ELVIS PRESLEY
ELVIS
PRESLEY
A SOUTHERN LIFE
JOEL WILLIAMSON
WITH DONALD L. SHAW
FOREWORD BY TED OWNBY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williamson, Joel.
Elvis Presley : a southern life / Joel Williamson with Donald L. Shaw ; foreword by Ted Ownby. pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–986317–4 (alk. paper) ebook ISBN 978–0–19–931494–2 1. Presley, Elvis, 1935–1977. 2. Rock musicians—United States—Biography. I. Shaw, Donald Lewis. II. Title. ML420.P96W59 2014 782.42166092—dc23 [B] 2014011520
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
For Anna, Alethea, William, and Joelle
CONTENTS
Foreword by Ted Ownby
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Death of Elvis
PART I: THE BUBBLE
1. The Dream
2. Killers of the Dream
PART II: WHY ELVIS?
3. Vernon and Gladys
4. East Tupelo and Tupelo
5. Memphis
6. Dixie Locke and Sam Phillips
7. A Girl in the Bed
PART III: COMEBACK AND DIE
8. The Comeback Special
9. Girls and Guns
PART IV: THE FALL
10. The Bodyguard Book
11. Saved
Epilogue: The Meditation Garden
Bibliographic Essay
Index
FOREWORD
TED OWNBY
People respond to Elvis Presley with some pretty powerful emotions. People love him for some things, laugh at him for others, feel almost desperately sad about his decline and wasted potential, and sometimes get angry at him or people close to him.
In the 1950s the main emotions seem to have been lust and also fear. From 1954 to 1958, Elvis Presley’s music in sound, look, and movement so appealed to young women that by his early twenties he became the subject of extraordinary female sexual fascination. They (not Sam Phillips or Tom Parker or even Presley himself) made Elvis Presley a powerful cultural figure, and for four years his appearances in person and on television and, less importantly, his recordings made him the subject of unprecedented public lust as a figure of sexual desire for people who, by the standards of their day, were not supposed to express or even possess such sexual desires.
Elvis Presley responded to these fascinations by performing onstage for only four years, and then by taking advantage of numerous opportunities to make money through the movies and to pursue sexual experiences with lots of young women. He did virtually nothing creative from 1958 to 1968, the year of his comeback television special, and only rarely and perhaps accidentally made music of much consequence. His fans stayed with him, though he feared he was not gaining many new fans, and in the last decade of his life he performed to loving but aging crowds in Las Vegas and in second-tier settings in smaller cities. He and his managers, bodyguards, and other supporters made choices that kept him in an unappealing, aesthetically unimaginative state in which he made uninspiring movies and (with a few exceptions) uninspiring music that relied on the fact that he was already a sex symbol. He lived an unhappy adulthood, fearful of bad publicity, overweight, oversexed, and overprotected, and took far more pills than human beings should take. The pills killed him.
That is a quick and far from complete summary of Joel Williamson’s biography of Elvis Presley. Any book on a well-studied individual is bound to say things most readers already know or address topics that will be familiar. Most books on Presley have at least mentioned his rising from Southern poverty and obscurity, confounding categories about musical genre, race, and class, disturbing television censors and the parents of young women with his music and movement, and displaying unique musical creativity and maybe losing it. Scholars have analyzed Presley and his relationships with music1 and race2 and religion3 and celebrity4 and cultural rebellion.5 Williamson’s book draws from all of those approaches, but above all it is a book about Presley and sexual desire—the desire young women had for Presley, his desires for them, how both affected his life as an artist, and how all of those became intertwined with efforts to keep desire alive into Presley’s middle age and beyond his death. The book seriously studies things that now seem clichés or easy jokes—squealing young women chasing performers into their dressing rooms, the phrase “Elvis has left the building,” wardrobe changes and handing out scarves, passing encounters with actresses, pageant winners, and other fans, and entourage members who attracted women by asking if they’d like to meet Elvis. The important female figures in Presley’s life, Gladys Presley, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Linda Thompson, Ginger Alden, and Lisa Marie Presley, all are crucial to the story. As Williamson argues, Presley loved being loved, and that craving did not always lead in creative or happy directions.
Historians of Elvis Presley see the mid-1950s as a time of impressive and creative musical experimentation as the young man and his friends made new music out of a fascinating mixture of other available, mostly Southern, forms of music. Williamson emphasizes that this period of Presley’s life was dominated by young women who responded to his music. The music was in fact sometimes creative, but soon it hardly mattered, since in public appearances no one could hear it. What the author of Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and other important works brings to the topic is a lifetime of provocative scholarship on the relationships between race and sexuality in southern history.6 He helps us understand the young Presley in the settings where he heard and started to make music—fair, church, honky-tonk, public park, the Louisiana Hayride, the New York television shows—in part to show the dynamics of who was there, what was expected, and what his rebellion rebelled against. The young women screaming at Presley get their own history here, and Williamson discusses them through the combined histories of Southern white women who had been valued above all for purity and self-control and plain-folk evangelicals whose religion encouraged plenty of expressive music but discouraged open display of sexual desire.7
In response both to the frenzy of young women fans and to his own performance style onstage, Presley, even more than most other popular musicians, had to defend himself against charges that he posed a threat to good morals. He found those ch
arges amazing and troubling, but he took advantage of female sexual desire for him from 1954 to his death, had physical relationships with countless young women, and lived in fear that the nature of his lifestyle would undermine his public support. Presley wanted to walk a line between being the object of desire and being a decent, religious, and patriotic American, but he frequently failed. Williamson makes a great deal of Presley’s fears that a book by some of the bodyguards he had fired would reveal him as lecherous and indulgent.
Williamson argues that the contours of Presley’s life were set by 1958, when he was twenty-three years old. Presley got stuck as the star in a grand drama about desire, and he enjoyed its benefits too much to break away from its limitations. One turning point came in 1968, when Presley surprised many people with a television special that was far more creative in music, dance, and look than most expected from a standard Christmas musical television special. Making what many saw as a comeback, Presley tried some things that were new, accepted some clothing choices that led to the style that defined him in his final decade, and, as Williamson emphasizes, played some older music surrounded by female fans who were no longer girls but grown women. The show was a high point because it once again pointed to Presley as a creative figure and object of desire. After that, Presley played primarily to older, loving fans in live performances, and his final years were generally sad and painful for the performer, his family and friends, and his fans. In retrospect, most of Presley’s shows in the 1970s represented a long swan song.
I came to this book as a reader for Oxford University Press, and I found that it made an impression on me for the ways it mixes good scholarship with extraordinary empathy for a troubled and often frustrating individual. As I first read the manuscript, I found myself hoping, no matter how irrationally, that Presley could turn things around, and Williamson ponders some of the possibilities he considered. And I found myself wanting to hear and see performances I had never encountered. I watched the Comeback Special and the Aloha Special and listened to the early recordings. The book left me in a bit of a daze, and in truth, although it is a long book, I wanted it, like a really good concert, to keep going. With its focus on a unique, sometimes bizarre story, and with some details it is still hard to fathom, Williamson’s book is not a case study of the problems of capitalism or mass culture or patriarchy. Nor, certainly, is it a celebrity biography. It is, instead, a thoughtful story of a fascinating individual life, and it is less about drawing conclusions and more about telling stories, often stories full of complications and context and extraordinary details. By emphasizing the relationships between Elvis Presley and the people who seemed to have mattered to him most—his female fans—the book helps us connect Presley’s music more broadly to the social changes of Presley’s time and more specifically to the uniqueness of his own personal circumstances. The book may not help us love its subject more or cause us to love him less, but it helps us understand him a lot better by seeing him in relation to the people who wanted so much from him.
So, what’s new about Williamson’s book? Is it just another story of the accomplishments, failings, and demise of a creative and influential individual? Many of the works on Elvis Presley deal with his Southern roots, his rebelliousness, his fans, certainly his music, and his extraordinary rise and personal and artistic decline. This volume will no doubt affect different readers in different ways, but I suspect its most unique, most powerful feature is its suggestion that the roots of Presley’s failures lay in the roots of his rise to popularity. The mixture of youth, sex, race, and religion that made Elvis Presley’s body and music so exciting and transgressive to his female fans and left Presley stuck in an identity created in his early twenties also let loose the mixture of easy sex, self-importance, and desire to cling to youth that were central to his failings and demise. Elvis Presley, as Joel Williamson shows, was not just another hero with big flaws. More important, the reasons for Presley’s success were what ultimately led to his decline.
University of Mississippi
June 2014
1 Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994); Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999).
2 Michael Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
3 Charles Reagan Wilson, Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
4 Erika Doss, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999).
5 Vernon Chadwick, ed., In Search of Elvis: Music, Race, Art, Religion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997); E. Warren Perry, Jr., ed., Echoes of Elvis: The Cultural Legacy of Elvis Presley (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2011); Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
6 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
7 On young women in the mid-twentieth-century South, see Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Pippa Holloway, Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). On Elvis Presley’s female fans, see Mary Elizabeth Lasseter, “ ‘That’s Alright, Mama, Any Way You Do’: Elvis, Sexuality, and Changing Southern Womanhood” (MA thesis, University of Mississippi, 2002). On Elvis Presley and female partners, see Alanna Nash, Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis and the Women Who Loved Him (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
PREFACE
Mississippi and Memphis are fascinating places. I suppose I always knew this, but it came home to me forcefully in 1984, when I taught at Millsaps College in Jackson as Eudora Welty Visiting Professor and at Rhodes College in Memphis. My hidden agenda in coming out from North Carolina was to pursue research for a book on William Faulkner. As the year progressed, however, I became increasingly interested in Elvis Presley in a scholarly way. In February of that year I visited Graceland. It was not crowded, not rushed at all, and the experience of the visitor much less structured than it is today.
On July 28, 1954, ten weeks after the initial Supreme Court Brown decision integrating public schools, Elvis sang “That’s All right” in the Overton Shell in Memphis. It was a black man’s song, and white women went wild at the sight of Elvis’s body—this beautiful young white male body—in motion as he sang. During the months that followed, “Elvis mania” swelled while the white South floated in dread, waiting for the Court’s promised next move. How would integration be enforced? By federal soldiers with fixed bayonets as in Reconstruction after the Civil War? By Yankee policemen, such as federal marshals or the FBI? What would our girls do?
I began to ponder the question: “Why Elvis?” Why this amazing phenomenon springing up so suddenly, so powerfully from the soil of Southern culture and influencing people all around the globe?
Teenage girls in America created “Elvis.” Why were these girls there in the Elvis venue in 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957? Why did they express themselves sexually in such a revolutionary way?
These young women belonged to a very special generation in American history. They were teenagers, born as the Great Depression ended and World War II began. During the war, their early childhoods were often marked by absent fathers and, essentially, “single mothers.” Some sixteen million men were away in the armed services and more than 400,000 of these were killed in combat. Millions more men were engaged in war work, often at a distance from home. A girl who turned sixteen in 1955 would have been born in 1939. She would have been two years old when America entered the war and six when it was over. Until late 1945 and early 1946, many of these girls lived with and among married but “single mothers” who, of necessi
ty, did the work of two parents. It was a familial experience, unmatched in magnitude and duration in America since the Civil War.
During the war, all the girls in Elvis’s audiences had lived in a world of man-made death and destruction. After the war, they lived in families that were virtually obsessive in their desire to produce children and acquire houses, cars, and clothes—to create all the good things of life.
The veterans who came home after World War II did not want to re-live the war in memory. They did not often talk about the slaughter they had witnessed overseas. Good men in that age were not supposed to flinch or cry, but rather absorb their physical and emotional hits and go resolutely on. And so they did, these men who were children during the heady prosperity of the 1920s, survived the Great Depression of the 1930s, and fought a desperate, obviously necessary and clearly moral war to the bitter end and won. They dedicated the remainder of their lives to fathering children and working diligently to ensure the perpetual comfort of their families. Ideally, their wives would stay home and care for these children.
After World War II, as very young girls, the females in Elvis’s audiences had seen their mothers’ bellies swell huge with pregnancy as often as nature allowed—once, twice, three times and more—while an increasing number of their younger brothers and sisters clutched at her sagging skirts. They helped their mothers mind their younger siblings, and they also helped neighboring mothers mind their children, all the tots and toddlers of the boomer generation. Babysitting—surrogate motherhood—became a new word to fit a novel and pervasive American institution as teenage girls were enlisted to help care for the sudden and massive flood of infants, toddlers, and tiny children that filled to overflowing the homes of the nation. In the lives of their own mothers and other mothers all around them, they saw their own future rise inexorably before them. They were slated to marry hard-working young men, bear child after child, and stay at home. Why did Elvis attract them?
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