Elvis Presley: The King, the Voice, the Fall

Before Elvis, there was no such thing as a teenage rock and roll star. After him, there was nothing else. He took the country music he grew up with, the gospel he sang in church, and the rhythm and blues he heard across the tracks, and welded them into something so new and so electric that it split the twentieth century in two — a before and an after. He became the most famous man on Earth, and then, slowly and publicly, the loneliest. They called him the King. The title was earned, and it was also a kind of cage.

Tupelo to Memphis

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on 8 January 1935 in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi. His identical twin, Jesse, was stillborn — a loss that shadowed Elvis all his life. The family was poor, devout, and steeped in music: gospel in the Pentecostal church, country on the radio, and the blues drifting up from Beale Street after they moved to Memphis. Young Elvis absorbed all of it without prejudice, which in the segregated South of the 1950s was itself a kind of revolution.

Sun Records and the Birth of a Sound

In 1954, at Sam Phillips's Sun Records, Elvis recorded a loose, joyful version of a blues song called That's All Right. It didn't sound like country, and it didn't sound like R&B — it sounded like both at once, sped up and set on fire. Phillips had been looking for exactly this. Within two years Elvis had moved to RCA, fallen under the management of the shrewd, controlling Colonel Tom Parker, and unleashed Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock on a world that had never heard anything like him.

The Hips, the Hysteria, the King

What made Elvis dangerous was not just the voice — a remarkable, supple instrument that could croon, growl and soar — but the body. When he moved, teenagers screamed and parents panicked; television cameras were ordered to film him only from the waist up. The hysteria was unprecedented, and it minted a new idea: the pop star as object of mass adoration and moral alarm. By 1957 he was the biggest entertainer alive.

Hollywood and the Army

At the height of it, in 1958, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and shipped to Germany — where he met a young woman named Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he would later marry. When he returned, Colonel Parker steered him away from live performance and into the movies: more than thirty films through the 1960s, most of them lightweight, lucrative, and a slow drain on his credibility as the rebel who had started it all.

The '68 Comeback

By 1968 Elvis was in danger of becoming a nostalgia act. Then came the television special now simply known as the '68 Comeback. Dressed in black leather, stripped down, sweating and alive, he reminded the world — and himself — of exactly who he was. It remains one of the great resurrections in show business, and it relaunched him as a serious performer.

Vegas and the Jumpsuit Years

What followed was the Elvis the world now pictures: the Las Vegas residencies, the orchestral arrangements, the rhinestone jumpsuits, the capes, Suspicious Minds and Can't Help Falling in Love. In 1973 his Aloha from Hawaii concert was beamed by satellite to over a billion people — a feat no entertainer had ever managed. He was, once again, the King, presiding over the most spectacular show on Earth.

Graceland and the End

But the spectacle had a cost. Isolated behind the gates of Graceland, surrounded by an entourage and increasingly dependent on prescription drugs, Elvis grew unwell and unhappy. The performances became uneven, the body strained. On 16 August 1977 he was found dead at Graceland of a heart attack, with drug use a contributing factor. He was forty-two. The grief was worldwide; Memphis came to a standstill; and a legend hardened into something close to scripture.

The Legacy

He remains the best-selling solo music artist in history. He did not invent rock and roll single-handedly — Black artists built its foundations, often uncredited — but he was the lightning rod that carried it to the world, and nothing in popular culture was the same afterward. Graceland is a place of pilgrimage. The jumpsuit, the lip, the voice: all instantly, permanently legible. There is a reason "the King" needs no surname.

Elvis at Skeleton House

On Dead Reckoning it is Elvis who sings — Freddie — and it is hard to imagine a more fitting pairing. Two of the greatest showmen who ever lived, two voices built for the biggest rooms on the planet, two men who turned live performance into something like religion and paid a private price for it. When the King sings for the king of the arena, it is one master of spectacle saluting another. You can read the other half of that conversation in our Freddie Mercury tribute, and more on the album in the Dead Reckoning concept and announcement.

Watch the Dead Reckoning visual album →

He fused a country together, ruled it for two decades, and never quite escaped it. Long live the King.