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Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935–August 16, 1977), was an American singer, musician and actor. He is a cultural icon, often known as "The King of Rock 'n' Roll", or simply "The King".

Presley began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm and blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular—and controversial—as did his uninhibited stage and television performances. He recorded songs in the rock and roll genre, with tracks like "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" later embodying the style. Presley had a versatile voice and had unusually wide success encompassing other genres, including gospel, blues, ballads and pop. To date, he is the only performer to have been inducted into four music halls of fame.

In the 1960s, Presley made the majority of his thirty-three movies—mainly poorly reviewed musicals. In 1968, he returned to live music in a television special and thereafter performed across the U.S., notably in Las Vegas. Throughout his career, he set records for concert attendance, television ratings and recordings sales. He is one of the best-selling and most influential artists in the history of popular music. Health problems plagued Presley in later life which, coupled with a punishing tour schedule and addiction to prescription medication, led to his premature death at age 42.

Early life

Presley's father, Vernon (April 10, 1916–June 26, 1979), had several low-paying jobs, including sharecropper and truck driver. His mother, Gladys Love Smith (April 25, 1912–August 14, 1958) worked as a sewing machine operator. They met in Tupelo, Mississippi, and eloped to Pontotoc County where they married on June 17, 1933.

Presley was born in a two room house, built by his father, in East Tupelo. He was the second of identical twins—his brother was stillborn and given the name Jesse Garon. He grew up as an only child and "was, everyone agreed, unusually close to his mother." The family lived just above the poverty line and attended the Assembly of God church. Vernon has been described as "a malingerer, always averse to work and responsibility." In 1938 he was jailed for an eight-dollar check forgery. During his absence, his wife, described as "voluble, lively, full of spunk," lost the family home. Priscilla Presley recalls her as "a surreptitious drinker and alcoholic."

Presley was bullied at school; classmates threw "things at him—rotten fruit and stuff—because he was different... quiet and he stuttered and he was a mama's boy."

At age ten, he made his first public performance in a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Dressed as a cowboy, the young Presley had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone and sang Red Foley's "Old Shep." He won second prize.

In 1946, Presley got his first guitar. In November 1948 the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, allegedly because Vernon—as well as needing work—had to escape the law for transporting bootleg liquor. In 1949, they lived at Lauderdale Courts, a public housing development in one of Memphis' poorer sections. Presley practiced playing guitar in the laundry room and also played in a five-piece band with other tenants. Another resident, Johnny Burnette, recalled, "Wherever Elvis went he'd have his guitar slung across his back... He'd go in to one of the cafes or bars... Then some folks would say: 'Let's hear you sing, boy.'"Presley attended L. C. Humes High School, but fellow students apparently viewed the young singer's performing unfavorably: Kenneth Holditch recalls that he was "a sad, shy, not especially attractive boy" whose guitar playing was not likely to win any prizes. Many of the other children made fun of him as a "trashy" kind of boy playing 'trashy' hillbilly music.

Presley occasionally worked evenings to boost the family income. He began to grow his sideburns and dress in the wild, flashy clothes of Lansky Brothers on Beale Street. Presley stood out, especially in the conservative Deep South of the 1950s, and he was mocked and bullied for it. Despite his unpopularity, he contested in his school's 1952 "Annual Minstrel Show"and won by receiving the most applause and thus an encore (he sang "Cold Cold Icy Fingers" and "Till I Waltz Again With You").

After graduation, Presley was still rather shy, a "kid who had spent scarcely a night away from home." His third job was driving a truck for the Crown Electric Company. He began wearing his hair longer with a "ducktail"—the style of truck drivers at that time.

Musical influences

Initial influences came through his family's attendance at the Assembly of God, a Pentecostal Holiness church. Rolling Stone magazine said: "Gospel pervaded Elvis' character and was a defining and enduring influence all of his days." During breaks at recording sessions or after concerts, Presley often joined in private with others for informal gospel music sessions.

The young Presley listened a lot to local radio; his first musical hero was family friend Mississippi Slim, a hillbilly singer with a radio show on Tupelo’s WELO. Presley performed occasionally on Slim’s Saturday morning show, Singin’ and Pickin’ Hillbilly. "He was crazy about music....That’s all he talked about," recalls his sixth grade friend, James Ausborn, Slim’s younger brother.Before he was a teenager, music was already Presley’s "consuming passion."J. R. Snow, son of 1940s country superstar Hank Snow, recalls that even as a young man Presley knew all of Hank Snow’s songs, "even the most obscure."

In Memphis, Presley went to record stores that had jukeboxes and listening booths, playing old records and new releases for hours. He was an audience member at the all-night black and white "gospel sings" downtown. Memphis Symphony Orchestra concerts at Overton Park were another Presley favorite, along with the Metropolitan Opera. His small record collection included Mario Lanza and Dean Martin. Presley later said, "I just loved music. Music period."

Memphis had a strong tradition of blues music and Presley went to blues as well as hillbilly venues. Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African American composers and recording artists, including Arthur Crudup, Rufus Thomas and B.B. King. King says that he "knew Elvis before he was popular. He used to come around and be around us a lot ... on Beale Street."

Presley "was an untrained musician who played entirely by ear. 'I don't read music,' he confessed, 'but I know what I like.' ... Because he was not a songwriter, Presley rarely had material prepared for recording sessions..." When he, as a young singer, "ventured into the recording studio he was heavily influenced by the songs he had heard on the jukebox and radio."

First recordings at Sun Studios

Main article: Elvis Presley's Sun recordings

On July 18, 1953, Presley went to Sun Records' Memphis Recording Service to record "My Happiness" with "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", supposedly a present for his mother.(On January 4, 1954, he cut a second acetate).

Sun Records boss Sam Phillips was on the lookout for someone who could deliver a blend of black blues and boogie-woogie music; he thought it would be very popular among white people. Assistant Marion Keisker called Presley on June 26, 1954. After an inauspicious session, Phillips invited local musicians Winfield "Scotty" Moore and Bill Black to audition Presley. Though not overly impressed, a studio session was planned.

During a recording break, Presley began "acting the fool" first with Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right (Mama)," Phillips got them all to restart and began taping. This was the sound he had been looking for.The group recorded other songs, including Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky.

"That's All Right" was aired on July 8, 1954, by DJ Dewey Phillips. After its release, both sides of "That's All Right"/"Blue Moon of Kentucky" began to chart across the South.

First public performances

Moore and Black began playing regularly with Presley. They gave a few performances in July 1954 to promote the Sun single at the Bon Air, a rowdy music club where the band was not well-received. On July 30 the trio, billed as The Blue Moon Boys, made their first appearance at the Overton Park Shell, with Slim Whitman headlining.A nervous Presley is said to have shaken his legs uncontrollably during this show: his wide-legged pants emphasized his leg movements, apparently causing females in the audience to go "crazy". Presley consciously incorporated similar movements into future shows. DJ and promoter Bob Neal became the trio's manager (replacing Scotty Moore).

Moore and Black left their band, the Starlite Wranglers, and from August through October 1954 appeared with Presley at The Eagle's Nest.

Presley debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville on October 2; Hank Snow introduced Presley on stage. He performed "Blue Moon of Kentucky" but received only a polite response. Afterwards, the singer was allegedly told: "Boy, you’d better keep driving that truck."

Country music promoter and manager Tillman Franks booked Presley for the Louisiana Hayride on October 16. Before Franks saw Presley, he referred to him as "that new black singer with the funny name" During Presley's first set, the reaction was muted; for the second, Franks advised Presley to "Let it all go!" As house drummer D.J. Fontana (who had worked in strip clubs) complemented Presley's movements with accented beats and Bill Black engaged in his usual stage antics, the crowd was more responsive.

According to one source, "Audiences had never before heard such music... or seen anyone who performed like Presley either. The shy, polite, mumbling boy gained self-confidence with every appearance... People watching the show were astounded and shocked, both by the ferocity of his performance, and the crowd’s reaction to it... Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time in Odessa, Texas: '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.'" Sam Phillips said Presley "put every ounce of emotion... into every song, almost as if he was incapable of holding back."

Presley's sound was proving hard to categorize; he had been billed or labeled in the media as "The King of Western Bop", "The Hillbilly Cat", and "The Memphis Flash."

From August 15, 1955, "Colonel" Tom Parker became Presley's manager. By August 1955, Sun Studios had released ten sides credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill," all typical of the developing Presley style.

Controversial king

When "That's All Right" was played, many listeners were sure Presley must be black, and most white disc-jockeys wouldn't play his Sun singles. However, black disc-jockeys didn't want anything to do with a record made by a white man. To some, Presley had undoubtedly "stolen" or at least "derived his style from the Negro rhythm-and-blues performers of the late 1940s."Some black entertainers, notably Jackie Wilson, countered, "A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis."

Hollywood years

Elvis Presley filmography

In 1956, Presley launched his career as a film actor, beginning with the musical western, Love Me Tender. It was panned by the critics but did well at the box office. The original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed because of the advanced sales of the song "Love Me Tender". The majority of Presley's films were musical comedies made to "sell records and produce high revenues." He also appeared in more dramatic films, like Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. To maintain box office success, he even "shifted into beefcake formula comedy mode for a few years." He also made one non-musical western, Charro!.

In the Army, Presley said on many occasions that "more than anything, he wanted to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor." His manager, with an eye on long-term earnings, negotiated a multi-picture seven-year contract with Hal Wallis.

The singer withdrew from performing, except for The Frank Sinatra Timex Show: Welcome Home Elvis (1960) and three charity concerts (two in Memphis and one in Pearl Harbor, 1961).Although Presley was praised by directors, like Michael Curtiz, as polite and hardworking (and as having an exceptional memory), "he was definitely not the most talented actor around."The Presley vehicles and the AIP beach movies (mainly made for an early sixties teenage audience) were generally criticized as a "pantheon of bad taste." The scripts of his movies "were all the same, the songs progressively worse." Sight and Sound wrote that in his movies "Elvis Presley, aggressively bisexual in appeal, knowingly erotic,acting like a crucified houri and singing with a kind of machine-made surrealism." Others noted that the songs seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." For Blue Hawaii, "fourteen songs were cut in just three days." Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, says that Presley hated such songs and that he "couldn't stop laughing while he was recording" one of them.Critics would later claim that "No major star suffered through more bad movies than Elvis Presley."

Final year

Presley's decline continued. A journalist recalled: "Elvis Presley had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self... 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.

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." In Knoxville, Tennessee on May 20, "there was no longer any pretense of keeping up appearances... The idea was simply to get Elvis out on stage and keep him upright for the hour he was scheduled to perform."Thereafter, Presley struggled through every show. Despite his obvious problems, shows in Omaha, Nebraska and Rapid City, South Dakota were recorded for an album and a CBS-TV special: Elvis In Concert.

In Rapid City, "he was so nervous on stage that he could hardly talk... He was undoubtedly painfully aware of how he looked, and he knew that in his condition, he could not perform any significant movement. He looked, moved, and gestured like an overweight old man with crippling arthritis." A cousin, Billy Smith, recalled how Presley would sit in his room and chat, recounting things like his favourite Monty Python sketches and past japes, but "mostly there was a grim obsessiveness... a paranoia about people, germs... future events," that reminded Smith of Howard Hughes.

A book was published—the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. Written with input from three of Presley's "Memphis Mafia," the book was the authors' revenge for them being sacked and a plea to get Presley to face up to reality. The singer "was devastated by the book. Here were his close friends who had written serious stuff that would affect his life. He felt betrayed."

Presley's final performance was in Indianapolis at the Market Square Arena, on June 26, 1977.

Another tour was scheduled to begin August 17, 1977, but at Graceland the day before, Presley was found on the floor of his bathroom by fiancée, Ginger Alden. According to the medical investigator, Presley had "stumbled or crawled several feet before he died." He was officially pronounced dead at 3:30 pm at the Baptist Memorial Hospital.

At his funeral, hundreds of thousands of fans, the press and celebrities line the streets and many hoped to see the open casket in Graceland. Among the mourners were Ann-Margret (who had remained close to Presley) and his ex-wife.U.S. President Jimmy Carter issued a statement.

Presley was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery, Memphis, next to his mother. After an attempt to steal the body, his—and his mother's—remains were reburied at Graceland in the Meditation Gardens.

Post mortem

Presley had developed many health problems, some of them chronic. "Elvis had an enlarged heart for a long time. That, together with his drug habit, caused his death. But he was difficult to diagnose; it was a judgment call."

Presley first took drugs in the army, taking amphetamines to stay awake, though there are claims that pills of some form were first given to him by Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips. In Elvis and Me, Priscilla Presley writes that by 1962, he was taking placidyls to combat severe insomnia in ever-increasing doses and later took Dexedrine to counter the sleeping pills' after-effects. She later saw "problems in Elvis' life, all magnified by taking prescribed drugs." Presley's physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, has said: "Elvis 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."

According to Guralnick: "Drug use was heavily implicated... no one ruled out the possibility of anaphylactic shock brought on by the codeine pills...to which he was known to have had a mild allergy." In two lab reports filed two months later, each indicated "a strong belief that the primary cause of death was polypharmacy," with one report "indicating the detection of fourteen drugs in Elvis' system, ten in significant quantity."

The medical profession has been seriously questioned. Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry Francisco had offered a cause of death while the autopsy was still being performed and before toxicology results were known. Dr. Francisco dubiously stated that cardiac arrhythmia was the cause of death, a condition that can only be determined in a living person—not post mortem. Many doctors had been flattered to be associated with Presley (or had been bribed with gifts) and supplied him with pills which simply fed his addictions. The singer allegedly spent at least $1 million per year on drugs and doctors' fees or inducements. Although Dr. Nichopoulos was exonerated with regard to Presley's death, "In the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had [prescribed] more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines, and narcotics: all in Elvis' name. On January 20, 1980, the board found [against] him... but decided that he was not unethical [because he claimed he'd been trying to wean the singer off the drugs]." His license was suspended. In July 1995, it was permanently revoked after it was found he had improperly dispensed drugs to several patients.

In 1994, the autopsy into Presley's death was re-opened. Coroner Dr. Joseph Davis declared: "There is nothing in any of the data that supports a death from drugs [i.e. drug overdose]. In fact, everything points to a sudden, violent heart attack."However, there is little doubt that long-term drug misuse caused his premature death

Biographer Ernst Jorgensen has observed that when Presley died, it was as if all perspective on his musical career had been lost.His latter-day song choices had been seen as poor; many who disliked Presley had long been dismissive because he did not write his own songs. Others complained—incorrectly—that he could not play musical instruments. Such criticism of Presley continues. The tabloids had ridiculed his obesity and his kitschy, jump-suited performances. His film career was mocked. In 1980, John Lennon said: "Elvis died when he went into the army. That's when they killed him, that's when they castrated him." Acknowledgment of his vocal style had been reduced to mocking the hiccuping, vocalese tricks that he had used on some early recordings—and the way he said "Thankyouverymuch" after songs during live shows. This was only countered by the uncritical adulation of die-hard fans, who had even denied that he looked "fat" before he died.Any wish to understand Elvis Presley—his genuine abilities and his real influence—"seemed almost totally obscured."

In the same year, Forbes magazine named Presley, for the fifth straight year, the top-earning deceased celebrity, grossing US$45 million for the Presley estate during the preceding year. In mid-2006, top place was taken by Nirvana's Kurt Cobain after the sale of his song catalogue, but Presley reclaimed the top spot in 2007