Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley was born in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi, in January 1935, thirty-five minutes after a twin brother who was stillborn, and became the first performer through whom the music of Black Southerners reached white teenagers everywhere, which is most of what the twentieth century meant by popular culture. His father did eight months on a chain gang for altering a cheque; the family moved to public housing in Memphis in 1948, and the boy grew up between the Assembly of God, the country radio and the blues on Beale Street. In July 1954 at Sun Records, at the end of a session going nowhere, he began clowning through Arthur Crudup's That's All Right and Sam Phillips, who had said he could make a billion dollars with a white man who sang like a Black one, pressed it. The regional hits, the hips on stage that the newspapers called obscene, and the management of Colonel Tom Parker, a Dutch illegal immigrant who had run carnivals, took him to RCA in November 1955 for an unheard-of thirty-five thousand dollars. Heartbreak Hotel was number one by April 1956, the Ed Sullivan Show filmed him from the waist up, and by the end of the year he had sold ten million records and made a film. The army took him in 1958 for two years in Germany, where he met his future wife at fourteen and began taking amphetamines; Parker kept the records coming and brought him back to a decade of Hollywood films that made money and nothing else. The television special of December 1968, in black leather, was a comeback and the last time he was dangerous. Then Las Vegas, twice a year, the jumpsuits, the Aloha from Hawaii broadcast of 1973 to a billion people, and the prescriptions from a doctor who wrote ten thousand of them in his last twenty months. He died at Graceland in August 1977 at forty-two, of a heart attack the drugs had prepared. The Mississippi page names him for the house in Tupelo, which the town bought back and shows.
- Lived: 1935 CE – 1977 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: singer, actor
