Elvis Memories E-Book

Michael Freedland

• Herausgeber: The Robson Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 453

Beschreibung

The man, the music, the mythology - everyone knows Elvis, right? From the swinging hips and tempestuous love life to the peanut butter and banana sandwiches. But how do the iconic snapshots and the snippets of rumour match up with the truth about the man behind the legend? Michael Freedland's Elvis Memories sets out to answer precisely that question - and succeeds in grand style, giving us a rare and privileged glimpse into the intimate recollections of the people who really knew him. On a journey that spans the United States, Freedland introduces us to Presley's friends, family and followers, taking in the kids who competed against him in childhood talent shows, the members of the 'Memphis Mafia' who went everywhere with him and the maid who prepared those infamous sandwiches and watched him line up the girls he wanted to take to his bed. Thirty-five years after the death of the man we still call 'The King', Elvis Memories offers a unique chance to see the real Elvis Presley through the eyes of those who shared his life.

Leseprobe

In adored memory

My Sarala – you were lovely. Everybody said so.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

The Friends’ Story

The Birthplace

Memphis

Graceland

Nashville

Las Vegas

Hollywood

The End

Finale

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates

Also by Michael Freedland

Copyright

THE FRIENDS’ STORY

Everyone knows Elvis. At least, that’s what you might think. You don’t need a surname. Yes, there’s another popular and highly successful singer who adopted that name, which was very clever of him. But the Elvis who comes to mind – and this is a challenge not to be ignored – is the fellow with the long shiny black hair who appeared to sneer as he swivelled his white jumpsuit-clad hips and answered to the appellation Presley.

Yes, everyone knows Elvis. But this is a book about people who really knew Elvis. Men and women who knew him in poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi; who travelled with the Presley family to Memphis, in neighbouring Tennessee; the ones who saw his burgeoning success there and who stayed with him in the mansion home he called Graceland, and those who travelled with him to Hollywood and the place where he established his virtual fiefdom called Las Vegas. They were among the throng who also witnessed the power he had in the music business in Nashville. We go into the army with him to Germany, experience his peccadillos, watch with his intimates the food fetishes which many say killed him, and the relationships with women which others could testify kept him alive.

We note the man’s generosity and his concerns. In many ways, this poor boy whose family were dismissed as white trash grew to be a true Southern gentleman.

That is the kind of book this is. It is not another conventional Elvis Presley biography. You won’t read any reviews of films or records – in fact, it has been a struggle to avoid mentioning any of his movies and/or his songs, but I have tried. There came the obvious moments when I found it inevitable. You won’t hear from any big stars either. This is a book about Elvis and his friends, as told by his friends. The ones who really knew Elvis.

We’ll meet the hairdresser who changed his life, the girls who fell in love with him, the nurse who set up home in Graceland because that was how he wanted it – in case he had a heart attack or cut his little finger. He gave her a car to make travelling to and from her own home a little easier. There’s the black maid who created the infamous hamburgers, the peanut butter sandwiches – and who saw how the girls were lined up night after night to suit the master’s pleasure. He gave her a car, too.

Then there are the guys who shared the same apartment block where Elvis lived as a teenager and went on raves with him, the ‘coloured’ boy – the term used by the more polite white folks from the other side of the Memphis tracks – who went to the movies with him, sneaking past the race laws as he did the black-only barriers; and also the man in the shop that was probably more essential to the Elvis Presley story than any other institution – because it was there that he was bought his first guitar. And talking of shops, I won’t be forgetting the one the young – the very young – Elvis used to stand outside, his nose pressed against the window until he was invited to come in and buy his first stage outfit – on what they called in those parts the instalment plan. There, today, more than half a century later, the big speciality is their own version of a pair of blue suede shoes. (See what has happened? Hardly past the first page and I’ve already given you a Presley song title.)

This all started on a BBC Radio Two series called The Elvis Trail. What you will ‘hear’ in this book are so many of the things that could never be included in a five-part, thirty-minute (complete with music) radio programme.

So, conventional biography or not, this is the real Elvis story. It is about the real man; neither the one that the publicity machine – and what the infamous (and phoney) ‘Colonel’ Parker dreamed up – nor the kiss and tell stories that have appeared since his death all those years ago.

THE BIRTHPLACE

The signs are everywhere – to ‘Elvis’s birthplace’ they declare. Well, yes and no. The house is the one in which he was born. The church is the one in which he prayed and where he sang his first gospel songs. But they are not where they were originally, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. Brick by brick, log by log they have been moved to either end of a landscaped grassy mound. Appropriately, the two buildings – if that is not glorifying a shack and a chapel whose structures were originally put up by local artisans who knew a hammer and shovel much better than any architect’s blueprint – have been arranged alongside the statue of a local boy made good. The house itself (and its painfully primitive furniture) was built in 1934, just before the star’s birth, by Elvis’s father Vernon and ‘daddy’s’ (remember, this is the Deep South we are talking about, where they use the term well beyond childhood) brother Vester working with their own father, Jesse Presley.

It’s all appropriate because without the blessing of that local boy in working man’s dungarees, the one with the tousled hair and the guitar that he first saw on a rack in the nearby hardware store, Tupelo would be just another Mississippi town, its 45,000-strong population like any other from that part of the world, driving down Main Street, seeing rail tracks that have both good and bad sides, overhead power cables, some greenery and lots of Confederate flags flying around the place. For this is as deep as the Deep South gets. As much part of the fabric as a dish of grits and gravy. The accents, the words they speak, betray the origins of the few septuagenarians who really do remember the Presley family and their boy Elvis.

The people of Tupelo claim him as their own. Susie Dent, who goes around Tupelo stressing the work of the North East Mississippi Historical and Genealogical Society – with great effect, it has to be said – plainly needs to stress the Elvis Connection whenever she can. She emphasises that not only was Tupelo influenced by him, but he was influenced by Tupelo.

As she said: ‘He had a Christian upbringing. The old-style fundamentalist churches had loads of music and he got a lot of soul from that music. He went from rags to riches, but a lot of people thought his magic would rub off on them.’ But did it? ‘He was pretty good at giving away his wealth.’ We shall see that as the story moves on. And then, said Susie, ‘his musical riches stayed around.’

What becomes clear is that it took a long time for Tupelo really to appreciate him. ‘When I first came here in 1970,’ Susie said, ‘most people had never even been to his birthplace, but now with the influx of people from all over the world, people have more respect for him.’

So there is more to this place than those locals. The signs are the big giveaway. For this is, above all, a place of pilgrimage and, in truth, many of the pilgrims make this a combination of Graceland and Lourdes – in the belief that Elvis couldn’t possibly have died without leaving behind some mystical powers. They think and possibly really do believe that they know more about the young Presley to whom they owe so much than those who can actually recall the time when he carried a few poor quality groceries home for his mother, Gladys, in what they describe, round and about, as his ‘wagon’ – in effect, a combination of wooden box and old pram wheels.

The day I was there, a couple, Sheri and Lois Hathaway had travelled 500 miles to pay their annual visit to the ‘house’, two tiny rooms in which the young Elvis, his mother Gladys and his father, newly released from jail, slept and a living room-cum-kitchen and – somewhat grandly, I thought – ‘laundry room’, where they did everything else.

Was this perhaps really some religious rite for the visitors? ‘Well,’ said Sheri, ‘it makes you feel closer to Elvis Presley. It started for us when we became fans forty years ago.’

Tupelo is the sort of place where people tend to know everyone else’s business. There are those who knew the Presley story before he became famous, and no one more so than the local genealogists, like Julien Riley. He told me how the family stemmed from both Scottish and Native American roots. But, although as this story moves on you will hear people who make statements to the contrary, suggestions that he had Jewish blood are denied by this source at least.

‘There’s not a sliver of evidence of that. It’s just a myth.’ A myth perpetuated by the fact that he sometimes wore a Star of David around his neck – along with his famous ‘Taking Care of Business’ badge.

Riley is convinced that the family came from Itawamba County, whose Native American name accounts for the ancestry of which he was always proud. A certain Dunnan Presley, who was born in Tennessee and had been a soldier in the Texas Revolution against the Mexicans – which included the famous Battle of the Alamo of 1836, the history of which makes no mention of an Elvis ancestor – was a bigamist and perhaps even a ‘trigamist’. He married Martha Jane Wesson, who had two daughters, Rosella and Rosalinda – two young ladies who never married but had thirteen children between them (showing perhaps a proclivity for one of the joys of life taken up with alacrity by their descendant), all with different surnames, but who eventually took the name Presley – which Riley says proves Elvis was not a Presley after all. In fact, he told me, he should have been known as Elvis Wallace, the true name of his great-grandfather, John, who was a Scottish fiddle player. ‘Had his great-grandmother married, there wouldn’t have been any Presleys at all.’

I wondered if the emotional impact of Elvis’s death on 16 August 1977 was as traumatic for the Hathaways as it was for seemingly millions of others. Did Sheri, for instance, cry when he died? ‘Oh yes,’ she said. She didn’t have to say anything else. Like those other pilgrims, she knew, almost literally, every movement of Elvis’s life. Me, I couldn’t imagine there was anything more to find out. But no. The journey had only just started.

‘We see all the museums,’ Sheri said. In fact, there was one just the other side of what is now very much a public park – perhaps the fact that they had the pink Cadillac that once belonged to the man people like to call ‘the King’ had something to do with it. Actually, the town and the people who have taken it upon themselves to preserve the Elvis legacy didn’t like the idea of this place cashing in on what they consider to be their own bailiwick and, before long, it closed.

But while it was there, the museum formed part of the pilgrimage for a couple who stay five days and never fail to visit the place they and everyone else calls ‘the mansion’, but which the rest of the world knows as Graceland. It’s a sort of refresher course for two people who wouldn’t dream of letting a day pass without listening to some Elvis song or other. ‘We are always listening to Sirius Radio’, a station which specialises in the King’s music.

And at the end of their five-day stay, they take on a job for themselves. As Lois told me: ‘As soon as we leave, we plan our trip for next year.’

It’s a familiar story for the custodian of the birthplace, Dick Guyton, a man who could claim to know more about Elvis and his early days than anyone else. It is as if he himself had sat in a classroom and heard the kid who, in fact, lived a mile or so away, singing his favourite Southern ditty, ‘Old Shep’, all about the love of a boy for his dog – ‘When I was a lad and Old Shep was a pup, over hills and meadows we’d stray …’

Certainly, he knows the visitors. ‘We had people here from twenty-one countries this year,’ he told me. ‘There was a lady from the UK who came here and kissed the floor.’ But not all the people who come to what is officially known as ‘the Birthplace’ are dyed-in-the-wool fans. ‘No,’ said Guyton ‘some are just interested.’ Which is, perhaps, an understatement.

Plainly, it isn’t just the Elvis legacy that benefits from all this attention. Economically, it has great impact on Tupelo. Seventy-five thousand people visit annually. But more than that, there is the honour of saying the king of rock’n’roll was born here, where he learnt about the music of the time. You can’t live here and not know about Elvis Presley. Or know about his impact on local religious life.

‘You are welcome’ reads a sign outside the white clapboard First Assembly of God church. And it’s a good bet, to use a probably inappropriate term, that you’d find more than one person inside the extraordinarily rudimentary building willing to talk about Master Presley. Willing? They rush to talk about him, the pride in their relationship fairly bursting out of their pores. And relationships there were aplenty. Real blood relationships.

Like Sybil Presley, his second cousin (or perhaps that should be, for the more pedantic among us, first cousin, once removed; to remove any doubt, it’s enough to say that their paternal grandfathers were brothers). We had first met on the porch outside the birthplace house. I asked Sybil what the name Presley meant in those parts. She dismissed any suggestion of either trading on the name or, even if it had meant anything, of anyone giving any favours. ‘We’re just simple country folk,’ she insisted. I liked that.

I asked about memories. ‘Oh, Elvis was shy, kind and generous.’ But they didn’t stay close. ‘We were a close-knit family, but the money separated us. Then the drugs, the fame, the fortune.’

It’s well known that the most important person in the world for Elvis Presley was his mother. But the fame and fortune threatened to cause trouble for Gladys, too. As Sybil remembered: ‘My most vivid memory is of Gladys coming back here after Elvis got famous … Gladys crying, wanting to be back in Tupelo. Graceland was an isolation for her.’ If you took Sybil’s word for it, you could come to the conclusion that, all those years later, Graceland was to be an isolation for Elvis himself, too.

‘He had an old brown Dodge and Elvis used to sneak back. Then one day [Tupelo] girls started screaming for him, so he couldn’t come so often.’

She puts the blame for his leaving his roots down to the ubiquitous Col. Parker, Elvis’s manager and some would say the evil spirit in his life. ‘We don’t have a good opinion of “Colonel” Parker,’ she told me. ‘He fed Elvis Presley drugs, overworked him.’ That made me wonder – how could a strong person like Elvis, a man to whom no one ever said no, allow that to happen? ‘I never saw Elvis as a strong person. He was nurturing, reaching out; the strong personality at the end was not him normally. True, he came alive on stage. Wasn’t he gorgeous? Some people say he was the perfect man.’ And Sybil demonstrated that fact by saying, that to her mind, his loyalty to Tupelo said it all.

‘He got offended at people misusing funds. [When he came back to Tupelo] in 1956 and 1957 at the fairs, he used the funds to buy all this back – the swimming pool, ball park, a youth centre.’ But things didn’t always go his way. ‘He wanted to have a guitar-shaped swimming pool built here, but the funds were misappropriated.’

Those were amazing days all the same – and everyone who was around at the time, or who had even a vicarious interest in it or, let it be said, liked to convince people that he or she was there, no matter whether they were or not, had their own story to tell. Not least Robert Norris, the policeman detailed to supervise the event and who ended up dragging kids off the stage.

‘They brought him to the fairground at ten o’clock that morning with wailing sirens. The kids stormed his Cadillac and there was no show that morning. So they brought him back at 2 p.m. and we had to come back that night.’

Norris was twenty-four years old at the time. ‘My chief was in his fifties and didn’t know what sort of crowd Elvis Presley would attract and I tried to tell him. I told him we needed a fire hose, but he said we didn’t need that.’ He seems to have anticipated the situation early on. ‘I was on the night shift and the phone rang at eleven and we were told we were needed at 1 a.m. sharp at the fairground.’

He was one of fourteen policemen on site. The youngsters spent the night waiting for the local lad who was by now established as their idol. The noise that greeted those cops was overwhelming. ‘I’ve never heard such screaming. They crowded in there. When it came to the afternoon show, it became clear that fourteen policemen were not going to be enough. So Governor J. R. Coleman got in the National Guard.’ That alone was an indication of precisely how difficult the task was going to be. So difficult that the Guard, used to quelling political demonstrations and race riots, couldn’t stop Julie Hopper who, the then young cop maintains, was shoved to such an extent that she ended up on the stage, an event that hit the national headlines as much as the National Guard did.

‘She didn’t even touch him.’ Elvis spoke to her, however. But it was one of those intimate whispers he loved to have with pretty girls and Norris maintains nobody heard what it was he did say.

Elvis was already a local fixture – as much with the local policemen as any of Tupelo’s farm workers. Robert Norris was wearing overalls when we met – just like Elvis did in those old pictures and sculptures. But, as I put to him, Presley would have been even happier swapping with the local cop. He would have dearly loved to wear a police uniform. ‘He was obsessed with the police,’ he told me. Why? ‘I don’t really know. He had a thing about policemen and he was made an honorary deputy.’ But that was in years ahead.

Yet even then, in his early twenties, Elvis had a reputation for generosity. ‘But Presley people are proud people. They wouldn’t accept handouts.’

All that is jumping a few years.

The First Assembly of God church glorifies the boy Elvis. Or at least the one he was reputed to be. But what comes so clear is that those old-timers who knew the boy Presley saw the man to be in the kid in the dungarees. Sure, there could be an element of 20/20 hindsight, yet the stories read true – all have an element of being able to place the big star in the life of a tiny Mississippi town all those years ago. They are all as redolent of the age as Elvis was himself. Like his own, their names speak of the Old South. None more so than the delightfully named Azalia Smith Moore, a psychologist who proudly talks about growing up with Elvis.

Azalia also remembers him, as do most Tupelo residents of a certain age, as a kind, warm youngster. However, unlike Sybil Presley she remembers his generosity to people who don’t appear to have been in his inner circle. As she told me, he was famous round and about for giving gifts to local people.

I found it fascinating that people who were aggressive to him as classmates were more recipients than those who were in his cadre of buddies. He didn’t try to buy them off, but I think there was a sort of − like the biblical [passage] – ‘Be kind to those who despitefully use you …’ We grew up with a respect for seniors, administrators, our preachers, then our teachers, our parents, the neighbourhood parents. And what I think happened to Elvis is that he was psychologically manoeuvred into that kind of a dependency syndrome with ‘Colonel’ Parker and other people who were in his control system. He would have said, ‘Yes, sir, thank you.’ That was the way we were brought up.

As for Azalia herself: ‘We stayed friends whilst we were growing up. My family is distantly related to Elvis Presley’s. We were a gang. We played together. We swapped comic books.’

But even then his reading habits went beyond the books filled with primitive drawings and conversations recorded in bubbles.

Azalia remembers the times when even the less than modest ‘birthplace’ was too expensive to keep up. ‘Vernon was in the penitentiary, so Gladys lived in little similar shacks. One of them was in one of my dad’s houses. He owned two rental houses – this prevented homelessness and brought in income. They were just tiny houses.’

They were always going to have problems, Gladys and Vernon. She because keeping a house together and looking after her only child – Elvis, of course, was one of twins: his brother died at birth, but would always be remembered as a long-lost, loved relative – he because of his brushes with the law.

Vernon had trouble. He was later a lovable old fellow, as was his brother Vester. Their father Jesse was not. But Vernon was. He was a playboy. He got into trouble because he was not responsible with money. When the wolf is at the door, the owner may be forced to do things he might not otherwise do. He was never abusive. He had a twinkle in his eye and there was a lot of devotion to each other. The destruction of their relationship occurred when he took charge of the household.

Plainly, the love and in many ways domination of her son by Gladys in his early years has had psychologists like Azalia pondering so much about them. Was Gladys, I asked her, a stage mother in all that that name applied?

I’ll give you a two-level answer. Gladys wanted him to have every opportunity. She kept him in school when others picked cotton. She provided the best clothes she could afford. She was made into a stage mother as he became a protégé of Parker. She wept every time she came back here. She didn’t hunger for the lavish world she lived in at Graceland.

Ms Smith Moore sees the troubles of Elvis’s early home life as the root of what would eventually kill him. ‘Vernon’s departure for the penitentiary came at the worst time. Separation, anxiety …’ Both were difficult for a child and his mother. ‘The need to provide better things for his mother is a need we’d all share. We were highly maternal in our closeness in the family. [If] the father was away, the mother became a central force. Gladys needed to belong, but she didn’t get that at Graceland.’

Elvis undoubtedly comes out of it all as the hero for the people of Tupelo. And there is no getting away from those sad parts of the story. What’s more, there was always more to come. ‘Elvis and Gladys were put out of the house, because they couldn’t keep up the payments.’ Round those parts, those properties were known as ‘shotgun houses’.

Her memories of her school friend are kinder. ‘He was sweet, kind, bashful. He started in the first grade, then he left the town in the second grade because his dad moved for a naval job. Then he returned and stayed until the fifth grade.’

At the church I met the man who was responsible for refurbishing the building and putting on a ‘Cinerama’-style film show – one recalling the boy Elvis leading the service, guitar in hand, voice ready for his favourite gospel songs. Guy Thomas Harris says that Elvis called him his ‘little brother’. He proudly showed me the pictures of his pal along with a group of other young citizens from seventy years before. As if there were proof needed of what small-town American life was like, Harris reels off the names of the other kids in the photo. ‘There’s James Farrell, Laverne, Bobby Spencer and Odell Clarke.’ He is sure that if Elvis were around today, he’d remember the gang, too.

They played with everyone of their own age. The highway divided the town as much as did the railroad tracks – the poor and the almost but not quite so poor. It was difficult to know which was which. As Harris said: ‘Well, we were all poor. You’d have a hard job trying to raise $100. Those who had a job didn’t actually make money. They were all trying to raise money to buy a house. Most people raised [just enough] for all that they could eat.’

It was a town of broken dreams – and broken marriages. ‘There was a time when Vernon wasn’t there and Elvis [in effect] was the victim of a broken marriage, as was I. I was raised by my mother and my aunt … two mothers …’

Some in Tupelo think that the one-parent family made the children independent. No one can be sure it made Elvis that. In fact, most of the evidence is that he was very much a mommy’s boy. But Harris says that he was one of the boys who bonded with each other.

It was because all our parents worked, so we had to be with each other. We were in our own little world. We were wishful shoppers in the hardware store. We were like one big family. If we didn’t have cornmeal we’d go from one house to another to get it. We were close-knit.

The games Elvis played with those close-knit friends were unconventional – and cheap.

‘We played, when we were eleven, telephone men, stringing telephone wire from one house to another – until a woman told us off.’

Such was fun in the Tupelo of the 1940s. ‘The closeness of the association imprints good happy memories,’ Azalia maintained to me.

Tupelo wasn’t quite the place that other books have made it. As Azalia said:

We call this ‘country’, but it’s farm country, hill country and there’s a difference. The bottom land is where the cotton and corn are grown. But here [in Elvis country, where we were talking] is red-clay hills. We rode up and down them, playing hide and seek, and swinging on ropes. But it’s not rural America. Our parents had come from really agrarian backgrounds in Alabama.

And that reflected in Gladys’s life, for sure. It certainly reflected in the food she cooked on her old black stove. The stories of her menus are repeated time and time again. ‘I can imagine Gladys’s routine,’ said Azalia. ‘We lived on collard greens, polk salad. She was known as Miss Gladys.’

They need no help in placing where Elvis was part of their lives. Said Guy Thomas Harris: ‘The last seat that Elvis sat in this school was right there. A friend called Hoyt Richie and his brother Bobby sat there first and then Elvis came in.’ All that, Azalia believes, confirms to her that ‘attention to detail’ is a contributory factor to those happy memories.

Tupelo has had Elvis Presley associations all Harris’s life. It was, he said, because

my ma and Gladys were best friends and I was born three and a half years later than Elvis and Ma said we grew up together. I was like the little brother he didn’t have. We played together daily in the creek, in the woods. We had pickled polk salads [together]. We picked up scrap iron to sell. All the kids in East Tupelo were close.

And – this appears to be common among Presley friends of the era – they stayed friends for years, if not close forever. ‘In 1970, Elvis Presley and Priscilla came to visit. In the 1950s, my brother and I stayed at Graceland a lot.’ But it was not to last. ‘It ended in 1958 when I got married. He had other friends.’

There was another crowd at another school, the Milam Elementary School, who could remember the ever so young Elvis. Jimmy Gault was there when I called, playing his mouth organ. He recalled being in Miss Miller’s class with Elvis in the seventh grade, when they were about seven.

‘He was a brilliant student in his own way. He was gifted in music. When he came back to Tupelo he was popular and stood out, a jolly person. A one-on-one person. A one-to-one person.’

‘Not many people,’ said Roy Turner, the town’s historian,

realise that Tupelo was divided into two white communities. There was Tupelo proper and East Tupelo, where I grew up and so did Elvis. That was for the factory worker, the less educated, whereas Tupelo proper was for the professionals, teachers and doctors, store owners and so on, while the black community there has the same division between the community that was called ‘The Hill’ and the community that was called ‘Across the Tracks’. It is interesting that both the [working-class] communities were called ‘Across the Tracks’.

It was then that another name came into conversation, Shakerag – the black area of this race-divided town. But Shakerag was the term used only by the residents of Shakerag. It was disrespectful if outsiders referred to it as Shakerag.

Billy Welch lived close by Elvis, across the tracks in East Tupelo. Like the others, Welch has only pleasant memories of the young Elvis. ‘He asked me to call him “Tex” sometimes’, which could have given an impression of a youngster with big ideas of his own importance – or perhaps high hopes.

He was fun. One day, we decided to pick cotton to make some money. It was hard work and we made one dollar each. We had what we called a home room programme in the classroom. He’d play the guitar and we’d sing together. He played well, but we never thought he’d go as far as he would.

I asked James Ausborn, who also went to this school, if he really did think of Elvis Presley when he sat in this room and looked around him. ‘Yes,’ he said in that Deep Southern drawl so common in Tupelo. ‘It brings back memories. We’d play football with a girl – he always liked to tackle her.’ He didn’t, however, go further in describing that incident. Elvis was happier about going with an unnamed black boy to listen to black music on Green Street. ‘We loved it together. He brought his guitar and my brother Mississippi Slim helped him.’

There’s more to come about Mississippi Slim, a name spoken with some respect by the country music fans in this part of the state. Ausborn remembers an Elvis who thought a lot about girls – which makes him pretty normal; unless, that is, he was tackling one in a football game.

We talked a lot about girls. They seemed to be attracted to him, which was also a look into the future. We loved to read Enid Blyton books. He once said he had a parrot. I found that when I went to his home, it was a plaster of Paris parrot. He laughed.

One can almost think of a kind of sibling rivalry when talking to these veterans of the days when the name ‘Elvis Presley’ just meant a boy in overalls and a pal from the other side of the tracks.

It wasn’t all roses for Elvis Presley while he was at that school. ‘He got into a fight at school,’ recalled Jimmy Gault, going back in time as though he were telling me about something that had happened on the very morning we were talking and they were both sitting in the same classroom, listening to the same teacher, pointing to the same blackboard. ‘The teacher came in and took him and the other boy into the office. People outside heard the head asking who was going to go first?’

The words unuttered were that they were both going to get a good hiding – and what they also heard were a few cries from both boys.

But most of the fun took place outside the school. Jimmy Gault remembers:

I’d ride up to his house and I’d have my saxophone on my bike and I’d go to see him and stay Friday night. Elvis’s dad had a grocery round and I went with him a few times, to a place below Verona, to a gas station. We took the groceries round the back and Elvis is here and he told me to get on to the tailgate. Vernon told me to pitch up a case of cabbages which he thought would go off if they hit the floor.

Such are the stories that make up memories.

Billy Welch had ideas for a business for them both. ‘We thought we’d make money by picking plums. But we ate all the plums before we got round to selling them in the street.’

There were hidden talents in the Elvis household. Gault remembered staying with him in the shack. ‘Gladys was a good cook. Also a ghost-story teller.’ He was convinced it was that which led to one of them turning into a sleepwalker. To this day, he can’t be sure if it was him or Elvis. Whoever it was, he himself didn’t exactly sleepwalk into fortunes.

It was a good time, then – and resulted in prosperous times later on. Elvis wasn’t the only success, Jimmy maintains. ‘There were seven millionaires and a billionaire out of a class of 120.’ Which is not bad going for the children who sometimes didn’t have more than one shirt to their backs. Gault says that most of his contemporaries were ‘regular factory workers on regular wages’. But he added: ‘It was the businessmen who got the cash. Many made their successes, like Elvis, without their parents’ help. One student became wealthy by setting up a shirt factory and then buying a furniture factory. Elvis and I weren’t part of the wealthy clique. We were the lowriders.’ He himself, he says, had ‘one pair of shoes and two pairs of pants’. The people who knew Elvis at this time kept insisting to me that everyone was just the same, ‘poor without knowing it’. It was echoed by so many of the people to whom I spoke on the trail, they could have rehearsed the line over and over again. Like Charlene Presley, Elvis’s cousin, who, talking about the Presley family, put it like this: ‘They were so poor, it was pathetic.’

Others depended for their work on such establishments as the Millam manufacturing company, the Daybright Company and a cottonseed mill – featured by Life magazine in a feature on Tupelo: ‘They wanted to make it seem rural, so they put a cotton cart on the front page, but we were very forward thinking,’ says Gault – and that was why they built a handsome new hospital in 1935, one which has since grown to be the pride of the town.

It they weren’t all poor as children, the Great Depression shaved a lot of the comforts from many of their parents, a Depression which still had echoes when Elvis and his friends were at school. A great tornado in 1936 had only made things worse.

Billy Welch, son of a truck driver, became a psychiatrist. He is proud of his father to this day. So are the others. ‘My mother was a nurse,’ says Jimmy Gault. ‘My father,’ Jimmy Ausborn adds, ‘worked in a sawmill. Then he was in a peddling truck, then a candy car, then a Standard Oil truck, then he worked in a grocery store.’

So was he, like the rest of Tupelo, proud of their local boy? By all accounts, they were like brothers. But, seeing what happened afterwards, did that also imply jealousy?

None of his real friends, if you believe them, were themselves jealous. As Guy Thomas Harris told me: ‘If there was jealousy, I haven’t seen it yet. I’m not saying they in Tupelo all like his music a hundred per cent, but he was one of the best gospel singers ever.’

‘No,’ said Billy Welch, making it sound very emphatic indeed. ‘I recall no jealousy. We were all thrilled to death when he made it.’

And, surprisingly, there really doesn’t seem to be any envy at all – so unlike, for instance, the story of the young Frank Sinatra, who was virtually disowned by his contemporaries at Hoboken, New Jersey. They thought Sinatra was arrogant. He thought the boys with whom he went to school, and later with whom he sang, had wide green stripes down their backs.

For all the way that Azalia and others believed they knew that the character of Presley didn’t change, no one claims they had a foretaste of the Elvis who later dominated the world of entertainment. There was, says the now ageing Azalia, no inkling of his later talent. ‘He sang a lot, but that was natural because we were all immersed in gospel music. Gospel music was the entertainment alongside some Grand Ole Opry kind of music. On Sundays, we would go from house to house and sing.’

And that led to talking about the most formative thing about his life in Tupelo, although no one realised it at the time. His guitar. ‘He really wanted a wagon and he got that. But it got destroyed and the man who destroyed it paid him out and he used the money to go on something else. He wanted a rifle, but Mom wouldn’t let him have that, so he had a guitar.’

The story was taken up at the Tupelo Hardware Store. There, an emporium stacked floor to ceiling with the sort of things people in small towns couldn’t do without, a place where people still buy their screwdrivers, hammers and a dozen boxes of nails, an establishment where the smells are as redolent of its stock as the things they have to sell, we find another kind of Elvis memorial. It was at the hardware store that the manager, Howard Hite, recalled the big event in the story of this veritable Aladdin’s cave. Hite looked around the building, founded in 1926 by a man still remembered in local folklore as ‘Poppa’. ‘It was 1945 and Elvis came with his mother to buy a bike. He and his mother came in through that same front door over there and spotted a rifle. But he was ten years old and Gladys wouldn’t let him have it. So he started crying.’

History was made that day, thanks to the man who tried to serve the Presley couple. His name was Forrest Bobo. ‘Forrest pulled out a guitar and handed it to Elvis Presley. Elvis took it and started to play it. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said, “I’ll take it.” Music history started here.’

So Elvis played and the first people who heard him strumming a guitar were the ones who happened to be shopping at the Tupelo Hardware Store that day, just a week or so before his eleventh birthday.

Naturally, the store is another place of pilgrimage, a site at which Howard Hite is the leader. Those who come simply because of the Elvis connection are known as ‘Howard’s people’, but he warns them that they are open to a particular danger. ‘Prince Albert of Monaco came here one day and I told him it was dangerous to remain where he stood – because [it is likely] your lip curls and your leg shakes.’ He has something else which qualifies him to greet those pilgrims: ‘The UK visitors say I am the first one they’ve met who had seen Elvis Presley in concert. I saw him three times.’

Azalia Smith Moore was in full flow the next time we met. We got to talking about the woman who was really responsible for Elvis taking up the guitar that, along with the curled lips and leg shakes, was undoubtedly his trademark. Gladys would always be the biggest influence in her son’s life. ‘Gladys was kind, generous, loving, but also fierce,’ she recalled.

Perhaps [it was because] she had to be living in the dire poverty that went hand in hand with life the wrong side of the tracks in Tupelo. The black stove [in the birthplace], it was used for cooking and heating. It was very cold here, especially in winter. She’d put on a pot of beans the night before for soaking, then greens, then hot corn bread … fatback [bacon] in the morning, few eggs. Her life was filled with a sort of makeshiftness we don’t know today. But it was a good life.

That was a difficult one to swallow. A meal of beans and greens? No money to the extent that she and her son lose their home?

Her answer was: ‘We had faith and no demarcation between faiths, church and community.’

And what about black people? This was, after all, Dixie.

Over the road from a Civil War memorial – for the fallen soldiers just of the South, of course – is the Lyric Theater, built for live performances although, apart from special events like beauty pageants and talent shows, it only ever showed movies. But it was at one of those talent shows that Elvis made his first appearance on a stage in Tupelo. Azalia Smith Moore remembers it like she recalls her first arithmetic marks.

To her, he was a ‘shy, gentle soul. It’s strange when you see him on stage. When you see the [much earlier] talent show [which he entered] pictures, you see the real Elvis Presley, you see him with glasses and home-made clothes.’

The show was a big event in Tupelo life. It was sponsored by the Baker Company, a furniture firm. Elvis won two tickets for the show and, when it was all over, waited for the results, decided by audience response.

Historian Roy Turner – and a fascinating fact of life is that every small town in America seems to boast its own tame historian – talks about that important date in the Mississippi history books. ‘Elvis sang a cappella,’ he told me.

He didn’t have his guitar at that point and he had to climb on to a stool to reach the mike. He’d actually asked [the promoter] Charlie Borne whether he could be in the show and Charlie said, ‘Yes, just as long as you don’t sing “Old Shep”.’ So what does Elvis do? He sings ‘Old Shep’.

Hardly surprisingly, Turner is happy to boast about being ‘a native Tupelan … just like Elvis. We had the same teachers.’ And then adds for good measure, ‘my father worked with his father’. Which you have to accept is another indication of the almost incestuous relationship that Tupelo had with its citizens. But does the town of the twenty-first century truly understand what Elvis did for it? ‘He put us on the map,’ Turner says, which might strike you as stating nothing less than the obvious. ‘But the average man knows very little [about the stamp Elvis made on the town] or understands his impact. Eighty thousand people come here every year. There’s money coming in. I’ve proposed a class in the local college to educate people in Elvis Presley.’ When we spoke, it hadn’t yet happened. On the other hand, he doesn’t doubt that Elvis himself came to appreciate the connection.

It was Roy Turner who recalled the 1956 visit that Elvis paid to Tupelo.

He said that he was going to perform to home folks. He got extremely nervous when he was performing to the home folks. He knew he had to be at his best and that, while this was happening, other stuff was going on – [people said] that rock’n’roll was going to be the ruination of our youth and preachers were declaring that Elvis music was bad. He certainly never wanted to do anything to make his home town ashamed of him. That was part of his upbringing that was burned into him by Gladys. For them to come back, the toast of the town, and be treated like royalty, I just sensed that Elvis felt he was giving them a tremendous gift. It was important that he not disappoint the mother whom he adored or Vernon, who was an ex-con, parents who had lived on the wrong side of the tracks to the people from Tupelo proper – a perception that still exists today to a certain extent.

Turner says that people who were at that concert remember him being particularly nervous simply because of the fact that he was playing to those home folks, the ones who had remembered the kid in glasses and home-sewn dungarees.

But it was the talent contests that helped shape him. He entered a show at the Lyric when he was eight years old and won – two tickets for the theatre. That was in 1941. Four years later, there was another contest at the Alabama Dairy Fair, held at the Tupelo fairgrounds. He came third. Or perhaps it was fifth. Nobody can give a definitive answer, except, of course, they stick to their own memories and they don’t dispute that the winner was a local girl now called Shirley Gilentine.

This is a town where everyone knows the name of everyone else, or at least knows who they were. Turner knows who came second on that night. ‘It was Nubbin Payne. She was twelve years old, a cowgirl in full regalia. She was already known around town.’ And if Elvis did have to settle for fifth place – and the evidence seems to point to that – there was a third runner-up who seems to have disappeared from the records, and Hugh Jeffries, who later became an optometrist. ‘When I interviewed him,’ Turner recalled, ‘Jeffries said he never knew that it was Elvis whom he beat.’

But their musical paths did cross again. ‘In the 1950s, there was a place called the Eagle’s Nest in Memphis, a hot place. Elvis Presley and some friends played there whilst Dr Jeffries’s band took a rest.’

Not only that, this cinema played a big part in the much earlier life of Elvis Presley, too. It was also important for his friend Sam Bell. His friend? That will surprise some people – because Sam is black. Yet for a time they did everything together, fired their BB guns, air rifles made specifically for shooting at birds. ‘Real BBs. If you fire a shotgun, all the BBs come out and spread – shot by compressed air.’

Together, they went to play at Shakerag. The Bells lived on ‘The Hill’, the other side of the tracks which divided what he called ‘the two cities’, the poor area and the one that was not quite so poor, which on ‘The Hill’ was. But it was a place for ‘respectable’ black families. The Presleys were, to some people, white trash. ‘Even so, there were still white families living in black neighbourhoods and vice versa. I grew up in East Tupelo, across the tracks, like Elvis.’

Sam Bell recalled, with the joy of memories dancing through his brain: ‘We were little boys and we played together.’ And went together to see the movies at the Lyric. ‘We’d come down here and he’d crawl over to my bit, the part reserved for the blacks. We’d sit in the aisle.’ It was strictly against the law, but there were no complaints unless some white racist in the auditorium took it upon himself to point to the ‘Coloreds only’ sign. ‘The owner was a nice guy, a white guy but nice,’ said Sam. How they did it has become part of local folklore. ‘We got inside to see the movie. There were girls in front and behind. Elvis said, “Let’s sit here.” Then two big gopher rats jumped up and the girls came on to us.’

Both Sam Bell and Ray Turner are convinced that westerns were Elvis’s favourite movies. Did he behave himself – aside, that is, from frightening girls? Children watching cowboy films are used to shouting and screaming. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he hollered.’

There doesn’t seem to have been much hollering about Elvis’s friendship with Sam Bell, who doesn’t look back on those times as being particularly hard for members of his own community. A terrible time? I suggested. ‘Yes, but you don’t think about it. It was a way of life. The relationship between black and white here in Tupelo wasn’t bad. It got to be a problem later on. There were black and white signs. But if you needed water, you’d [still] go into a white bathroom.’

They even went to the same drug stores: ‘black and white; we were too young for bars’.

I asked if Sam took his pal to places where he wouldn’t otherwise have gone. ‘I wouldn’t say “take”. We just went. We went around together.’

That, of course, extended to talking about church and church music. Together, they would go, he said, to a black church which used to be a theatre, just to listen to the music. There was no doubt that the gospel songs were, says his friend, very much black music, a strand of rhythm that was to remain always Elvis’s principal love and inspiration. ‘Yeh, it was black music. He wanted to be a gospel singer. Long back, he’d sing to a broom, pretending it was a guitar. We thought he was crazy.’ But, he then added: ‘Man, he played that broom all the way to the top.’

There would be some places where a white man singing black music would be considered an appropriation of another people’s heritage, almost a burglary of their lives. But not in Tupelo. ‘There were no worries because he was a homeboy,’ said Sam Bell. ‘Blacks played guitar with him, taught him things.’ That, despite the racial regulations, seemed the natural way of life in the town. But not quite. ‘No, the only time it was different was when we went to school. We had segregated schools. But there was no separation in football teams, or the swimming pool. Everyone went.’ Then he thought about it. Yes, most places were restricted. ‘But we had the fairground – and the Lyric.’

It didn’t stay that way. ‘After I went away, there were riots, but we never had that trouble [at that time].’ Neither was there any indication that there would be trouble. Elvis was a welcome guest in Sam’s home. ‘He came in and used the fridge, whatever. Poppa called him “that boy”.’

The fridge was the centre of attraction at another black boy’s home on ‘The Hill’. Elvis used to go there with Sam and his friends, all of whom made a beeline for that fridge, which was always filled with the goodies. But not Elvis, said Sam. No, the family who lived in that house also had a piano and the young Presley was more interested in thumping out what he believed were notes on the instrument than eating. He couldn’t play then, but he thought he was making music.

The Lyric Theater was very much a meeting place for the youngsters of Tupelo. James Ausborn says that – and his relationship with Elvis there was, as we have seen, vividly etched on his memory. ‘I used to cycle here and Elvis would sit on my handlebars. We loved the same kind of cowboy films.’

Sam Bell remembered the westerns, too. And once again the Presley–Bell firearms came into use.

When we got home, we used to enact what we’d seen – only the BB guns were used instead of pistols. The BBs were in shotgun shells. But just single BBs. You could kill a bird, but you wouldn’t hurt anyone. And you weren’t allowed to aim at people, just [shoot at] things, like rocks. It was dangerous. We had a guy called Harold. Humpty Harold, we called him. Elvis and Harold didn’t get along. Elvis had a pump gun. We had cock guns. Elvis shot Humpty Harold. I remember he shot a blackbird and said, ‘I guess I’ll go home now.’ If you put enough compressed air in it, you could keep on shooting, like an automatic. Harold wanted to go on fighting, but Elvis said, ‘I’ve shot one blackbird, but no more.’ Everyone had a gun. We all wanted a BB gun – and a bike. And we had [toy] metal aeroplanes.

That might, of course, explain how the Elvis of Tupelo became the Elvis we knew. But, before that, there was a lot of action, as they say in those parts. A lot of it concerning music.

Elvis was keen, although it could never be said that he spent all his time thinking about his guitar or of one day using it for his living. Ausborn remembers what served as good fun in old Tupelo. ‘If we had a little money we’d go up to Johnny’s Drive-In, just on the corner over yonder. He wanted a dough burger – a burger with meat mixed with dough, you know, biscuit dough.’

A lot of it occurred at Johnny’s Drive-In, which still stands on the highway leading into town, the place where, as Ausborn confirms, the Presley enthusiasm for foods not recommended in the better cookery books had its roots (and we’re not talking about root vegetables). But it’s the place itself that Ausborn remembers even more than the food, which is still the speciality of the house. ‘There’s more traffic now,’ he said. Plainly. There wouldn’t be anywhere for Elvis to park his bike outside these days. There is a plaque outside, commemorating the visits of the place’s most famous former customer. It doesn’t put any emphasis on what should be its main position in the Elvis Presley story – the fact that it was, indeed, here that he discovered, fostered and satisfied his devotion to those hamburgers which many consider were his silent killers, but which were, supposedly, according to Presley, the best in the South. As Ausborn told me: ‘This really was a good place to eat. We’d have burgers, sit and think about what we were going to do. Go to a movie, ride around on a bike.’

Another day I met Mr Ausborn when we were talking with a bunch of other former pupils – students, as they were called there – at the Milam High School, which is still standing, along with its pictures of Elvis and the plaque that states ‘Rock with responsibility, roll with respect, shake up good attitudes, swing into excellence’. Elvis was at the elementary school in another building, but the two schools shared more than just a name – Elvis. The plaque, among so many other things, seems to sum up ‘the Elvis Effect’. Not many junior schools celebrate rock’n’roll. But, then, Presley epitomises achievement.