The truck driver's son from Tupelo who walked into Sun Studio in Memphis and synthesised gospel, country, and the blues into a music that changed the world's relationship with the human body. The King — a title that requires no qualification because no one else has contested it since 1956.
Portrait · Elvis Presley
Born Elvis Aaron Presley on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi — a twin birth; his brother Jesse Garon was stillborn. His family was poor — his father served time in prison for check forgery when Elvis was three — and they moved to Memphis when he was thirteen. He attended Assembly of God services and absorbed the gospel tradition; he haunted Beale Street and absorbed the blues. At eighteen he paid four dollars to record himself at Sun Studio as a birthday present for his mother.
Sam Phillips at Sun Records heard what he had heard in no one else — a white singer who could channel the emotional truth of Black music without imitation, whose natural synthesis of gospel and blues and country was not calculated but entirely organic — and signed him. The recordings of 1954–55 changed the sound of American popular music before they had a national audience. By the time Heartbreak Hotel reached number one in March 1956, the question of what popular music was had been permanently reopened.
His two-year military service (1958–60) interrupted the first phase of his career at its peak; Colonel Tom Parker managed the Hollywood period that followed — thirty-three films of generally diminishing quality that made money and exhausted a genuine acting talent. His 1968 NBC Comeback Special — live, unscripted, the black leather suit, the performances of complete visceral authority — proved that the industry's decade of misuse had not touched the core of what he was.
The Las Vegas residencies that followed (1969–77) produced some of his finest recorded performances and documented a vocal instrument of remarkable power and range. His health deteriorated through the 1970s; he died on August 16, 1977, at Graceland, aged forty-two. He remains the best-selling solo music artist in history.
The Comeback Special's power derives from the contrast between the man who appears and the decade of films that preceded him — it is simultaneously a return and a rebuke. "If I Can Dream," the closing performance, delivered with complete conviction in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination, is the most politically charged moment of his career.
Jailhouse Rock is the one film that uses what Elvis actually was rather than a softened version of it — Vince Everett's selfishness and his charisma are the same quality, and Elvis understood this. The title number — which he choreographed — remains the most physically compelling musical sequence in 1950s American cinema.
Love Me Tender cast him against type — as the secondary character, not the lead — and the choice was instructive: he understood what vulnerability in a role required and provided it with complete commitment. His death scene was re-shot when audiences reportedly wept; the producers brought him back as a ghost-image over the final credits.
The documentary captures a performer who has found his mode and is using it to maximum effect — the Las Vegas performances are more vocally sophisticated than the earlier recordings, the instrument larger and more controlled. His rendition of "Suspicious Minds" — the song that gave him his last number one — is the finest performance the film contains.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.
Elvis Presley's legacy is the twentieth century's most significant reorganisation of popular culture — a single body, a single voice, a single moment of synthesis that made the world's relationship with music and with itself permanently different. Before 1956 and after 1956 are genuinely distinct periods in the history of what music is for and what it can do.
The best-selling solo recording artist in history, with more than 600 million records sold. The inaugural inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Three Grammys, all for gospel. A Lifetime Achievement Award at thirty-six. The title — the King — has never been seriously contested because the argument for any alternative would have to explain why, of all the performers who came before and after him, this is the one the culture could not stop mourning.