Family connections used to take me occasionally to northeast Mississippi, and when my wife and I were feeling adventurous, we would drive the 35 miles or so north to Tupelo to visit the birthplace of Elvis Presley.
Then, as now, there was not much to see. There was the tiny shotgun house itself, built by his father Vernon the year before Elvis was born (1935), and which the family was forced to abandon three years later when Vernon was imprisoned for check-kiting and could no longer pay back the $180 he had borrowed for the project. There was a memorial chapel nearby—underwritten by Elvis’s longtime manager, “Colonel” Tom Parker, no doubt with some tax benefit—where Elvis’s “personal Bible” was displayed under glass. There was no evidence that any human had ever handled the volume, much less studied its contents.
I do not mean to suggest that Elvis never opened a Bible, or lacked religious conviction; clearly he had, and he did. But that pristine personal Bible was of a piece with the spotless, cozily-furnished, two-room structure where the Presleys had lived in considerable privation a half-century earlier. In the Depression years, the shotgun house was set among dozens of others on some forlorn acreage near an evangelical church at the edge of Tupelo. By 1979, when I first saw it, the house stood alone beside a state historical marker in a neatly-manicured city park. The bed where Elvis arrived in the world, and his twin brother Jesse had been stillborn, no longer existed, but a substitute bed stood in its place.
There was never an abundance of visitors—at least when I was last there—but their tone and manner were invariably respectful, even reverent.
I mention all this to suggest that, along with baseball and Monticello, Las Vegas and the campus of a land-grant university—among other things—it’s impossible to understand America without knowing something about Elvis. When I first visited his birthplace, Elvis had not been dead for very long, and certain features of the Presley mythology had not yet taken root. Moreover, Elvis had died in his early 40s, and so his most fervent fans—his contemporaries—were still comparatively young.
Yet at the time, a casual, even disinterested, observer such as I was could see the paradox that made Elvis Presley an interesting, even compelling, character. Elvis’s sudden death—40 years ago today (August 16, 1977)—had produced an equally sudden, and unexpected, outpouring of national grief, featuring masses of pilgrims and near-hysterical conditions at the time of his funeral and burial at Graceland, in Memphis.
In the post-Princess Diana world, we’re accustomed to such mortuary implosions; but four decades ago, it was a surprise—not least because Elvis himself was long out of musical fashion when he succumbed. And the circus atmosphere at Graceland—accentuated, to some degree, by its kitschy contents and downscale character—has never quite lifted. The Elvis of the sideburns and swiveling hips, screaming female fans, and he’s-the-king costumes, is now the dominant image of the first (and perhaps, last) American pop-cultural figure whose fame transcended his time, place, and, especially, his vocation. In the mid-1950s, rock ‘n’ roll was a circumscribed taste, at best; but there was hardly anyone on the planet, certainly no one in America, who didn’t know about Elvis Presley, or could fail to recognize the sound he made.
Here I should declare my bias. I grew up in a household which took a decidedly dim view of postwar pop music—even my older sister, who was exactly the right age to be prime fan material, preferred Buddy Holly to Elvis Presley. I was not yet 6-years-old when Elvis made his debut on national television (1956) and so I, and my contemporaries at school, tended to find the Elvis phenomenon more amusing than hypnotic. Or so I remember.
Yet in the decades since, while never much of a rock enthusiast, I have long since grown to cherish the early, ducktailed Elvis—”Mystery Train,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” etc.—and subscribe to the conventional wisdom that, after his service in the Army (1958-60) slowed down the parade, he never quite recaptured the moment.
To be sure, Elvis was hardly forgotten in the 1960s, and while he went in short order from hip to unhip—the famous photograph of his impromptu 1970 White House audience with President Nixon comes to mind—it is always important to remember that fashions evolve, and grow unfashionable in their turn. What appealed to certain Americans about Elvis Presley in 1957 still meant something to them, and to many others, when he died 20 years later.
Of course, there was, and remains, the music; but in Elvis’s case, there was affinity as well, a characteristic of celebrity culture. And therein lies the paradox. On the one hand, Elvis Presley was a familiar figure in the history of pop music: A unique performer who spent his later years pursuing what we now call relevance, descending in the exercise into drugs, disillusion, and emotional pathos. On the other hand, he was a God-fearing Southern boy of the yes sir/no ma’am school, who honored his father and (especially) his mother, was generous to friends, kind to strangers, and served his country, without question, at some personal cost.
It’s that Elvis, I suspect, that you find in Tupelo.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
