In , Elvis was drafted for military service , a major event for fans and media. After basic training, he joined the 3rd Armoured Division and was stationed in Germany for two years. During the s, Elvis also starred in several prescribed Hollywood movies , usually musical comedies that were accompanied by a soundtrack album. Sadly, after years of prescription drug misuse and in failing health, Elvis passed away on August 16, , after suffering a sudden heart attack in his Graceland home.
From a shy young boy to global superstar, the icon of the 20th century that was Elvis Presley is still as enigmatic today as when he was alive. One of the most celebrated and influential popular musicians of all time, his gift and talent, flaws and failings are as enchanting now as they were when he first snarled his lips. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.
Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. I think he still matters today because the art is so true. His art, she says, came from Elvis "just being Elvis. He was so unique his influence can still be felt years later in music, culture, dress, hairstyles, and pop stardom. It was his ideas for what he wore in Vegas, it was his ideas for the music.
All of that creativity came from Elvis. Elvis Presley on stage singing in performance at Madison Square Garden. Nash says that staying power serves as a huge testament to his depth and truth as an artist. She believes it was the loss of that ability to create that led to him, eventually, losing himself. In some ways becoming kind of a caricature of his former self so that he just had to numb himself out.
She was working as the pop music writer for the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal when word broke that he died. She was sent to Graceland to cover his funeral and became the first journalists to view his remains. She would go on to write a series of books on Elvis covering just about every aspect of his life. Original Caption Las Vegas, Nev..
Entertainer, Elvis Presley sits cheek to cheek wit his bride, the Smith, Marty Lacker, and Lamar Fike painted a vivid portrait of what it was like to live with Elvis through the highs and lows of his life and career, and during the later years as he began to slip away.
It also delves into his extremely close relationship with his mother, Gladys. He also changed how we are able to look at, and experience, him in the 21st century. Next up: a hologram Elvis that can carry an entire concert.
His fantastic rise and long, sad slide into an overweight, gun-toting, prescription-drug-abusing conspiracy theorist about communism and the counterculture he hated the Beatles, once telling President Nixon that the British band threatened American values tap into fundamental questions about race, mass culture, sexuality and working-class anxiety in a postwar America. A poor boy made good in the prosperous s, Presley experienced tension and feared disorder in the s before breaking down totally in the hectic s.
In his music and movies, in his private worlds at Graceland and in Las Vegas, Presley was a forerunner of the reality-TV era in which celebrities play an outsize role in the imaginative lives of their fans.
Presley was born in Tupelo, Miss. The other two distinct Mississippi worlds are the Delta and the Gulf Coast. His mother was devoted to her son, all the more so because Presley had had a twin brother who was stillborn. Presley grew up as a member of the Assembly of God, a denomination that emphasized personal religious experiences.
Music and singing were essential means of creating ecstatic moments of transcendence: a vibrant, emotional, very public form of faith. The individual was the vessel of the Holy Spirit—a performer, if only for the congregation. Eventually the family moved to Memphis, which was perfect for Presley. A longtime cotton hub, the city, like Presley himself, sat between the blues-soaked Delta and the virtually all-white country-and-western music world of Nashville. In the summer of , after a brief, not-quite-successful visit the year before, Presley cut a record with the producer Sam Phillips, who ran Sun Records on Union Avenue.
A few weeks later, at an open-air performance at Overton Park Shell in Memphis, Presley played the two songs from that recording. That much, at least, should have been clear: they were hollering at him, transported by his electric physicality and extraordinary voice, which ranged comfortably from baritone to tenor and above. He did not simply sing; he became the music, as though possessed by a spirit of joy and release back at the Assembly of God.
It was sexual, yes, and thus disturbing to the more placid and puritanical observers, but it was inescapably religious too, in the sense that religion evokes realities ordinarily hidden from the human eye.
Here, on a covered stage in a park in western Tennessee, a white man was drawing on the deep tradition of African-American blues. In the popular mind, a fresh genre—a different epoch—was emerging. That was not strictly true. Presley was a vehicle—cultural critics would say he was basically a mimic, or even a thief—of the black musical and spiritual experiences of his native Mississippi.
Phillips, the maestro of Sun Records who recorded artists such as B. Chuck Berry and Little Richard would be early breakout stars across the color line, but Phillips believed that would not be enough to integrate the cultural and commercial markets.
My daddy and I were laughing about it the other day. Presley emerged at the moment the machinery of post—World War II mass culture began to hum. The world was on the move; old barriers were under siege; new possibilities were opening up.
It was the age of the GI Bill and Brown v.
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