Little Richard, 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 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.
Parker negotiated a lucrative deal for two appearances on NBC's The Milton Berle Show. The first, on April 3, featured Presley on the deck of the USS Hancock in San Diego, where he was cheered by an audience of appreciative sailors and their dates. A few days after, a flight taking Presley and his band to Nashville for a recording session left all three badly shaken when the plane lost an engine and almost went down over Texas. That same month, twelve weeks after its original release, "Heartbreak Hotel" became Presley's first number one pop hit. The Berle shows drew such high ratings that Presley was booked for a July 1 appearance on NBC's The Steve Allen Show, recorded in New York. Allen, no fan of rock and roll, believed that his show should be one "the whole family can watch" and introduced a "new Elvis" in white bow tie and black tails. Presley sang "Hound Dog" for less than a minute to a basset hound in a top hat and bow tie. As described by television historian Jake Austen, "Allen thought Presley was talentless and absurd... [he] set things up so that Presley would show his contrition". Allen, for his part, later wrote that he found Presley's "strange, gangly, country-boy charisma, his hard-to-define cuteness, and his charming eccentricity intriguing" and simply worked the singer into the customary "comedy fabric of our program". Presley would refer back to the Allen show as the most ridiculous performance of his career. Later that night, he appeared on Hy Gardner Calling, a popular local TV show. Pressed on whether he had learned anything from the criticism to which he was being subjected, Presley responded, "No, I haven't, I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. ... I don't see how any type of music would have any bad influence on people when it's only music. ... I mean, how would rock 'n' roll music make anyone rebel against their parents?"
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 Florida judge called Presley a "savage" and threatened to arrest him if he shook his body while performing in Jacksonville. The judge declared that Presley's music was undermining the youth of America. Throughout the performance, which was filmed by police, he kept still as ordered, except for wiggling a finger in mockery of the ruling. 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. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of "Hound Dog", provided "Love Me".
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan, despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances for an unprecedented $50,000.[99] The first, on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers—a record 82.6 percent of the television audience. Actor Charles Laughton hosted the show, filling in while Sullivan recuperated from a car accident. According to Elvis legend, Presley was shot only from the waist up. Having viewed clips of the Allen and Berle shows, Sullivan told his producer that Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants—so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his rooster. ... I think it's a Coke bottle. ... We just can't have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show! Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, "As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots." In truth, Presley was shown head-to-toe in the first and second shows. Though the camerawork was relatively discreet during his debut, with leg-concealing closeups when he danced, the studio audience reacted in customary style—screaming. More than any other single event, it was this first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity of barely precedented proportions.
The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly fevered. Moore recalled, "He’d start out, 'You ain’t nothin’ but a Hound Dog,' and they’d just go to pieces. They’d always react the same way. There’d be a riot every time." At the two concerts he performed in September at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, fifty National Guardsmen were added to the police security to prevent crowd trouble. Elvis, Presley's second album, was released in October and quickly rose to number one. On October 28, he returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its namesake. After the performance, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned Presley in effigy.
His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released on November 21. Though he was not top billed, the film's original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on the popularity of his latest single: "Love Me Tender" had hit the top of the charts on November 3. To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role. The film was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office, becoming the 23rd-highest grossing movie of 1956, despite being released fewer than five weeks before the end of the year. Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.
On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed with them. Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any Presley recordings, he made sure the trio's performance was captured on tape. (Johnny Cash is often thought to have performed with them, but he was present only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity.) The recording, long speculated about, would eventually surface in 1977 on a bootleg titled The Million Dollar Quartet, and RCA would finally release an authorized version a few years later. On December 29, Billboard revealed that Presley had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since record charts began. This news was followed by a front page report in the Wall Street Journal on December 31 that suggested Presley merchandise had grossed more than $22 million in sales.
"Don't", another Leiber and Stoller tune, became Presely's tenth number one pop hit a couple of weeks into the new year. It had been only 21 months since "Heartbreak Hotel" had brought him to the top for the first time. Recording sessions for the King Creole soundtrack were held in Hollywood mid-January. Leiber and Stoller provided three songs and were again on hand, but it would be their final collaboration with Presley. A studio session on February 1 marked another ending: the last occasion on which Black performed with Presley. He died in 1965. On March 24, Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private, under the service number US 53 310 761, at Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Captain Arlie Metheny, the information officer, was unprepared for the media attention the singer received on arrival at Fort Chaffee. Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus, and photographers accompanied him into the base. Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: "The Army can do anything it wants with me." Later, at Fort Hood, Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten gave the media carte blanche for one day, after which she declared Presley off-limits to the press.
Parker visited occasionally with news of sales and to discuss strategy, and to obtain Presley's signature when necessary to proceed with arrangements. Another visitor, Eddie Fadal, a businesman Presley had met when on tour in Texas, said the singer had become convinced his career was finished—"he firmly believed that." During a two-week leave in early June, Presley cut five sides in Nashville. He returned to training, but in early August his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis and her condition worsened. Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her, arriving in Memphis on August 12. Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged forty-six. Presley was devastated. Their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names. Presley completed basic training at Fort Hood on September 17, before being posted to Friedberg, Germany, with the 3rd Armored Division, where his service began on October 1. Some months after his mother's death, Presley was introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant while on maneuvers. He became "practically evangelical about their benefits"—not only for energy, but for "strength" and weight loss, as well—and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging. The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, later including it in his live performances. Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley's wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity while in the service. To supplement meager under-clothing supplies, Presley bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit. He also donated his Army pay to charity, and purchased all the TV sets for personnel on the base at that time.
Currie Grant, a friend of Presley's in Army Special Services, spotted 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu at a club used by army personnel and their families. He introduced her to the singer at Presley's home in Bad Nauheim on September 13, 1959. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship. Presley had not elected to join Special Services, which would have allowed him to avoid certain duties and maintain his public profile. However, Precilla has said that he was eager to serve in the detachment, where he would have been able to give some musical performances and remain in touch with the general public. In her autobiography, she states that it was Parker and RCA who convinced Presley he should serve his country as a regular soldier to gain respect from the public, despite the singer's worries that this might instead ruin his career. He continued to receive massive media coverage, with much speculation echoing his concerns about his career. However, RCA Victor producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had planned ahead with the February and June 1958 recording sessions. Armed too with unreleased songs from earlier sessions, they aimed to supply a regular stream of releases during Presley's two-year hiatus. The strategy was successful. Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck", the number one "Hard Headed Woman", and "One Night" in 1958, and "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I" and the number one "A Big Hunk o' Love" in 1959. RCA also managed to generate four albums compiling old material during this period, most successfully Elvis' Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.
Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant on March 5. The train that carried him from New Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans. Back in Memphis, he wasted no time in returning to the studio. His first recording session, on March 20, was attended by several representatives of RCA; none had heard him sing for two years, and there were inevitable concerns about his ability to recapture his previous success. The session was the first at which Presley was taped using an advanced three-track machine, allowing stereophonic recording, higher fidelity, and postsession remixing. A second session in early April yielded two of Presley's best-selling singles, the ballads "It's Now or Never" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Many of the other tracks recorded during the two sessions appeared on Elvis Is Back! Greil Marcus described its defining sound as full-on Chicago blues "menace, driven by Presley's own super-miked acoustic guitar, brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph. Elvis's singing wasn't sexy, it was pornographic." Released only days after the second session, Elvis Is Back! reached number two on the album chart.
Presley returned to television on May 12, as a guest on The Frank Sinatra-Timex Special, an ironic move for both stars given Sinatra's not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March—the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker, who had made the arrangement months in advance, secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for six minutes of singing. He hoped that the appearance would help boost Presley's popularity with Sinatra's older, pop-oriented following; still, he made sure that 400 Presley fan club members were in the studio audience. The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.
G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain, remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, raising over $60,000 for 24 local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, Presley was awarded a plaque by RCA for worldwide sales of over 75 million records. Another benefit concert was staged on March 25, in Hawaii, after Parker read an article stating that no "permanent memorial stands in salute to the dead of Pearl Harbor". The event was held at Bloch Arena in aid of the USS Arizona Memorial Fund, which was $50,000 short of its target: the concert raised over $62,000. It was to be the last public performance Presley would give for seven years.
Presley returned to the International Hotel in January 1970 for a month-long engagement, performing two shows a night. Recordings from these shows were issued on the album On Stage. In late February, Presley performed six more attendance-breaking shows at the Houston Astrodome in Texas. In April, the single "The Wonder of You" was issued—a number one hit in Great Britain, it topped the U.S. Adult Contemporary chart, as well. MGM filmed rehearsal and concert footage at the International during August, for the documentary Elvis: That's the Way It Is. Presley wore a jumpsuit, which would become a trademark of his live performances in the 1970s. Around this time Presley was threatened with kidnapping at the International. Phone calls were received, one demanding $50,000—if unpaid, Presley would be killed by a "crazy man". Presley had been the target of many threats since the 1950s, often without his knowledge. The FBI took the threat seriously and security was stepped up for the next two shows. Presley went onstage with a Derringer in his right boot and a .45 pistol in his waistband, but the concerts went off without incident. After closing his Las Vegas engagement on September 7, Presley embarked on his first concert tour since 1958. Exhausted by the tour, he spent a month relaxing and recording before touring again in October and November. He would tour extensively until his death, frequently setting attendance records.
On December 21, 1970, Presley engineered a bizarre meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippie drug culture. He asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts. Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon The Beatles exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture. (Presley and his friends had had a four-hour get-together with The Beatles five years earlier.) On hearing reports of the meeting, Paul McCartney later said that he "felt a bit betrayed. ... The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him", a reference to Presley's death, hastened by prescription drug abuse. Belying his own comments, Presley regularly performed the Beatles songs "Yesterday", "Something", and "Get Back" in concert during the early 1970s.
The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Presley "One of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Nation" on January 16, 1971. Not long after, the City of Memphis named the stretch of Highway 51 South on which Graceland is located "Elvis Presley Boulevard". The same year, Presley became the first rock and roll singer to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award (then known as the Bing Crosby Award) by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy Award organization. Three studio albums of new, non-movie Presley songs were released in 1971, as many as had come out over the previous eight years. The biggest seller was Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, "the truest statement of all", according to Greil Marcus. "In the midst of ten painfully genteel Christmas songs, every one sung with appalling sincerity and humility, one could find Elvis tom-catting his way through six blazing minutes of 'Merry Christmas, Baby,' a raunchy old Charles Brown blues. ... If [Presley's] sin was his lifelessness, it was his sinfulness that brought him to life".
MGM again filmed Presley in April 1972, this time for Elvis on Tour, which went on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Documentary Film that year. His gospel album He Touched Me, released in April, is described by The New Rolling Stone Album Guide as a "wonder". It would earn him his second Grammy Award, for Best Inspirational Performance. A 14-date tour started with an unprecedented four consecutive sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden. The evening concert on July 10 was recorded and issued in LP form a week later. Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden would became one of Presley's biggest-selling albums, reaching triple-platinum status. After the tour, the single "Burning Love" was released—Presley's last top ten hit on the U.S. pop chart. "The most exciting single Elvis has made since 'All Shook Up'", wrote rock critic Robert Christgau. "Who else could make 'It's coming closer, the flames are now licking my body' sound like an assignation with James Brown's backup band?" Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant, barely cohabiting, and he was anyway frequently absent on tour. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often raised the possibility of her moving in to Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla. The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, whom Presley had recommended as a karate instructor. Priscilla reported that Presley "grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a real man makes love to his woman." Presley lived with Linda Thompson, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, from July 1972 until their breakup in late 1976. Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18, 1972.
In January 1973, Presley performed two charity concerts in Hawaii for the Kui Lee cancer foundation in connection with a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii. The first concert, on January 12, was primarily a practice run, serving too as a backup should technical problems affect the live broadcast two days later. Aired as scheduled on January 14, Aloha from Hawaii was the first global live concert satellite broadcast, reaching approximately 1.5 billion viewers. Budgeted at a record $2.5 million, the show raised $85,000—more than three times what had been anticipated. Presley's outfit became the most recognized example of the elaborate concert costumes with which his latter-day persona became closely associated. As described by Bobbie Ann Mason, "At the end of the show, when he spreads out his American Eagle cape, with the full stretched wings of the eagle studded on the back, he becomes a god figure." The accompanying album, released in February, went to number one, spending a year on the charts. It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his lifetime.
The same month, a disturbance during a midnight show left Presley in a state of shock. When four men rushed onto the stage in what appeared to be an attack, security men leapt to Presley's defense, and the singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the stage himself. Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that the men had been sent by Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in me ... Stone [must] die." His outbursts continued with such intensity that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large doses of medication. After another two full days of raging, Red West, his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy.
Since his comeback in 1968, Presley had staged more and more live shows with each passing year, and in 1973 he had the busiest schedule of his professional life, with 168 concerts. In March, Presley and Parker negotiated a deal with RCA that resulted in a lump sum payment to Presley of $5.4 million in lieu of all future performance royalties for any songs he had recorded up to that time. (Presley would retain performance royalties on future recordings.) Under the terms of Presley's contract with his manager, Parker received 50 percent of the payment. In terms of Presley's own interests, the deal was terrible, "right up there with the Indians selling Manhattan for twenty-four dollars", as Jack Soden of Elvis Presley Enterprises later described it.
Presley's divorce took effect on October 9, Elvis and Priscilla agreeing to share custody of their daughter. After the divorce, Presley became increasingly unwell. The problems he had been having with keeping his weight under control became more obvious. He twice overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident. According to his main physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley was "near death" in November, the result of side effects of Demerol addiction. His subsequent hospital admission necessitated extraordinary measures to protect his medical details. Lab technicians went so far as to sell samples of his blood and urine. Nichopoulos says that Presley "felt that by getting [pills] from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street. He ... thought that as far as medications and drugs went, there was something for everything."
Despite his failing health, in 1974 Presley undertook another intensive touring schedule. In April, rumors spread that he would play overseas after years of offers. A million-dollar bid came in for an Australian tour, but Parker was uncharacteristically reluctant, prompting those closest to Presley to speculate about the manger's past and the reasons for his apparent unwillingness to apply for a passport. Parker ultimately squelched any notions Presley had of working abroad, claiming that foreign security was poor and venues unsuitable for a star of his status. The debut of his annual August residency at the Las Vegas Hilton introduced a brand-new program and earned a rave from the Hollywood Reporter, which called it his "best show ... in at least three years. [Presley] looks great, is singing better than he has in years ... the packed Hilton showroom gave him several standing ovations."
Soon thereafter, his condition seems to have declined precipitously. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers Presley's arrival at a University of Maryland concert in September: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.' He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?" Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "The lights go down, and Elvis comes up the stairs. He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so hugged up. ... It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. You couldn't hear him hardly. ... We were in a state of shock. [Conductor] Joe Guercio said, 'He's finished...'. I remember crying. He could barely get through the introductions on the stage." Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year off...?' I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.'"
Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. A 1975 tour ended with a concert in Pontiac, Michigan, attended by over 62,000 fans. Cultural critic Marjorie Garber has described the significance of Presley's physical transformation, particularly in the context of his Vegas appearances of the period: "heavier, in pancake makeup wearing a jumpsuit with an elaborate jeweled belt and cape, crooning pop songs to a microphone: in effect he had become Liberace. Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers".
On July 13, 1976, Presley's father fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards Red West, Sonny West, and David Hebler. The dismissal took all three by surprise, especially Red West, who had been friends with Presley for two decades. Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the singer was too cowardly to face the three himself. Vernon Presley cited the need to "cut back on expenses"; another associate of Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans frequently gave rise to lawsuits and lawyers' fees. Presley historians David E. Stanley and Frank Coffey, however, have claimed that the bodyguards were really fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency.
RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the studio waned. After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio at all in 1974. Parker sold RCA on another concert record, Elvis: As Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis. Exemplifying the label's demand for new product, it was recorded on March 20, the very day that the Good Times studio album was issued, and came out just three-and-a-half months later. It included a version of "How Great Thou Art" that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award. (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of a total of fourteen nominations—were for gospel recordings.) Presley returned to the studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful. In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home. Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a struggle for him. For all the concerns of his label and manager, in studio sessions between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977). The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits, but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight of the singles he recorded in the studio during this period and released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy" was a number one AC hit in 1975; "Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976; and "Way Down", released in June 1977, made it to the top of both the country and UK pop charts just days after his death. Three other studio tracks from these years issued posthumously as singles also rose to the country top ten. Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came in 1976 with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on the soul classic "Hurt". "If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long.
Journalist Tony Scherman writes that by early 1977, "Elvis Presley had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self. Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopoeia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts." In Alexandria, Louisiana, the singer was on stage for less than an hour and "was impossible to understand". In Baton Rouge, Presley failed to appear: he was unable to get out of his hotel bed, and the rest of the tour was cancelled. In Knoxville, Tennessee, on May 20, "there was no longer any pretence of keeping up appearances. The idea was simply to get Elvis out on stage and keep him upright". Despite the accelerating deterioration of his health, he stuck to most of touring commitments. Shows in Omaha, Nebraska, and Rapid City, South Dakota, were recorded for an album and CBS television special, Elvis In Concert.
In Rapid City, "he was so nervous on stage that he could hardly talk", according to Presley historian Samuel Roy. "He was undoubtedly painfully aware of how he looked, and he knew that in his condition, he could not perform any significant movement." The story was much the same in Omaha. According to Guralnick, fans "were becoming increasingly voluble about their disappointment, but it all seemed to go right past Elvis, whose world was now confined almost entirely to his room and his spiritualism books." A cousin, Billy Smith, recalled how Presley would sit in his room and chat, recounting things like his favorite Monty Python sketches and his own past japes, but "mostly there was a grim obsessiveness... a paranoia about people, germs... future events", that reminded Smith of Howard Hughes. Presley's final performance was in Indianapolis at the Market Square Arena, on June 26, 1977. He was now living with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden, who later reported that she and Presley became engaged. His stepbrother David Stanley confirms that Presley proposed and gave her a ring, but says he believes he wanted to secure her companionship and had no intention of marrying again. The book Elvis: What Happened?, written by Steve Dunleavy and the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1. It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. According to David Stanley, he "was devastated by the book. Here were his close friends who had written serious stuff that would affect his life. He felt betrayed. [But] what they wrote was true." By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments—glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and possibly caused, by drug abuse. After re-examining Presley's X-rays in the 1990s, Nichopoulos concluded that he was probably also suffering from degenerative arthritis, fueling his addiction to painkillers.
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, Alden discovered him unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with "permanently chang[ing] the face of American popular culture". Hundreds of thousands of fans, the press, and celebrities lined the streets of Memphis, many hoping to see the open casket in Graceland. One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer's biggest-selling issue ever. Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story, but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement. Presley left her nothing in his will.
Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18. Among the mourners were Ann-Margret, who had remained close to him since they co-starred in Viva Las Vegas 13 years before, and his ex-wife, Priscilla. Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women and critically injuring a third. Presley was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, next to his mother. An attempt was made to steal his body eleven days later. After zoning issues were addressed, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
Jailhouse Rock
Suspicious Minds
blue suede shoes
a little less conversation
Heartbreak Hotel
an american trilogy
Return to Sender
in the ghetto
Hound Dog/All Shook Up
