Elvis Aaron Presley was born in a two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935, the surviving twin in a poor white family. His parents moved to Memphis when he was thirteen. In July 1954 the producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records caught him improvising 'That's All Right' between takes; the recording, released a week later, fused the blues he had heard in black Memphis churches with country and gospel into a new music. Across the next twenty-three years he placed 149 singles on the Billboard charts, made thirty-one feature films, and served two years in the US Army in Germany. His 1968 NBC Comeback Special revived a career flagging from too many bad films, and he closed the 1970s as the most-watched performer in Las Vegas. He died at Graceland on August 16, 1977, at forty-two, of cardiac arrest complicated by years of prescription-drug abuse; the funeral cortège was over a kilometre long.
All Figures
Singer · The King of Rock and Roll
Elvis Presley
1,935 CE – 1,977 CE
The Tupelo truck driver who, in a Memphis recording studio in 1954, fused blues, gospel and country into rock and roll — and never recovered from the fame that followed.
Lifetime
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