The white jumpsuit is the single most recognizable outfit in the history of popular music—high collar, plunging neckline, enormous belt, flared trousers, rhinestones everywhere. Every Elvis impersonator on earth wears a version of it. But almost nobody knows where any of it actually came from — and the honest answers are Napoleon Bonaparte, a factory … Read more
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people walk into the Meditation Garden behind Graceland and stand at Elvis Presley’s grave. Almost none of them know that he wasn’t originally buried there — or that the reason he ended up in that garden is one of the strangest crime stories in American history. Twelve days after … Read more
Every year at Graceland, on holidays and especially around Christmas and New Year, the King of Rock and Roll organized something that would give a modern safety inspector a heart attack. He bought thousands of dollars’ worth of fireworks, split his friends into two teams, sent them out into the field behind the house, and … Read more
There is a piece of film from July 1, 1956, in which a 21-year-old Elvis Presley sits alone in a hotel room, talking down a telephone line to a New York newspaper columnist. It looks like nothing much. It is, in fact, extraordinary — because in a career of more than twenty years, that broadcast … Read more
On June 9, 1972, Elvis Presley sat down in a ballroom at the New York Hilton to face a room full of reporters. It was a big moment: he was about to play Madison Square Garden, and he hadn’t performed live in New York since his television appearances back in the 1950s. Everyone expected the … Read more
In March 1972, Elvis Presley walked into a Hollywood studio in one of the worst slumps of his career. He hadn’t had a Top 10 single in nearly two years. His marriage had collapsed the month before. Somebody put a rocking, up-tempo song in front of him called “Burning Love” — and Elvis flatly didn’t … Read more
Ask most people to name Elvis Presley’s biggest song, and they’ll say “Hound Dog,” or “Jailhouse Rock,” or “Suspicious Minds.” All wrong. The biggest-selling single of his entire career — around 20 million copies worldwide — is a slow, sweeping love song where he sings almost like an opera tenor. It’s called “It’s Now or … Read more
Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977. His daughter Lisa Marie was nine years old. Twenty years later, she walked into a recording studio, put on a pair of headphones, and did something almost nobody has ever done. She sang a duet with her father — his voice from the past, hers in the present, … Read more
It was 1955. Elvis Presley was 20 years old, and almost nobody outside the South knew his name yet. He was riding around in a car with two other musicians, playing in high school gyms, at county fairs, and at little country music shows. Most nights the crowd came to see somebody else, not Elvis. … Read more
In 1968, Elvis Presley was in trouble. Not money trouble. Not health trouble. Something worse for a singer. People had stopped taking him seriously. For years he had been making movies instead of music, and the wild young man who once shook up America had turned into a face on a poster. So Elvis picked … Read more