He died on August 16, 1977, at the age of 42. He had been famous for barely twenty-one years. In that time he became the best-selling solo artist in the history of recorded music, changed what a live concert could be, and left behind a house that people still fly across oceans to stand outside. Forty-nine years on, thousands of them gathered at Graceland again this month with candles in their hands. Here is what the man actually achieved.
Start with the sales, because the numbers are almost silly. Guinness World Records lists Elvis Presley as the best-selling solo artist of all time, with an estimated one billion records sold worldwide. Graceland puts it the same way, adding that roughly 40 percent of those sales happened outside the United States. He has earned more gold records than any other act in history. He remains the most certified artist the American recording industry has ever measured, with certifications still being added today — nearly fifty years after he stopped recording.
Elvis Presley: A Life From Beginning To End | Full Biography
Then there is the chart history, which is where his real strangeness shows. He scored 104 Top 40 hits and 38 Top 10 singles. In 1956, he became the first artist ever to knock himself off the number one spot when “Love Me Tender” replaced “Hound Dog”/“Don’t Be Cruel” at the top. His records have spent more cumulative weeks on the UK singles chart than anyone else’s. And in 2016, thirty-nine years after his death, he beat Madonna to take the record for the most number one albums by a solo artist in Britain. He is still setting records he will never know about.
But the numbers miss what made him matter. On September 9, 1956, his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was watched by around 60 million Americans — roughly one in three people in the country. In December 1968, after nearly a decade of forgettable films, he walked onto a small stage in black leather and made the most-watched television program of the year. And on January 14, 1973, he became the first performer in history to be broadcast live around the planet by satellite, in Aloha from Hawaii, seen in more than 40 countries by an audience estimated at over a billion people.
Elvis Presley – Aloha from Hawaii
He rewrote live performance too. When he returned to the stage in Las Vegas in 1969 after eight years away, he broke every attendance record on the Strip within a week. He went on to play 636 sold-out shows across seven years — inventing the modern residency that Celine Dion, Elton John and Adele would all follow. In June 1972 he sold out four straight shows at Madison Square Garden, playing to 80,000 people in a single weekend.
And he gave a great deal of it away. Every Christmas from 1961 he quietly wrote cheques to more than 50 Memphis charities, often over $100,000 a year, with no press and no photographs. In 1961 he played a benefit in Honolulu that raised around $62,000. He rescued the stalled USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, insisting every penny go to the fund and buying the first ticket himself. He handed out as many as 200 Cadillacs in his lifetime, including one to a stranger who happened to be admiring a car through a showroom window.
The three Grammys he won were all for gospel, never rock — a fact he would probably have liked. His 1993 postage stamp remains the best-selling commemorative in United States history. Graceland is now the second-most-visited private home in America, behind only the White House. And on Saturday night, in near-hundred-degree heat, people who were not born when he died queued for hours on Elvis Presley Boulevard to walk up his driveway holding a candle. Next August marks fifty years.