Thread by @marinamaral2

He recalled placing fifth.

A few months later, Presley received his first guitar for his birthday; he had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle.

Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."

In September 1946, Presley entered a new school, Milam, for sixth grade. The following year, he began bringing his guitar to school on a daily basis.

He played and sang during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly music.

By then, the family was living in a largely African-American neighborhood. Presley was a devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio station WELO.

He was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother, who was one of Presley's classmates and often took him into the station.

Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques.

When his protégé was twelve years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but succeeded in performing the following week.

In November 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. After residing for nearly a year in rooming houses, they were granted a two-bedroom apartment in the public housing complex known as the Lauderdale Courts.

When his music teacher told him that he had no aptitude for singing, he brought in his guitar the next day and sang a recent hit, "Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me", in an effort to prove otherwise.

A classmate later recalled that the teacher "agreed that Elvis was right when he said that she didn't appreciate his kind of singing". He was usually too shy to perform openly, and was occasionally bullied by classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy".

During his junior year, Presley began to stand out more among his classmates, largely because of his appearance: he grew out his sideburns and styled his hair with rose oil and Vaseline.

In his free time, he would head down to Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and gaze longingly at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing those clothes.

Presley, who received no formal music training and could not read music, studied and played by ear. He also frequented record stores that provided jukeboxes and listening booths to customers.

By the time he graduated from high school in June 1953, Presley had already singled out music as his future.

In August 1953, Presley checked into the offices of Sun Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a two-sided acetate disc: "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin".

He later claimed that he intended the record as a gift for his mother, or that he was merely interested in what he "sounded like", although there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at a nearby general store.

Biographer Peter Guralnick argued that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered.

Asked by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of singer he was, Presley responded, "I sing all kinds."

When she pressed him on who he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, "I don't sound like nobody."

After he recorded, Sun boss Sam Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young man's name, which she did along with her own commentary: "Good ballad singer. Hold."

In January 1954, Presley cut a second acetate at Sun Records—"I'll Never Stand In Your Way" and "It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You"—but again nothing came of it. Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows.

He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing." Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time.

In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver.

His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith's professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist.

Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer".

Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused.

As Keisker reported, "Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.''

In June, he acquired a demo recording by Jimmy Sweeney of a ballad, "Without You", that he thought might suit the teenage singer. Presley came by the studio, but was unable to do it justice.

Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew.

He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians to work something up with Presley for a recording session. The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night.

As they were about to abort and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right".

Moore, the guitarist, recalled:

"All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them.

Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open. he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'"

Phillips quickly began taping. This was the sound he had been looking for.

Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played "That's All Right" on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer really was.

The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the remaining two hours of his show.

Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended in order to clarify his color for the many callers who had assumed that he was black.

The trio played publicly for the first time on July 17 at the Bon Air club—Presley still sporting his child-size guitar.

At the end of the month, they appeared at the Overton Park Shell, with Slim Whitman headlining.

A combination of his strong response to rhythm and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements, causing young women in the audience to start screaming.

In 1954, trading in his old guitar for $8 (and seeing it promptly dispatched to the garbage), he purchased a Martin instrument for $175, and his trio began playing in new locales, including Houston, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas.

Elvis made his first television appearance on the KSLA-TV television broadcast of Louisiana Hayride. Soon after, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on the CBS television network.

At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November, Presley was voted the year's most promising male artist. Several record companies had by now shown interest in signing him.

After three major labels made offers of up to $25,000, Parker and Phillips struck a deal with RCA Victor on November 21 to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an unprecedented $40,000.

Elvis, at 20, was still a minor, so his father signed the contract.

Parker arranged with the owners of Hill & Range Publishing to create two entities to handle all the new material recorded by Presley. Songwriters were obliged to forgo one-third of their customary royalties in exchange for having him perform their compositions.

RCA released Presley's self-titled debut album on March 23. Joined by five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently recorded tracks were of a broad variety.

After a show in La Crosse, an urgent message on the letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

It warned that "Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. (...)

(...) [His] actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. ... After the show, more than 1,000 teenagers tried to gang into Presley's room at the auditorium. (...)

(...) Indications of the harm Presley did just in La Crosse were the two high school girls ... whose abdomen and thigh had Presley's autograph."

The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded Presley to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son."

During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of "Hound Dog" with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.

Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub.

... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway."

Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley. Elvis, who rotates his pelvis, gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar...

... tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos".

Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing".

To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."

On March 24, 1958, Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. His arrival was a major media event. Hundreds of people descended on Elvis as he stepped from the bus; photographers then accompanied him into the fort.

Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying that he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: "The Army can do anything it wants with me."

In early August, his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis, and her condition rapidly worsened. Presley, granted emergency leave to visit her, arrived in Memphis on August 12.

Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged 46. He was devastated.

Presley was honorably discharged on March 2, 1960, with the rank of sergeant.

While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.

In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion. The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had recommended to her.

Priscilla related that when she told him, Presley "grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a real man makes love to his woman."

She later stated in an interview that she regretted her choice of words in describing the incident.

Five months later, Presley's new girlfriend, Linda Thompson moved in with him.

Elvis and Priscila filed for divorce on August 18. According to Joe Moscheo of the Imperials, the failure of Presley's marriage "was a blow from which he never recovered."

Presley's stage costume in a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii, became the most recognized example of the elaborate concert garb with which his latter-day persona became closely associated.

The accompanying double album, released in February, went to number one and eventually sold over 5 million copies in the United States. It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his lifetime.

At a midnight show the same month, four men rushed onto the stage in an apparent attack. Security men came to Presley's defense, and the singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the stage himself.

Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that the men had been sent by Mike Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in me ... Stone [must] die."

His outbursts continued with such intensity that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large doses of medication.

After another two full days of raging, Red West, his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy."

Presley's divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973. Since then, his life was on the verge of a serious decline. Twice during the year, he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident.

Towards the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semi-comatose from the effects of pethidine addiction. Presley's condition declined precipitously in September.

Keyboardist Tony Brown remembered the singer's arrival at a University of Maryland concert: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.'

He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?"

Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up. It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. I remember crying."

On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards, citing the need to "cut back on expenses". It was claimed that they were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency.

In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home. Even in that comfortable context, the recording process became a struggle for him.

Presley and Linda Thompson split in November 1976, and he took up with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden. He proposed to Alden and gave her an engagement ring two months later, though several of his friends later claimed that he had no serious intention of marrying again.

Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopeia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts. In Alexandria, Louisiana, the singer was on stage for less than an hour, and "was impossible to understand".

On March 31, Presley failed to perform in Baton Rouge, unable to get out of his hotel bed; a total of four shows had to be canceled and rescheduled.

Despite the accelerating deterioration of his health, he stuck to most touring commitments.

"Way Down", Presley's last single issued during his career, was released on June 6. That month, CBS filmed two concerts for a TV special, Elvis in Concert, to be aired in October.

In the first, shot in Omaha on June 19, Presley's voice, Guralnick writes, "is almost unrecognizable, a small, childlike instrument in which he talks more than sings most of the songs"

Two days later, "he looked healthier, seemed to have lost a little weight, and sounded better, too", though by the conclusion of the performance, his face was "framed in a helmet of blue-black hair from which sweat sheets down over pale, swollen cheeks".

His final concert was held in Indianapolis at Market Square Arena, on June 26.

On the evening of August 16, 1977, Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis to begin another tour. That afternoon, suffering high blood pressure, liver damage, glaucoma and an enlarged colo, he was discovered in an unresponsive state in a bathroom floor.

According to Ginger's eyewitness account, "Elvis looked as if his entire body had completely frozen in a seated position while using the commode and then had fallen forward, in that fixed position, directly in front of it."

Attempts to revive him failed, and his death was officially pronounced at 3:30 p.m. at the Baptist Memorial Hospital.

Thousands of people gathered outside Graceland to view the open casket. One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer's biggest-selling issue ever.

Presley's funeral was held at Graceland on Thursday, August 18. Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women. About 80,000 people lined the processional route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Presley was buried next to his mother.

Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the US and UK pop charts.

Following an attempt to steal the singer's body in late August, the remains of both Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October.

In 2013, Dr. Forest Tennant described his own analysis of all of Presley's available medical records. He concluded that Presley's "drug abuse had led to falls, head trauma, and overdoses that damaged his brain", and that his death was due in part to a toxic reaction to codeine...

... DNA analysis in 2014 of a hair sample purported to be Presley's found evidence of genetic variants that can lead to glaucoma, migraines, and obesity; a crucial variant associated with the heart-muscle disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy was also identified.

Between 1977 and 1981, six of Presley's posthumously released singles were top ten country hits. Graceland was opened to the public in 1982. Attracting over half a million visitors annually, it is the second most-visited home in the United States, after the White House.

Elvis has been inducted into five music halls of fame. In 1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' Award of Merit.

As the catalyst for the cultural revolution that was rock and roll, he was central not only to defining it as a musical genre but in making it a touchstone of youth culture and rebellious attitude.

With its racially mixed origins—repeatedly affirmed by Presley—rock and roll's occupation of a central position in mainstream American culture facilitated a new acceptance and appreciation of black culture.

To this day, Elvis Presley remains the best selling solo artist, with sales estimates ranging from 600 million to 1 billion sales.

Born: January 8, 1935
Tupelo, Mississippi, U.S.

Died: August 16, 1977 (aged 42)
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.

*Done*