Presley Holds Sway 10 Years After His Death : King Elvis Still Reigns in Southern Lore

The Yankee visitor at the downtown Ramesses the Great art exhibition here was perplexed when he entered the adjoining gift shop. The bazaar of souvenir items for sale included pyramid paperweights, carved scarabs, papyrus paintings, hieroglyphic scrolls--and Elvis Presley gift wrapping paper.

“Isn’t Elvis just a little out of place at a souvenir shop for an Egyptian Pharaoh?” he asked a young cashier.

“Not at all,” she replied graciously, amused that anybody should ask such a question. “They’re both kings!”

Spoken like a true Southerner. It will be 10 years Sunday since Elvis Aaron Presley died, but the once and always “king of rock ‘n’ roll” still exerts a powerful influence over the hearts and minds of his fellow Dixieans.

The British may boast of the largest Elvis Presley fan club in the world. More Yankees than Southerners may visit Graceland, Elvis’ Memphis mansion and a shrine for the Presley faithful. But as a group, Southerners are unsurpassed in their pride in Elvis and their spiritual and psychological attachment to him.

In a region where myth and legend still hold strong sway, the $35-a-week truck driver turned international superstar embodies many of the most potent myths and legends of Southern lore--among them, the “Southern gentleman,” the “rebel with a cause,” the “poor boy who rises to plantation lord,” even the “saintly Southerner corrupted by evil Yankee materialism.”

Memphians, who claim Elvis as a “hometown boy” because he lived here from the age of 13 until his death, may be more excessive in their outward forms of devotion--such as putting Elvis wrapping paper on sale at the Ramesses exhibit gift shop. But they otherwise are little different from their cousins elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon line.

“It’s not too much to say that Elvis Presley is a symbol of the South who is rivaled in the 20th Century perhaps only by Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Charles Wilson, a University of Mississippi history professor and co-editor of the university’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

As another observer of the Southern scene has put it, the difference between the homes of poor whites and poor blacks in Dixie is that “black houses got two pictures on the wall--Jesus and Martin Luther King; white houses got Jesus and Elvis.”

To those who have never cared much for Elvis or his music, such reverence might seem puzzling. But it is as rare to find a Southerner left entirely untouched by the Elvis mystique as it is to find one unaffected by “Gone With the Wind,” the Confederate battle flag or the song “Dixie.”

Inspiring Legend

Elvis’ rise from a two-room “shotgun” shack in Tupelo, Miss., where he was born Jan. 8, 1935, to his white-columned Graceland, which he bought in 1957 and lived in until his death Aug. 16, 1977, is among the most inspiring facets of the Presley legend.

Janelle McComb, 63, of Tupelo, a lifelong friend of Elvis’ and head of Tupelo’s Elvis Presley Commission, cites the example of a prosperous physician who donated $1,000 to the building fund for the Elvis Presley Memorial chapel near Presley’s birthplace.

“When he handed me the check,” she said, “he told me that he was born under similar circumstances as Elvis, and when he would go into the fields and plow as a boy, he would think about how Elvis made his dreams come true and he’d say to himself: ‘If Elvis can do it, so can I.’

“Elvis came along when we needed heroes like that,” she added. “We weren’t the ‘Sun Belt South’ then. We were the rural South, still struggling to come out of the Depression. Times were difficult, and Elvis gave hope and inspiration to all those born without a silver spoon in their mouths.”

Elvis the “Southern gentleman”--polite, courteous, good to his mother, loyal to his family and friends, generous to strangers--is another side of the Presley myth with a powerful appeal below the Mason-Dixon line.

Pearl Recalls Meeting

Minnie Pearl, the Grand Ole Opry star, recalled in a newspaper column earlier this year that she was taken aback by Elvis’ “almost timid politeness” when she and her husband, Henry Cannon, first met Presley backstage at a Memphis auditorium where he was performing.

“He referred to Henry and me in typical Southern fashion as ‘Mr. Henry’ and ‘Miss Minnie,’ ” she said. “Later, I was knocked out by his performance and the hold he had on the audience. . . . Even this early in his career, the Elvis mystique was already firmly established.”

When Ed Sullivan declared Elvis Presley a “real fine, decent boy” after Presley’s third appearance on Sullivan’s network television show in 1957, he only confirmed what many Southerners already had discovered--and many still maintain to this day, despite Elvis’ image in his later years as a bloated, drug-ridden parody of himself.

“When those bodyguards of his came out with their book about Elvis and his drug addiction, I refused to believe it,” said Darlene Hankins, 41, of Smyrna, Ga. “I still today have a hard time believing it, even though I’ve read his ex-wife Priscilla’s book, and she virtually verified it.”

Of all Elvis’ “gentlemanly” virtues, perhaps the one most admired by Southerners is his love for his mother, Gladys Smith Presley.

Dotes on Mother

Elvis, an only child, doted on her until her death from a heart attack at the age of 46 on Aug. 14, 1958, just a few months after he was drafted into the Army for a two-year hitch as a soldier with a tank battalion.

He called her his “one true sweetheart,” telephoned her constantly when he was on the road and showered her with gifts, including a 1955 pink-and-white Cadillac that was the one car he kept throughout his life. At her burial, he reportedly threw himself on the coffin and cried out: “Everything I have is gone!”

Although his love for his mother often seems obsessive, even by Southern standards, it nevertheless continues to stir many a Southern soul.

“If you find somebody who loves and appreciates his mother, you’ve got somebody who will be a hit with people,” said Mary Clark of Sumiton, Ala., during a visit to Presley’s Tupelo birthplace. “And Elvis did love his mother--and he wasn’t ashamed of it.”

Underlying Elvis’ stature among Southerners is his unshakeable “Southerness”--his absolute fidelity to his rural Dixie roots despite the enormous wealth and fame he attained.

Enjoys Southern Snack

For example, grilled peanut butter and mashed banana sandwiches, a staple of backcountry Southern diets, remained his favorite snack throughout his life. The women with whom he is said to have had his deepest romances were almost all Southern belles. Even the decor of Graceland, which is often criticized as “Southern tacky,” reflected his rural upbringing.

As a child growing up in Tupelo and then as a young teen-ager in Memphis, oddly enough, Elvis showed few signs of the exalted place he would attain in the Southern pantheon of heroes.

“The boys thought he was a ‘sissy’ because he hung around his mother all the time,” said Laverne Clayton, 53, of Tupelo, recalling Elvis’ childhood there. She grew up with Elvis in his old neighborhood and saw his first public performance at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair in 1945 when he won second prize for singing “Old Shep,” a country ballad in which the singer recalls his dead pet dog.

In Memphis, the “duck-tail” hairdo and black gabardine pants with pink stripes down the side that Elvis began sporting in 1951 earned him the wrath of his high school classmates. Presley bought the clothes at a Beale Street store that catered to blacks.

“Elvis always wanted to be different, and that was his way to be different,” said George Klein, 52, a Memphis disc jockey and former associate of Elvis who was president of their high school graduating class. “The standard look then for boys was crew cut or flattop, T-shirt and jeans.”

Kids Turn on Elvis

In his 1981 biography, “Elvis,” music critic Albert Goldman said: “The tough working-class kids turned on Elvis as if he had been Tiny Tim. They baited, mocked and jeered him. They said he looked ‘like a squirrel jes’ come down outta the trees.’ ”

That all changed, however, after Elvis made his first commercial record at Sun studios in Memphis in 1954--”That’s All Right, Mama,” by black blues singer Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup, backed by the country classic “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

When “That’s All Right, Mama,” was played for the first time on a local radio station, WHBQ, disc jockey Dewey Phillips was besieged with calls for it to be repeated. And the Elvis legend was firmly launched.

William Ferris, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, recalled the dramatic impact of the youthful Presley--the gyrating “rebel with a cause” who remolded the entire popular music world with his iconoclastic musical style that fused rhythm and blues, gospel and country-and-Western.

“Elvis was a kind of ‘cultural mulatto’--or what Norman Mailer called a ‘white Negro’--who shattered the rigid, middle-class musical caste system that existed then between white and black music,” Ferris, 45, said. “That had a liberating effect on many middle-class white kids in the South, particularly as it was also around this same time that the Supreme Court handed down its landmark desegregation decision.”

Inspired by Elvis

Ferris, in fact, was one of those liberated middle-class white kids. Bolstered by Elvis’ trail-blazing example, he pursued academic studies in blues music and Afro-American folklore, becoming the first white faculty member of Yale University’s black studies department before assuming his present position at “Ole Miss.”

Many black Southerners also were among Elvis’ earliest admirers. Rufus Thomas, a Memphis-based entertainer who was a disc jockey at a local black radio station in the 1950s, played “That’s All Right, Mama” in defiance of the program director’s policy.

“My phone didn’t stop ringing with requests for more,” he said. “The following year, when Elvis showed up to see one of the benefit shows the station used to put on at the municipal auditorium, he went out on stage, shook his leg in that old Presley style, and the crowd went wild.”

However, Elvis fell out of favor with blacks in the 1960s after rumors--never substantiated-- spread that he had said privately: “The only thing a nigger can do for me is shine my shoes.” Black affection for Elvis was further alienated as the civil rights movement became more aggressive and as Elvis’ evolving musical style increasingly lost its black flavor.

‘Love His Movies’

“I’m not crazy about his music, but I still love his movies,” said Regina Gilmore, a black who is news director for a Memphis country radio station. “He’s so good-looking and romantic, and he always treats his ladies like a gentleman.”

Presley’s death ended a career that began increasingly to be plagued in his later years by his pill-popping habits and other self-destructive excesses. But that has not tarnished his image among some Southerners, who see him as an innocent victim of his exploitative managers, Hollywood film producers and recording industry sharks.

“His managers wanted him to conform to what they wanted, Hollywood wanted him to conform to what they wanted and the record companies wanted him to conform to what they wanted,” said Karen Loper, president of the Houston Elvis Presley fan club. “Those people didn’t have Southern values.”