Elvis Presley: The King of Rock and Roll

He was born in a two-room house his father built with borrowed lumber, and he died in a fourteen-room mansion with a jet plane bearing his name. In between, he changed the world. Elvis Presley arrived on the scene in 1954 in a small recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and what he did there — fusing the gospel of the Pentecostal church with the rhythm and blues of Black America and the country music of the white South into something that had never existed before — triggered one of the most profound cultural revolutions in the history of popular music. This biography follows Elvis from his childhood in the poverty of Tupelo, Mississippi, through the explosive years of 1956 when Ed Sullivan and America's teenagers discovered simultaneously what rock and roll could do to a living room, through the Hollywood decade that consumed and failed to destroy his talent, through the Army years and the loss of his beloved mother Gladys, through the triumphant 1968 Comeback Special that proved he still had everything, through the Las Vegas residency that made him rich and slowly isolated him, and finally to the tragic death at forty-two that cut short a life and a career whose full potential had never been realized. But this book is not only a story of decline: it is a story about music as cultural force, about race and class in America, about the machinery of fame and what it does to the people caught inside it, about a voice that was genuinely one of the great instruments of the twentieth century, and about a human being who was more interesting, more complex, and more worth knowing than the myth of the King ever quite managed to show.