Life & times of Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley - widely known by the single name Elvis, is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King".

Presley is regarded as one of the most important figures of the twentieth-century. He is the best-selling solo artist in the history of popular music, with sales of approximately 1 billion units worldwide. Among many honours, Elvis 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.

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. A few months later, for his eleventh birthday, Presley received his first guitar.

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". Presley entered a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946. Though generally regarded as shy and a "loner", he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis the following year. He would play and sing during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played "hillbilly" music. When Presley was 12 years old, Mississippi Slim 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. 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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. Presley transformed not only the sound but the emotion of the song, turning what had been written as a "lament for a lost love into a satisfied declaration of independence."

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, all of a sudden, Elvis just started singing That's All Right, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too. 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 colour 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.

Winfield "Scotty" Moore and Bill Black, began playing regularly with him. They gave brief performances on July 17 and July 24 1953 to promote the Sun single at the Bon Air, a rowdy music club in Memphis. 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.

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.

Several record companies had shown interest in signing Presley and, by the end of October 1955, 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. By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.

Presley first became interested in acting in his youth. Despite his later declarations that he had no acting experience, fellow Humes High students recall that he was often cast as the lead in the Shakespeare plays they studied in English class. He admired actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and reportedly paid close attention to their performing styles long before he ever set foot on a movie set. On March 26–28, 1956, just days after the release of his first album, he did a screen test for Paramount Pictures. Part of the test was an audition for a supporting role in The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster. Screenwriter Allen Weiss compared his acting to that of "the lead in a high school play." Then, to his recording of Blue Suede Shoes, Presley gave a lip-synched performance, complete with gyrations. In a radio interview two weeks later, Presley excitedly declared that he would be making his motion picture debut in The Rainmaker. The part ultimately went to Earl Holliman. King Creole (1958) was Presley's personal favorite among his many films.

On April 25, Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount that also allowed him to work with other studios. In November, he made his big-screen debut with the musical western Love Me Tender. Its commercial success led to the release of three more Presley film vehicles over the next twenty months. The singer would go on to star alongside several well-established actors, including Walter Matthau, Carolyn Jones, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Stanwyck, and Mary Tyler Moore. An eleven-year-old Kurt Russell made his screen debut in It Happened at the World's Fair (1963).

A couple of Presley's early films, Jailhouse Rock (1957) and King Creole (1958), called for relatively dramatic performances. The dance sequence to the former's title song is often cited as his greatest moment onscreen.

Presley's films were indeed commercially successful, and he "became a film genre of his own." The silver screen gave many of his fans around the world their only opportunity to see him, given the almost complete absence of international appearances by the singer. Change of Habit (1969) was Presley's final non-concert movie. His last two theatrical films were concert documentaries in the early 1970s. In 1974, he lost the opportunity to co-star with Barbra Streisand in a big-budget remake of A Star Is Born when Parker demanded 50 per cent of the profits from the production along with other extravagant financial demands.With Kris Kristofferson as the male lead, the film became a major hit.

On May 5, 1967, Elvis took time from his busy career to marry Priscilla Beaulieu. The couple had one child together, a daughter named Lisa Marie Presley.

In 1973, after his divorce from Priscilla, Elvis' life took a turn for the worst. And, finally, Elvis Presley's musical career came to an abrupt end on August 16, 1977.

The book Elvis: What Happened?, written by Steve Dunleavy and the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1, 1977. It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. 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. Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, his girlfriend Ginger 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.

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.

In 1982, Graceland was officially opened to the public. Attracting over half a million visitors annually, it is the second most-visited home in the United States, after the White House. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006.

Presley has been inducted into four music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (1997), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001). In 1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' first posthumous presentation of the Award of Merit.

A Junkie XL remix of Presley's A Little Less Conversation (credited as Elvis Vs JXL) was used in a Nike advertising campaign during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It topped the charts in over 20 countries, and was included in a compilation of Presley's number one hits, ELV1S. Released the same year, the album too achieved international success. In 2003, a remix of "Rubberneckin'", a 1969 recording of Presley's, topped the U.S. sales chart, as did a 50th-anniversary re-release of "That's All Right" the following year. That's All Right was an outright hit in Great Britain, reaching number three on the pop chart.

In 2005, another three reissued singles, Jailhouse Rock, One Night/I Got Stung, and It's Now or Never, went to number one in Great Britain. A total of 17 Presley singles were reissued during the year—all made the British top five. 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 2006, Nirvana's Kurt Cobain headed the list after the sale of his song catalogue, but Presley reclaimed the top spot in 2007. In 2009, he was ranked fourth.

His fans from across the world make it a point to visit Graceland on his birth anniversary dressed in his style. These people are famous as "Elvis impersonators." Professional Elvis impersonators have been working all over the world as entertainers, and such tribute acts are in great demand due to the unique iconic status of Elvis. There are even a number of radio stations that exclusively feature Elvis impersonator material.

Presley's rise to national attention in 1956 transformed the field of popular music and had a huge effect on the broader scope of popular culture. As the catalyst for the cultural revolution that was rock and roll, he was central not only to defining it as a musical genre but in making it a touchstone of youth culture and rebellious attitude. With its racially mixed origins—repeatedly affirmed by Presley—rock and roll's occupation of a central position in mainstream American culture facilitated a new acceptance and appreciation of black culture. Presley also heralded the vastly expanded reach of celebrity in the era of mass communication: at the age of 21, within a year of his first appearance on American network television, he was arguably the most famous person in the world.

A stamp depicting Presley was also issued by the German post office in 1988.

For much of his career, Presley enjoyed the kind of worldwide fame that had never been seen before, and that has rarely been seen since. The global satellite concert Aloha From Hawaii remains the most viewed performance by any solo entertainer in history. His name, image, and voice are instantly recogniseable on every continent and among most cultures. In polls and surveys, he is recognized as one of the most important popular music artists and influential Americans, and he is one of the top selling musicians of all time.

(Text: Wikipedia)