Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Main
American singer and actor
in full Elvis Aaron Presley or Elvis Aron Presley
born Jan. 8, 1935, Tupelo, Miss., U.S.
died Aug. 16, 1977, Memphis, Tenn.
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 grew up dirt-poor in Tupelo, moved to Memphis as a teenager,
and, with his family, was off welfare 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 Reverend 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-coloured 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. This sound was the
hallmark of the five singles Presley released on Sun over the next year.
Although none of them became a national hit, by August 1955, when he
released the fifth, “Mystery Train,” arguably his greatest record ever,
he had attracted a substantial Southern following for his recordings,
his live appearances in regional roadhouses and clubs, and his radio
performances on the nationally aired Louisiana Hayride. (A key musical
change came when drummer D.J. Fontana was added, first for the Hayride
shows but also on records beginning with “Mystery Train.”)
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,” “Love Me Tender” (all 1956), "All
Shook Up" (1957), and more.
From 1956 through 1958 he completely dominated the best-seller charts
and ushered in the age of rock and roll, opening doors for both white
and black rock artists. His television appearances, especially those on
Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show, set records for the size of the
audiences. Even his films, a few slight vehicles, were box office
smashes.
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 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.”
In 1960 Presley returned from the army, where he had served as a
soldier in Germany rather than joining the Special Services
entertainment division. 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. Upon
his return to the States, he picked up pretty much where he had left
off, churning out a series of more than 30 movies (from Blue Hawaii to
Change of Habit) 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?,” “Little Sister” (both 1961), “Can’t
Help Falling in Love,” “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 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 unsophisticated, 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. He had married in 1967 without much furor,
became a parent with the birth of his daughter, Lisa Marie, in 1968, and
got divorced in 1973. He made no more movies, although there was a good
concert film, Elvis on Tour. His recordings were of uneven quality, but
on each album he included a song or two that had focus and energy. Hits
were harder to come by—“Suspicious Minds” was his last number one and
“Burning Love” (1972) his final Top Ten entry. But, thanks to the
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.
However, Presley had also developed a lethal lifestyle. Spending
almost all his time when not on the road in Graceland, his Memphis
estate (actually just a big Southern colonial house decorated somewhere
between banal modernity and garish faux-Vegas opulence), he lived
nocturnally, surrounded by sycophants and stuffed with greasy foods and
a variety of prescription drugs. His shows deteriorated in the final two
years of his life, and his recording career came to a virtual
standstill. Presley never seemed confident in his status, never entirely
certain that he would not collapse back into sharecropper poverty, and,
as a result, he seems to have become immobilized; the man who had risked
everything, including potential ridicule, to make himself a success now
lived in the lockstep regimen of an addict and recluse. Finally, in the
summer of 1977, the night before he was to begin yet another concert
tour, he died of a heart attack brought on largely by drug abuse. He was
42 years old.
Almost immediately upon hearing of his death, mourners from around
the world gathered at Graceland to say farewell to the poor boy who had
lived out the American dream. In a way, that mourning has never ceased:
Graceland remains one of the country’s top tourist attractions more than
20 years later, and Presley’s albums and other artifacts continue to
sell briskly. Each August crowds flock to Graceland to honour him on the
anniversary not of his birth but of his death. From time to time rumours
have cropped up that he did not really die, that his death was a fake
designed to free him from fame. Elvis impersonators are legion. His
biggest fans—working-class white women, almost exclusively—have passed
their fanaticism on to their children, or at least to a surprising
number of daughters. “Elvis has left the building,” but those who are
still inside have decided to carry on regardless. Once more, Elvis
Presley is triumphant, although this triumph is shadowed by something
far less than happiness.
Dave Marsh
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Elvis Presley
