Elvis Presley was an American singer and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about the King of Rock and Roll!
1.His full name was Elvis Aaron Presley.
2. He was born on January 8, 1935 and passed away on August 16, 1977)
3.The general development of Presley’s voice is described by critic Dave Marsh as “high and thrilled in the early days, lower and perplexed in the final months.
4. Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee with his family when he was 13 years old.
5. His music career began there in 1954, when he recorded a song with producer Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was an early popularizer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues.
6. RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who managed the singer for more than two decades. Presley’s first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel”, was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States.
7. He was regarded as the leading figure of rock and roll after a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines that coincided with the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, made him enormously popular—and controversial.
8. As a teenager, Presley’s musical interests were wide-ranging, and he was deeply informed about African American musical idioms as well as white ones (see “Teenage life in Memphis”).
9. Though he never had any formal training, he was blessed with a remarkable memory, and his musical knowledge was already considerable by the time he made his first professional recordings in 1954 at the age of 19.
10. When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller met him two years later, they were astonished at his encyclopedic understanding of the blues.
11.In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender.
12. In 1958, he was drafted into military service. He resumed his recording career two years later, producing some of his most commercially successful work before devoting much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and their accompanying soundtrack albums, most of which were critically derided.
13. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed televised comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours.
14. In 1973, Presley featured in the first globally broadcast concert via satellite, Aloha from Hawaii. Several years of prescription drug abuse severely damaged his health, and he died in 1977 at the age of 42.
15. Elvis Presley is one of the most celebrated and influential musicians of the 20th century. Commercially successful in many genres, including pop, blues and gospel, he is one of the best-selling solo artists in the history of recorded music, with estimated record sales of around 600 million units worldwide.
16. He won three Grammys, also receiving the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame.
17. Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered stillborn 35 minutes before his own birth.
18. Thus, as an only child, Presley became close to both parents and formed an especially close bond with his mother.
19. The family attended an Assembly of God, where he found his initial musical inspiration
20. . Although he was in conflict with the Pentecostal church in his later years, he never officially left it.
21. Rev. Rex Humbard officiated at his funeral, as Presley had been an admirer of Humbard’s ministry.
22. Elvis Presley’s ancestry was primarily a Western European mix, including Scots-Irish, Scottish,German, and some French Norman.
23. Gladys’s great-great-grandmother, Morning Dove White, was possibly a Cherokee Native American.
24. The Presleys survived the F5 tornado in the 1936 Tupelo–Gainesville tornado outbreak.
25. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of kiting a check written by the landowner, Orville S. Bean, the dairy farmer and cattle-and-hog broker for whom he then worked. He was jailed for eight months, and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
26. In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his instructors regarded him as “average”.
27. He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley’s country song “Old Shep” during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, was his first public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the ten-year-old Presley stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang “Old Shep”. He recalled placing fifth.
28. 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.
29. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family’s church.
30. Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He played and sang during lunchtime, and was often teased as a “trashy” kid who played hillbilly music. The family was by then living in a largely African-American neighborhood.
31.In August 1953, Presley walked 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”.
32. He would later claim 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.
33. Biographer Peter Guralnick argues that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered.
34. On January 10, 1956, Presley made his first recordings for RCA in Nashville. Extending the singer’s by now customary backup of Moore, Black, and Fontana, RCA enlisted pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarist Chet Atkins, and three background singers, including first tenor Gordon Stoker of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill out the sound] The session produced the moody, unusual “Heartbreak Hotel”, released as a single on January 27.
35. Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS’s Stage Show for six appearances over two months. The program, produced in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. After his first appearance, on January 28, introduced by disc jockey Bill Randle, Presley stayed in town to record at RCA’s New York studio
36. The sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl Perkins’ rockabilly anthem “Blue Suede Shoes”. In February, Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top of the Billboard country chart.Neal’s contract was terminated and, on March 2, Parker became Presley’s manager
37. GM filmed Presley in April 1972, this time for Elvis on Tour, which went on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Documentary Film that year. His gospel album He Touched Me, released that month, would earn him his second Grammy Award, for Best Inspirational Performance. A 14-date tour commenced with an unprecedented four consecutive sold-out shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
38. The evening concert on July 10 was recorded and issued in LP form a week later. Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden became one of Presley’s biggest-selling albums. After the tour, the single “Burning Love” was released—Presley’s last top ten hit on the U.S. pop chart. “The most exciting single Elvis has made since ‘All Shook Up'”, wrote rock critic Robert Christgau. “Who else could make ‘It’s coming closer, the flames are now licking my body’ sound like an assignation with James Brown’s backup band?”
39. Elvis Presley, mutton-chopped and fuller-faced, sings into a handheld microphone. A golden lei is draped around his neck, and he wears a high-collared white jumpsuit resplendent with red, blue, and gold bangles.Presley in Aloha from Hawaii, broadcast live via satellite on January 14, 1973. The singer himself came up with his famous outfit’s eagle motif, as “something that would say ‘America’ to the world.”
40. Elvis Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant, barely cohabiting. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted—unbeknownst to him—in her pregnancy and an abortion.
41. He often raised the possibility of her moving into Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla. The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had recommended to her.
42. Five months later, Presley’s new girlfriend, Linda Thompson, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him.Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18. Accrding to Joe Moscheo of the Imperials, the failure of Presley’s marriage “was a blow from which he never recovered.
43. Presley’s divorce took effect on October 9, 1973. He was now becoming increasingly unwell. Twice during the year he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident.
44. Toward the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semicomatose from the effects of pethidine addiction. According to his primary care physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley “felt that by getting [drugs] from a doctor, he wasn’t the common everyday junkie getting something off the street.” Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever. Despite his failing health, in 1974 he undertook another intensive touring schedule.
45. Between 1977 and 1981, six posthumously released singles by Presley were top ten country hits.
46. 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.
47. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
48. Elvis Presley has been inducted into five music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001), the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007), and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2012). 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.
49.Presley holds the records for most songs charting in Billboard’s top 40 and top 100: chart statistician Joel Whitburn calculates the respective totals as 104 and 151;
50. Elvis Presley retains the record for cumulative weeks at number one: alone at 80, according to Whitburn and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame;tied with Carey at 79, according to Billboard.
51. He holds the records for most British number-one hits with 21, and top-ten hits with 76.
52. In 2016, the album The Wonder of You, which sets Presley’s vocals against music by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, was released and reached No. 1 in the UK in October. According to Billboard, this created two new records for Presley: with 13 UK No. 1 albums (The Beatles’s total is 15), he is the solo artist with the most number one albums, and the album set a new record for “the longest span between No.1 albums in the UK”: Presley first charted at No.1 in 1956 with his self-titled debut album.
53. Reinforcing Presley’s image as a sex symbol were the reports of his dalliances with various Hollywood stars and starlets, from Natalie Wood in the 1950s to Connie Stevens and Ann-Margret in the 1960s to Candice Bergen and Cybill Shepherd in the 1970s. June Juanico of Memphis, one of Presley’s early girlfriends, later blamed Parker for encouraging him to choose his dating partners with publicity in mind. Presley never grew comfortable with the Hollywood scene, and most of these relationships were insubstantial.[
54. A vast number of recordings have been issued under Presley’s name. The total number of his original master recordings has been variously calculated as 665 and 711.
55. His career began and he was most successful during an era when singles were the primary commercial medium for pop music. In the case of his albums, the distinction between “official” studio records and other forms is often blurred. For most of the 1960s, his recording career focused on soundtrack albums. In the 1970s, his most heavily promoted and best-selling LP releases tended to be concert albums. This summary discography lists only the albums and singles that reached the top of one or more of the following charts: the main U.S. Billboard pop chart; the Billboard country chart, the genre chart with which he was most identified (there was no country album chart before 1964); and the official British pop chart.
If you like something, you can check the links for online order.
1.The 50 Greatest Hits
Buy the CD album for £44.00 and get the MP3 version for FREE.
2. Being Elvis: A Lonely Life
What was it like to be Elvis Presley? What did it feel like when impossible fame made him its prisoner? As the world’s first rock star there was no one to tell him what to expect, no one with whom he could share the burden of being himself – of being Elvis. Buy the book here!
3. Elvis Presley Signature Collection
Buy the DVD Collection on Amazon
4. Smiffy’s Men’s Elvis Costume
Men’s Elvis Costume, Including: Shirt, Trousers, Cape & Belt, Black Elvis suit with gold detail, Ideal for indoor or outdoor events, Perfect for carnival, theme parties or Halloween. Buy the costume on Amazon!
5. Elvis Presley Monopoly
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