Reference
- Presley, ElvisIn the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black labored in a small darkened recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, with guitars, bass, and voice, under the eager tutelage of Sam Phillips, owner and operator of Sun Studios. Their performances mined, refined, and polished the intensities of life in a major Southern city during the final decade of the Jim Crow era of segregation and the first decade of the new postwar youth culture. After hours of ragged, sweaty failure to produce pop songs that felt right to each of them, the shaggy yet overdressed Elvis picked up his old acoustic guitar and began banging out the chords to a recent blues hit by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, “That's All Right.” The song had received regular airplay on WDIA, a white-owned radio station that hired African American talent and aimed its programming at the growing black consumer base in the Memphis region. Moore and Black were familiar with the song. They grabbed their instruments, Phillips hit the tape recorder, and the great mythical cautionary tale that is the story of Elvis Presley began.
Twenty-three years later an overweight, drug-addicted, very lonely, and very rich, and totally evacuated Elvis Presley died at home. Official autopsy reports indicated that Presley died from the effects of too many prescription drugs, but his organization and most of his fans insisted that the real cause was heart failure. And why not? After all, Presley's heart certainly seemed to have failed. And what could be worse for an American entertainer-cum-myth than to end in a case of heart failure—no longer capable of intuiting and responding to the not-quite-spoken needs of his audience?
In between those years Presley recorded hundreds of successful pop songs, successful both artistically and commercially. His best performances were painstakingly constructed of professionally written material, in prime recording conditions, with the support of sympathetic musicians. In retrospect, Elvis Presley was perfectly positioned to capture musically the complex contradictions of race, gender, class, region, and age in the Southern United States. Driven by the ambition to remake himself and to use the inherited materials of his culture to make something new, Presley helped initiate, and then spent his career responding to, the powerful demand from young whites for a music that inspired them to move their bodies in new ways. Presley's music brought to the foreground sexuality, yet it did so through a prism of race; it articulated desire, yet channeled it through commodities. Presley also starred in dozens of nondescript movies, which, despite their blandness, helped distribute his image and expand his audience across the nation. Presley's career was a key contributor to the postwar reassertion of the cultural dominance of whiteness and the commercialization of society in the United States...
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Perspectives
Elvis Presley
In Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, one of the most admired Southern historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society--indeed, American society--in the second half of the twentieth century.Author of The Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and Southern History, Joel Williamson is a renowned historian known for his inimitable and compelling narrative style. In this tour de force biography, he captures the drama of Presley's career set against the popular culture of the post-World War II South. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley was a contradiction, flamboyant in pegged black pants with pink stripes, yet soft-spoken, respectfully courting a decent girl from church. Then he wandered into Sun Records, and everything changed. "I was scared stiff," Elvis recalled about his first time performing on stage. "Everyone was hollering and I didn't know what they were hollering at." Girls did the hollering--at his snarl and swagger. Williamson calls it "the revolution of the Elvis girls." His fans lived in an intense moment, this generation raised by their mothers while their fathers were away at war, whose lives were transformed by an exodus from the countryside to Southern cities, a postwar culture of consumption, and a striving for upward mobility. They came of age in the era of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which turned high schools into battlegrounds of race.
Last Train to Memphis
Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated. A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award "Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others." --Bob Dylan From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world. This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis' life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records ("That's All Right," "Mystery Train"), and the early RCA hits ("Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel"). These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army and his mother died shortly thereafter.
Elvis Cinema and Popular Culture
Though Elvis Presley's music is widely credited as starting a sea change in American popular culture, his films are often dismissed as base marketing vehicles, commercially successful but insignificant. Beyond the formulaic plotlines and increasing reliance on weak songs, however, the films - and Elvis - serve as profound cultural touchstones, revealing changing American aesthetics more than a changing Elvis. Elvis's rebel image in 1956, as a guitar-swinging incarnation of Brando or Dean, had by 1969's Change of Habit become safe and sterile. This work demonstrates how Elvis, through his films, reflected a shifting social, cultural and political landscape in America. Encompassing all 31 movies and two 1970s documentaries, it provides a film-by-film study of Elvis Presley and America, and argues that each film reflects the society for which it was made. Throughout his career, most of Elvis's characters combined rebellion with wholesome, traditional ideals, but the public's perspective changed, and what was considered radical in 1954 was called reactionary by 1970. Studied sequentially, his films reflect those cyclical ideals, and unconsciously portray America's process of renewal and redefinition of self.
The Death and Resurrection of Elvis Presley
There is no other way to put it: Elvis is the King. Note the present tense: even though Elvis (supposedly) died nearly forty years ago, he has lived on in our hearts, as a sound, as an image, and as an especially vigorous personality. In fact, it's safe to say no other celebrity has done so quite as well. The Death and Resurrection of Elvis Presley is the story of that afterlife, of Elvis after he left the building. Walking the eccentrically carpeted rooms of Graceland, bidding into stratospheric sums on his auctioned relics, and mingling among the some 200,000 impersonators of his likeness, Ted Harrison offers nothing less than the ultimate Elvis tribute. Harrison begins, of course, in pilgrimage: to Graceland. He shows how Elvis's estate was pillaged nearly to ruin by his manager but was saved through the deft business acumen and financial vision of his divorced wife, one Priscilla Presley. If Graceland seems holy, that's because it is: Harrison unveils in Elvis's allure a deeply spiritual dimension, showing how Elvis fans, over the decades, have anointed their idol with Christ-like qualities. Through Elvis's extravagance, Harrison raises fascinating links between money and faith, and through Elvis's life, he shows how the King actually fulfilled a host of roles ranging from hero to martyr to saint. Underpinning the whole story is Elvis's extraordinary charisma and--lest we forget--his astonishing musical genius. Fascinating, colorful, and deeply informative, this book is a must-have for any fan, anyone who was ever lucky enough to see Elvis alive or who hopes they might still be able to.
Elvis Presley - In The Movies
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This documentary focuses on Elvis's film career. It includes highlights from his best films, this entertaining documentary has rare footage of Elvis in the army, his marriage to Priscilla and other amazing true-life Elvis moments. The whole story of "The King" is here from beginning to end. You'll enjoy the best scenes from his most acclaimed movies, a dozen in all.
The Last Elvis
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowMost evenings in Buenos Aires, "Elvis" Gutierrez is a star - his singing and stage presence bring back to life the King of Rock and Roll in all his glory. By day, though, Gutierrez slaves away at a dead-end factory job and endures the scorn of his ex-wife; only his young daughter, Lisa Marie, brings any joy outside of his Elvis tribute gigs.
The King
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowDriving a Rolls-Royce once owned by Elvis Presley - with a revolving crew of musicians in the backseat - director Eugene Jarecki embarks on a cross-country road trip to explore how Elvis lost his authenticity as America lost its soul.
Nominated for the Golden Eye Award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival.
Online Resources
- 'And Introducing Elvis Presley' Industrial Convergence and Transmedia Stardom in the Rock 'n' Roll MovieRecent cinema music scholarship has demonstrated that the correspondence between commercial music production and Hollywood filmmaking has rarely operated according to a stable or fixed formula, but has instead taken place as an ever-shifting negotiation between media industries
- "Image, Music, Text": Elvis Presley as a Postmodern, Semiotic ConstructPeter Whitmer has written that around the world the names Jesus, Coke and Elvis are the "only three words that need no translation to convey their meaning" (Whitmer 1996: x). Even in a multicultural South Africa, in the year 2008, the image of an Elvis impersonator was used to market a series of rollerball pens for no other reason than they come in a variety of colours redolent of the ersatz emeralds and sapphires on the singer's jumpsuit (Sunday Times Magazine, 25 May 2008, n.p.)!
- Just a Little Talk with Jesus: Elvis Presley, Religious Music, and Southern SpiritualityWilson examines Elvis Presley's song, "Just a Little Talk with Jesus", and discusses religious music and southern spirituality at the height of Presley's rock and roll popularity. "Just a Little Talk with Jesus" was an especially revealing song of southern spirituality that day in Sun Studios, two years after the 1954 Brown decision and one year before the Soviet satellite Sputnik, during a decade that launched extraordinary cultural changes in the South.
Elvis: Return To Tupelo
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThe Elvis phenomenon has its roots in his birthplace where Presley began a musical journey that would take him from the wrong side of the tracks in Tupelo through Memphis to worldwide iconic status. Interviews, recordings, photographs and rare home movies reveal the influences that would inspire both his music and personality, capturing a portrait of America on the cusp of radical social change.