Elvis Born: The King of Rock and Roll Arrives

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun shack in East Tupelo, Mississippi, that his father Vernon had built with borrowed money. His twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. The family was poor enough that they sometimes relied on neighbors and government assistance for groceries. Elvis grew up listening to gospel music at the Assembly of God church his family attended and to the blues he heard on Beale Street in Memphis, where the family relocated in 1948. At nineteen, he walked into Sun Records in Memphis and paid four dollars to record two songs as a gift for his mother. Sam Phillips, the studio owner, heard something in the young man's voice and called him back. The result was That's All Right, a recording that fused Black rhythm and blues with white country music in a way that sounded like nothing else on the radio. Within two years, Elvis was on The Ed Sullivan Show, filmed from the waist up because CBS censors considered his hip movements too sexually suggestive for family television. He had eighteen number-one singles on the Billboard chart. He starred in thirty-three films, most of them critically forgettable but commercially successful. He was drafted into the Army in 1958, served in Germany, and returned to a career that had changed in his absence. He never performed outside North America. His 1968 comeback special and his Las Vegas residency in the early 1970s revived his creative reputation, but prescription drug abuse and declining health dominated his final years. He died at Graceland on August 16, 1977, at the age of forty-two. He had bought the house for his mother.