Elvis Presley (стр. 1 из 3)
| Elvis Presley | |
 Elvis Presley at the White House in 1970 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Elvis Aron Presley |
| Born | January 8, 1935 Tupelo, Mississippi, USA |
| Died | August 16, 1977,Memphis, Tennessee, USA |
| Genre(s) | Country, Gospel,Rock'n'Roll |
| Occupation(s) | Singer, Actor, American soldier |
| Instrument(s) | Guitar and Piano |
| Years active | 1954–1977 |
| Label(s) | Sun, (1953–1955), RCA Victor,(1956–1977) |
Contents
1Parents, childhood and youth
2Musical roots
3Voice characteristics
4Sun recordings
5Presley and his manager "Colonel" Tom Parker
6Cultural impact
6.1Presley and African American music
6.2"A danger to American culture"
6.3American icon
7Military service
81960s film career
91968 comeback
10The final years
11Death and burial
21Notes
Elvis Aron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) often known simply as Elvis and also called "The King of Rock 'n' Roll" or simply "The King", was an Americansinger and actor. He is regarded by many to be the greatest entertainer of the 20th century. (Presley's birth certificate uses the spelling Aron, but his estate has designated Aaron as the official spelling of his middle name.)
Presley started as a singer of rockabilly, singing many songs from rhythm and blues (R&B), gospel and country. He was first billed as "The Hilbilly Cat". His combination of country music with bluesy vocals and a strong back beat marked a clear path toward rock & roll. He was the most commercially successful singer of rock and roll, but he also had success with ballads, country, gospel, blues, pop, folk and even semi-operatic and jazz standards. His voice, which developed into many voices as his career progressed, had always a unique tonality and an extraordinary unusual center of gravity, leading to his being able to tackle a range of songs and melodies which would be nearly impossible for most other popular singers to achieve. In a musical career of over two decades, Presley set many records, such as concert attendance, television ratings, and record sales, and became one of the best-selling artists in music history.
Elvis Presley is an icon of modern American pop culture. During the late 1960's and through a large portion of the 1970's, Presley re-emerged as a live performer of old and new hit songs, both on tour and in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he was known for his on-stage highly energetic performances both vocally and physically, his sartorial jump-suits and capes adding to the drama. He attracted massive attendance figures. His concert performances were staggering in quantity, considering they numbered over 1,100 in 8 years. He continued to perform before sell-out audiences around the U.S. until his death in 1977.[1][2][3] His death was premature at 42, despite alarming concerns about his health. When he died on August 16, 1977, it was a huge shock to his fans. However, it soon became clear that a combination of over-work, obesity, depression, bad diet and severe abuse of prescription drugs, accelerated his premature departure. His popularity as a singer has survived his death.
Parents, childhood and youth
Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935 at around 4:13 a.m. in a two-room shotgun house in East Tupelo, Mississippi to Vernon Presley, a truck driver, and Gladys Love Smith, a sewing machine operator. Vernon Presley is described as a "taciturn to the point of sullenness," whereas his mother Gladys "was voluble, lively, full of spunk."[4]Priscilla Presley describes her as "a surreptitious drinker and alcoholic." When she was angry, "she cussed like a sailor".[5] Presley's twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, was stillborn, thus leaving him to grow up as an only child. The surname Presley was Anglicized from the German name "Pressler" during the Civil War. His ancestor Johann Valentin Pressler emigrated to America in 1710. Presley was mostly of Scottish,[6]Native American, Irish, Jewish, and German roots.
Presley's parents were very protective of their only surviving child. The little boy "grew up a loved and precious child. He was, everyone agreed, unusually close to his mother."[7] His mother Gladys "worshipped him", said a neighbor, "from the day he was born." Elvis himself said, "My mama never let me out of her sight. I couldn't go down to the creek with the other kids."[8] In his teens he was still a very shy person, a "kid who had spent scarcely a night away from home in his nineteen years."[9] He was teased by his fellow classmates who threw "things at him - rotten fruit and stuff - because he was different, because he was quiet and he stuttered and he was a mama's boy."[10] Gladys was so proud of her son, that, years later, she "would get up early in the morning to run off the fans so Elvis could sleep".[11] She was frightened of Elvis being hurt: "She knew her boy, and she knew he could take care of himself, but what if some crazy man came after him with a gun? she said...tears streaming down her face."[12]
In 1938, when Presley was three years old, his father was convicted of forgery. Vernon, Gladys's brother Travis Smith, and Luther Gable went to prison for altering a check from Orville Bean, Vernon's boss, from $3 to $8 and then cashing it at a local bank. Vernon was sentenced to three years at Mississippi State Penitentiary.[13] Though Vernon was released after serving eight months, this event deeply influenced the life of the young family. During her husband's absence, Gladys lost the house and was forced to move in briefly with her in-laws next door. The Presley family lived just above the poverty line during their years in East Tupelo.
In 1941 Presley started school at the East Tupelo Consolidated. There he seems to have been an outsider. His few friends relate that he was separate from any crowd and did not belong to any "gang", but, according to his teachers, he was a sweet and average student, and he loved comic books. In 1943 Vernon moved to Memphis, where he found work and stayed throughout the war, coming home only on weekends.
In January 1945 Gladys took Elvis shopping for a birthday present at Tupelo hardware. And she bought him his first guitar, in lieu of a bike and rifle, for $12.75.
In 1946 Presley started at a new school, Milam, which went from grades 5 through 9, but in 1948 the family left Tupelo, moving 110 miles northwest to Memphis, Tennessee. Here too, the thirteen-year-old lived in the city's poorer section of town and attended a Pentecostal church. At this time, he was very much influenced by the Memphis blues music and the gospel sung at his church.
Presley entered Humes High School in Memphis taking up work at the school library and after school at Loew's State Theatre. In 1951 he enrolled in the school's ROTC unit, tried unsuccessfully to qualify for the high school football team (supposedly cut from the team by the coach for not trimming his sideburns and ducktail), spending his spare time around the African-American section of Memphis, especially on Beale Street. In 1953 he graduated from Humes, majoring in History, English, and Shop.
After graduation Presley worked first at Parker Machinists Shop, and then for the Precision Tool Company with his father, finally working for the Crown Electric Company driving a truck, where he began wearing his hair the trademarked pompadour style.
Musical roots
Elvis was very influenced by gospel acts, as well as acts such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry. The common story that the Presleys formed a popular gospel trio who sang in church and travelled about to various revival meetings is probably not true.[14] However, in 1945 Presley, just ten years old, entered a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Decked out in a cowboy outfit, he had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone singing Red Foley's "Old Shep." He won second place, a $5 prize and a free ticket to all the rides. On his birthday in January 1946 he received a guitar purchased from Tupelo Hardware Store. In his seventh-grade year at Milam he seems to have taken this guitar to school every day. Many of the other children denigrated him as a "trashy" kind of boy playing trashy "hillbilly" music. Over the next year, Vernon's brother Johnny Smith and Assembly of God pastor Frank Smith gave him basic guitar lessons.
Some years later, in Memphis, Tennessee, the young Presley "spent much of his spare time hanging around the black section of town, especially on Beale Street, where bluesmen like Furry Lewis and B.B. King performed".[15] B.B. King says that he "knew Elvis before he was popular. He used to come around and be around us a lot. There was a place we used to go and hang out on Beale Street".[16] Beale Street in Memphis was notorious for its bars, prostitutes and gambling establishments. Music producer Jim Dickinson called it "the center of all evil in the known universe".[17] But it was a place where young Presley could hear black music. In an interview with Ev Grimes, composer Philip Glass says, "Elvis Presley was really the guy that took black music and made it—well, popular is really the best word."[18] In similar terms, Elijah Wald writes that Presley has "listened carefully to Negro blues men and sanctified singers, swallowed all of that music and combined it with hillbilly sound."[19]
The opening chapter of Peter Guralnick's book Last Train To Memphis[8] deals with musical influence coming from birth exclusively through his family's attendance at the Assembly of God, a PentecostalHoliness church. Rolling Stone magazine wrote that: "Gospel pervaded Elvis' character and was a defining and enduring influence all of his days."[20] The United States government mandatory personal examination of Presley as part of the approval process to make his Graceland home a National Historic Landmark wrote that Presley "clearly embraced African American music and culture and did so at a pivotal point of cultural change in American history" but that " Gospel music was his primary musical influence." The U.S. government historian stated that "In the early years of the twentieth century, the evangelical Pentecostal movement with its "vibrant worship style" became extremely popular with working-class Christians, black and white." The church services in which the Presley family participated was where people "jumped, shouted, danced, and fell out for Jesus, because, in a word, they acted "crazy, " they became a national laughingstock, the Holy Rollers of fable and cliché." According to the study, the family's move to Memphis expanded his musical horizons when he began to attend Sunday services at the East Trigg Baptist Church.[21]
Voice characteristics
Elvis Presley was a baritone whose voice had an extraordinary compass — the so-called register — and a very wide range of vocal color.[22] It covered two octaves and a third, from the baritone low-G to the tenor high B, with an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D flat. Presley's best octave was in the middle, D-flat to D-flat. In ballads and country songs he was able to belt out full-voiced high Gs and As, showing a remarkable ability to naturally assimilate styles.
Presley's range, though impressive in its own right, did not in itself make his voice that remarkable, at least in terms of how it measured against musical notation. What made it extraordinary, was where its center of gravity lay. By that measure, and according to Gregory Sandows, Music Professor at Columbia University, Presley was at once a bass, a baritone, and a tenor, most unusual among singers in either classical or popular music.
Sun recordings
Main article: Elvis Presley's Sun recordings
On July 18, 1953 Presley paid $3.25 to record the first of two double-sided demos acetates at Sun Studios, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", which were popular ballads at the time. According to the official Presley website, Presley gave it to his mother as a much-belated birthday present. Presley returned to Sun Studios (706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee) on January 4, 1954. He again paid $8.25 to record a second demo, "I'll Never Stand in Your Way" and "It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You" (master 0812).
Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, who had already recorded bluesmen such as Howlin' Wolf, James Cotton, B.B. King, Little Milton and Junior Parker[9], was looking for "a white man with a Negro sound and the Negro feel," with whom he "could make a billion dollars," because he thought black blues and boogie-woogie music might become tremendously popular among white people if presented in the right way.[23] The Sun Records producer felt that a black rhythm and blues act stood little chance at the time of gaining the broad exposure needed to achieve large-scale commercial success."[24]
Phillips and assistant Marion Keisker heard the Presley discs and called him on June 26, 1954 to fill in for a missing ballad singer. Although that session was not productive, Phillips put Presley together with local musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black to see what might develop. During a rehearsal break on July 5, 1954, Presley began singing a blues song written by Arthur Crudup called "That's All Right". Phillips liked the resulting record and on July 19, 1954 he released it as a 78-rpm single backed with Presley's hopped-up version of Bill Monroe's bluegrass song "Blue Moon of Kentucky". Memphis radio station WHBQ began playing it two days later, the record became a local hit and Presley began a regular touring schedule hoping to expand his fame beyond Tennessee.
However, Sam Phillips had difficulty persuading Southern white disc jockeys to play Presley's first recordings. The only place that played his records at first were in the Negro sections of Chicago and Detroit and in California. However, his music and style began to draw larger and larger audiences as he toured the South in 1955. Soon, demand by white teenagers that their local radio stations play his music overcame much of that resistance and as Rolling Stone magazine wrote years later in Presley's biography: "Overnight, it seemed, "race music," as the music industry had labeled the work of black artists, became a thing of the past, as did the pejorative "hillbilly" music. [10] Still, throughout 1955 and even well into 1956 when he had become a national phenomenon, Presley had to deal with an entrenched racism of die-hard segregationists and their continued labeling of his sound and style as vulgar "nigger music". Allegations of racism were made against Presley, possibly by those segregationist elements who hated what he was doing. Jet examined the issue and in its August 1, 1957 edition, the African American magazine concluded that: "To Elvis, people are people regardless of race, color or creed."[25]
Country music star Hank Snow arranged to have Presley perform at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry and his performance was well received. Nonetheless, one of the show's executives was not impressed and hinted that Presley should give up his music.
Presley's second single, "Good Rockin' Tonight", with "I Don't Care if the Sun Don't Shine" on the B-side, was released on September 25, 1954. He then continued to tour the South. On October 16, 1954, he made his first appearance on Louisiana Hayride, a radio broadcast of live country music in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was a hit with the large audience. His releases began to reach the top of the country charts. Following this, Presley was signed to a one-year contract for a weekly performance, during which time he was introduced to Colonel Tom Parker.
National exposure began on January 28, 1956, when Presley, Moore, Black and drummer D.J. Fontana made their first National Television appearance on the Dorsey brothers' Stage Show. It was the first of six appearances on the show and the first of eight performances recorded and broadcast from CBS TV Studio 50 at 1697 Broadway, New York. After the success of their first appearance they were signed to five more in early 1956 (February 4, 11, 18 and March 17 and 24).