Plenty of famous people in the 1950s and 60s were handed honorary black belts they hadn’t earned. Elvis Presley wasn’t one of them. He trained in karate for nearly twenty years, under a string of serious instructors across three countries, opened his own karate school, and reached a rank most people who train their whole … Read more

Almost everyone on earth knows the phrase. It’s in films, in cartoons, in video games, in comedy routines. It has been said by sports announcers, politicians and stand-up comics who never heard an Elvis record in their lives: “Elvis has left the building.” What almost nobody knows is that the very first time those words … Read more

It is one of the most recognizable outfits in the history of show business. The gold lamé suit — jacket, trousers, belt, shoes and tie, all of it glittering — worn by Elvis Presley on the cover of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Even the Elvis Barbie doll wears one. The world was told … Read more

In August 1956, a judge in Florida did something no judge has done before or since. He issued a warning to a 21-year-old singer that amounted to an injunction on his hips. If Elvis Presley moved them on stage that night, arrest warrants were ready, and he would be taken straight to jail. What Elvis … Read more

The man who controlled the biggest career in music history did not come from Hollywood, or Nashville, or any record company. He came from a traveling carnival — and the way he made his living before Elvis Presley is so outrageous that people assume it’s a joke. It isn’t. Colonel Tom Parker caught ordinary brown … Read more

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is one of the saddest songs Elvis Presley ever recorded. It went to number one in 1960, and it’s about a man begging to know if the woman who left him still thinks about him. There is nothing funny in it anywhere. Which is why the most famous performance of it … Read more

In January 1954, a fifteen-year-old girl at a church function in Memphis spotted a boy she couldn’t stop looking at. He was nineteen, shy to the point of silence, and had a strange haircut and clothes nobody else in the congregation would have dared to wear. Her name was Dixie Locke. His name was Elvis … Read more

Walk through the Graceland exhibits in Memphis, and you’ll come to a 25-inch RCA color television from the 1970s with a bullet hole in the screen. It isn’t a replica or a prop. Elvis Presley genuinely pulled out a gun and shot his own TV set while it was switched on, and the story of … Read more

In May 1957, Elvis Presley was filming what would become the most famous dance sequence of his career. The song was “Jailhouse Rock.” The scene required him to slide down a pole — and he threw himself into it exactly the way he threw himself into everything. He hit the pole so hard that he … Read more