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TUPELO, MS ‒ The distance from here to Memphis, Tennessee, is about 115 miles ‒ an easily traveled span of wooded hills and sunbaked asphalt, churches and truck stops, strip malls and at least one strip club.
But the space between the two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, where Elvis Presley was born on Jan. 8, 1935, and the 23-room mansion in Memphis, where the life of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll ended on Aug 16, 1977, is vast ‒ epic, historic, immeasurable.
Elvis’ journey from poverty and obscurity to an arguably unprecedented level of celebrity remains distinct in American history, and has yet to be reproduced, even if some of his sales records have fallen (to the Beatles, Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift, among others). His trajectory is one we've traced as part of our coverage leading up to America's 250th birthday in July 2026.
In the decades since Elvis' death, his life has been recognized by some 20 million travelers. That’s the number of visitors claimed by operators of Graceland, Elvis’ Memphis estate, which was opened to the public in 1982 as the entertainment equivalent of such historic homes as George Washington's Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
Some visitors are simply curious tourists. Others are fans, obsessives, pilgrims, seeking a connection with the entertainer who has sold more than a billion records worldwide (according to Graceland); who starred in 31 Hollywood movies; who revolutionized youth culture; who was a rebel and a patriot, an innovator and a borrower, a threat and a comfort, an artist and a punchline.
Some visitors pose for selfies in front of the iconic Graceland gates, with their stylized musical notes and representations of Elvis in wrought iron. Others say prayers and place flowers at Elvis’ grave in the Meditation Garden, on the south side of the mansion, where Elvis is interred along with several family members, including his daughter and only child, Lisa Marie Presley, who died in 2023.
Some never leave.
“I came down here and fell in love with everything Elvis,” said Mary Hertweck, a 64-year-old executive assistant and longtime Pittsburgh resident who this year bought a ranch-style 1960s house on Dolan Drive, a street adjacent to Graceland, so she could inhabit what she calls “Elvis World.”
“There’s the barn,” she said from her front yard, pointing toward a rooftop that could be seen beyond the trees across the street, indicating the building on the Graceland property where Elvis kept his horses. “It gives me goosebumps just to look at it.”
Hertweck left her two daughters and a new grandson behind in Pittsburgh. “They said, ‘Mom, what happened?’ I just said, ‘I’m going. I can’t explain this. I belong here.' "
He may be the King, but he's also 'relatable'
"The Hillbilly Cat," they called him. Also, "Elvis the Pelvis," after his gyrations on "The Milton Berle Show." "King of rock 'n’ roll" ‒ that phrase appeared, for perhaps the first time, in a 1956 column in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, the city's evening newspaper.
But was any nickname as unusual as the name "Elvis," which was his father's middle name?
The son of Gladys Love Smith Presley and Vernon Elvis Presley, Elvis was born on his parents’ bed, in a two-room, 300-square-foot home ‒ a “shotgun shack,” some would say ‒ that had been built just a few months earlier by his father, grandfather and uncle.
His stillborn twin, Jesse Garon Presley, had arrived 35 minutes earlier, and was buried in a shoebox, tied with a red ribbon, in an unmarked "pauper's grave" in Tupelo.
The Presley family's financial woes intensified when Vernon Presley was sent to the so-called “Parchman Farm,” the Mississippi State Penitentiary, after altering a check from “$4” to “$40.” The extra $36 cost Vernon dearly: He served about eight months at the work farm and was released about a month after Elvis’ fourth birthday.
During this time, the Presleys were unable to pay back a loan and lost the house Vernon had built, with its cardboard drop ceiling and newspaper wallpaper. The family was essentially itinerant after that, living in at least seven Tupelo locations before moving to Memphis, where Vernon hoped to find steady work rather than odd jobs. Elvis was 13.
Preserved because of the singer’s celebrity and because Elvis eventually purchased it himself, the Presley home is the last remaining house in the East Tupelo neighborhood where he was born. Like Graceland, the house is a tourist destination and the centerpiece of a campus of attractions, the Elvis Presley Birthplace, which includes the preserved white-frame Assembly of God Church where the future superstar was exposed to the gospel music that he would meld with country and pop into a distinctive Elvis style.
Shelby Jones, 74, a tour guide at the Elvis birth home, grew up in the neighborhood, a few years after the Presleys had moved away. “I’ve loved this house since I was 5 years old,” she said. “We would come over here and play and we didn’t know it was Elvis’ home.”
She said Elvis fans love the house, too. “They can’t understand why it’s so little, but they love it, they love it, they love it,” she said.
Also largely unchanged since Presley's childhood is Tupelo Hardware (founded in 1926), where Elvis received his first guitar, a Kay acoustic, on his 11th birthday. The gift was a compromise: Elvis had wanted a more expensive, not to mention more dangerous, .22 rifle. (Perhaps that thwarted desire inspired his devotion to guns: At the time of his death, Elvis owned close to 40 firearms.)
A black tape "X" on the hardware store floor marks the spot where Elvis is alleged to have first held and strummed his new guitar. "That's where rock and roll was born, right where that X is," said veteran sales clerk Floyd Hodges, perhaps aware of the more storied tape "X" that marks the spot at Sun Studio in Memphis, where Elvis cut his first commercially released record.
Like many early Elvis stories, the guitar yarn has a fairy tale quality ‒ it's about a boy who would become a King ‒ and yet it's homey, "relatable," to use a word favored by Roy Turner, executive director of the Elvis Presley Birthplace. He said this quality is a key to Elvis' enduring appeal.
When students from Mississippi’s struggling public schools tour the property, Turner said, “I point out that Elvis was poor, he was bullied and made fun of, his father was imprisoned, he was the kid of an ex-convict ‒ and Elvis rose above that. So I think he’s relatable.”
'I sing all kinds'
In a 1960 press conference at Graceland, Elvis was asked what he missed about Memphis during his two years in the Army. He answered: "Everything."
"I missed everything about Memphis," he said. "You name it, I missed it."
He perhaps wasn't as sanguine during his early years in the Bluff City, so called because of its location on the high ground of the Chickasaw Bluffs along the Mississippi River. The Presleys occupied at least eight addresses during the pre-Graceland era.
For most of Elvis' teenage years, the family rented an apartment at the Lauderdale Courts, walking distance from what would be Elvis' alma mater, Humes High School. Both Humes (no longer a public school) and the Courts remain; the Elvis faithful can rent No. 328 and spend the night in the bedroom where the young Elvis read comic books, struggled with homework, slept and dreamed. The walls that surround the 1950s-style bed in the apartment testify to the popularity of this particular fan indulgence: They are as patterned as the leopard-print mohair shoes that Elvis sometimes wore on stage, but the spots, on close examination, reveal themselves to be the red lipstick imprints of visitors who have pressed their mouths to the paint and plaster.
About a year-and-a-half after the Presleys left the Lauderdale Courts, Elvis, 19, got a job with the Crown Electric Co. But lightning did not strike until July 5, 1954, when Elvis, joined by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, improvised their revved-up rockabilly version of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's 1946 blues song "That's All Right," at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Service, now commonly referred to as Sun Studio. As Moore told Guitar World magazine in 2009, Elvis started "acting the fool"; Moore and Black followed suit, and "that was the beginning of, how do you say it ‒ all hell breaking loose!"
The session has been described as the Big Bang of Rock 'n' Roll. "Before Elvis, there was nothing," said John Lennon in 1980. For many, this July 5 date represented a new type of Independence Day. "Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail," said Bob Dylan in 1987.
Elvis was shy and polite (his use of "sir" and "ma'am" during press conferences, even at the height of his fame, astonished cynical reporters), but he had aspirations.
Elvis had been recruited for what would become known as his "Sun Sessions" by Sam Phillips' studio assistant, Marion Keisker, who met Elvis when he recorded his acetates; she thought the young vocalist had promise. Years later, she recounted their initial 1953 meeting in detail, attributing to Elvis an uncanny if ungrammatical eloquence. "I said, 'What kind of a singer are you?' " Keisker remembered. "He said, 'I sing all kinds.' I said, 'Who do you sound like?' He said, 'I don't sound like nobody.'"
Music, movies, more
Elvis' swivel hips, curled lip, dynamic talent and startling popular appeal launched a national conversation about sex, race, religion, free expression, cultural appropriation and American values that shows no sign of slowing.
That conversation arguably began three days after the recording of "That's All Right," when motor-mouthed Memphis radio deejay Dewey (no relation to Sam) Phillips ‒ who introduced teenagers to Black as well as White artists ‒ played Elvis' debut single over and over again on his popular "Red, Hot & Blue" program.
The song was a regional hit. Presley, Moore and Black began to perform for audiences, including on such far-reaching radio programs as the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. In 1955, Elvis signed with his influential and eventually controversial manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker. He continued to cut sides at Sun, and national interest in the novel, sexy singer grew. In November 1955, RCA Victor bought Presley's contract from Phillips for $40,000. Less than two months later, Elvis recorded "Heartbreak Hotel" in Nashville.
His first RCA single, the song topped the pop and "Country and Western" charts, and reached No. 3 on Billboard's "Rhythm and Blues" chart, indicating that Elvis had appeal for Black as well as White listeners.
The former Hillbilly Cat had also become catnip for programmers, pundits, producers and others. In 1956, he made a series of network television appearances, with his uninhibited hip-shaking style a shock to the system. Critiquing Elvis on "The Milton Berle Show," the New York Journal-American deplored the singer's “primitive physical movement difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper," while the New York Daily News suggested his "animalism" should be "confined to dives and bordellos." But he was a ratings dynamo.
By the fall of 1956, TV's top variety host, Ed Sullivan ‒ who earlier in the year had called Presley "unfit for family viewing" ‒ was eager to have Elvis on the season premiere of his CBS show; the broadcast reportedly attracted some 60 million viewers, or almost 83% of the audience. By the time of Elvis' third Sullivan stint, in January of 1957, the host was heralding the singer as a "decent, fine boy" ‒ even as the cameras filmed Elvis only from the waist up, even during his performance of a gospel number, "Peace in the Valley."
By that time, Elvis had logged another six No. 1 hits, including the title track to 1956's "Love Me Tender," the somewhat tentative ‒he was billed third, after Richard Egan and Debra Paget ‒ introduction of a new Elvis, Elvis the Movie Star. With poisonous glee, Time magazine's critic wrote of Elvis' acting debut: "Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp-looking, but who ever heard of a 172-pound sausage, 6 feet tall? Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft, beautiful eyes and curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns? Is it a corpse? The face just hangs there, limp and white with its little drop-seat mouth, rather like Lord Byron in the wax museum."
The "corpse," however, was a crowd-pleaser ‒ a star. For much of his subsequent career, Elvis would deemphasize music to concentrate on an increasingly frivolous and ultimately un-hip movie career, his ambitions of being another James Dean or Marlon Brando thwarted by the commercial imperatives of "Colonel" Tom, who yoked his client to the Technicolor musical escapism of such projects as "Easy Come, Easy Go," in which Elvis plays a Navy frogman turned nightclub crooner, and "Fun in Acapulco," in which Elvis croons "There's No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car" ("When a little kiss I want to steal / I hit my head against the steering wheel").
Uniforms and jumpsuits
The movies took Elvis away from Memphis and, crucially, his home, Graceland, which he had purchased for $102,500 in 1957, when he was 22.
Graceland was waiting after Elvis' return from what could have been a career killer, his two-year stint in the Army. Elvis was drafted in 1957 and served three years ("Private Presley" would be his latest nickname). He was stationed in Germany, where he met then 14-year-old Priscilla, the stepdaughter of an Air Force officer, in 1959. He was also in Germany when his beloved mother took ill; he flew to her side, and she died soon after, at the age of 45.
As Parker expected, Elvis' respectful and acquiescent military service ‒ complete with the much-publicized shearing of his famous pompadour and sideburns ‒ quashed criticisms of his performance style, but at a cost to his credibility among some of those who had idolized him. "Elvis really died the day he joined the Army," John Lennon said.
But for many of the fans who tour the mansion and its nearby museums today, Elvis' apparent patriotism, his love for his mother, his interest in Christianity and spirituality, and his other so-called "traditional" values are a major part of his appeal.
Elvis' 1968 NBC network special, the so-called "'68 Comeback Special," was a post-Army highlight that helped restore Presley's luster by dressing him, in one segment, in black leather. The 1969 recordings he made at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio marked a return to greatness and to the top of the charts, via "Suspicious Minds."
The movies expired in 1969, as Elvis launched another defining phase of his career, his seven-year Las Vegas residency. He also toured extensively during this period, wearing elaborately designed jumpsuits that fans can identify by name: the "Aztec Sunset," the "Aloha from Hawaii," the "Black Phoenix." To a large extent, the jumpsuited Elvis ‒ easily parodied, referenced in cartoons and comedy movies, found in costume shops and Las Vegas wedding chapels ‒ has become the most recognizable Elvis, as familiar as Superman or Santa Claus.
For all the joy of the touring Elvis' performances, this final phase of Presley's monumental but abbreviated career provides a dark finish to his American journey. Baz Luhrmann's 2022 biopic "Elvis" ‒ which Graceland officials say has helped boost attendance, especially among young people ‒ ends with footage borrowed from Presley's final on-camera performance, during a 1977 concert in South Dakota, less than two months before the singer's death. Elvis appears bloated and unwell. "He’s clearly suffering with drugs, yes," Luhrmann told The Wrap, "but he sings the best he ever sings and it’s the last time he sings.”
After Elvis died, the Memphis medical examiner reported that Presley "died from a heart attack in which 'drugs played no part,'" according to the Press-Scimitar. Many outside investigations followed, with most researchers now believing that Presley's dependency on prescription drugs contributed significantly to his death.
Elvis' afterlife
Death has not slowed Elvis. His influence is pervasive, his presence ubiquitous ‒ "Elvis Is Everywhere," as Mojo Nixon sang in 1987.
He's been a fixture at or near the top of Forbes' annual list of Highest Paid Dead Celebrities, sometimes ranking No. 1. In 2002, a remix by Dutch musician Junkie XL of Elvis' 1968 recording "A Little Less Conversation" reached No. 1 in Britain, Australia and about a half-dozen other countries. Luhrmann's "Elvis" earned $289 million at the worldwide box office and eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. He's been on two U.S. Postal Service stamps, issued in 1993 and 2015.
Criticism has also continued. Elvis' borrowings from or "appropriation" of Black culture has been much debated, on campuses and on social media, with some arguing that Elvis' contemporary, Chuck Berry, who wrote his songs and was an expert electric guitarist, is a truer "King" of rock ’n’ roll than Presley.
The debate has followed Elvis his entire career. In 1957, Sepia, a magazine aimed at Black readers, published an article titled "How Negroes Feel About Elvis" that repeated rumors about Elvis' racial opinions. That same year, Jet, another magazine for Black readers, interviewed Elvis, who was humble about his influences: "A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock 'n' roll was here a long time before I came along."
Whatever his origins and however complicated his life and legacy, Elvis, for many, remains the embodiment of the American ideal, even if his journey lasted only 42 years.
"All the foreign visitors that come here, it's the American dream more than the music that they talk about," said Turner, in Tupelo. "They are fascinated that he went from this little house to Graceland. They perceive it as what we call the American dream, going from nothing to something to something really big."
The fascination with that dream, as embodied by Elvis, takes many forms. Some fans carry it with them always.
Standing outside of Graceland, Sonya Reid of London, who has visited the mansion every year since 2012, explained that she has transformed her body into a canvas for tattooed portraits of Elvis because "the only thing you can take to the grave is ‒ that." As she spoke, she stretched out an arm that was etched with a photo-realistic depiction of Elvis, circa 1956, complete with sideburns and curled lip.
"I want to keep him close to me," she said.
John Beifuss reports for The Commercial Appeal.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: We followed Elvis from Tupelo to Graceland. It wasn't far but the distance was great.
Reporting by John Beifuss, USA TODAY NETWORK / Memphis Commercial Appeal
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