Elvis Presley & Tupelo

On the face of it, Tupelo is no different from hundreds, if not thousands, of other small cities in the Southern United States. Essentially it’s a one-street town—a main drag a few miles long, flanked on both sides by a few blocks of housing, some shops, banks and small businesses, the ubiquitous water tower, and the highways and byways that lead to Memphis, to Nashville, and all points elsewhere. Here a Kroger, there a Walgreen’s, over there a bar.

Today it’s home to around 35,000 people, most brought to the area by the Toyota plant a few miles out of town. But hang around in the sweltering summer heat for more than about 15 minutes and somebody will ask you if you’re here to see “the Birthplace”. And of course you are, because Tupelo, Mississippi, midway between Memphis to the north west and Birmingham to the south east, is the birthplace and the childhood home of the Mississippi Flash, the Hillbilly Cat and, once upon a time, long ago and far away, of a little boy in dungarees and wire-framed spectacles called Elvis Presley.

Back in January 1935, when Elvis was born, Tupelo had not long become the first city to get electric power via President Roosevelt’s controversial Tennessee Valley Authority—and although that meant the lights burned bright on Main Street, it didn’t make an awful lot of difference to the shacks up by Old Saltillo Road in East Tupelo, overlooking the city by way of Shake Rag, the area of town mostly occupied by poor black families, with a few poor white folks thrown in alongside. The Presley house was typical of the area, two rooms in shotgun style one behind the other, and it was built in 1934 by Vernon Presley himself with a $180 loan from his then-employer Orville Bean.

If you come to Tupelo today, this is where you’re going to start. In fact you’re going to begin at the end, because as you leave the car park up on the renamed Elvis Presley Drive you pass a 1939 Plymouth sedan in green, facing the direction of Memphis. Although not the actual vehicle itself, this is the same model of car that took the Presley family to the dream of a better life in a bigger city, and not for the last time in the day you’ll feel a little prickle of emotion as you think of the hope that car must have carried and the astonishing pay-off that its youngest passenger could never have imagined. It doesn’t seem quite real.

That is an overwhelming feeling for the Elvis fan, and for the British Elvis fan in particular. It doesn’t seem real that Elvis, that towering fantastical creature, actually came from somewhere—and that, furthermore, it is this place, and you are standing in it. And it’s to its enormous credit that the Birthplace goes to tremendous lengths to make it real for you and to give you a compelling insight into the Presley beginnings without at any time underplaying the bigger, wider story that surrounds it.

The on-site museum, for example, deploys a wide range of artefacts in pursuit of that aim. Over here are a series of short films telling Tupelo’s own story. Over here is the hammer—the actual one—that Vernon used to build the house, alongside a photo of the doctor who delivered Elvis and his still-born twin, and the doctor’s medical bag. But over there, just before you leave and tucked away in a corner that almost dares you to find it, is a bright orange, sleeveless, transparent lace blouse—no other word for it—that Elvis wore in 1954, a vivid reminder of how fundamentally strange, how downright weird and how thrillingly, excitingly transgressively different the boy from Tupelo must have seemed to a post-war America on the cusp of an overwhelming social revolution.

Then you walk over to the Assembly of God church that Elvis attended as a child, moved wholesale from its original location just down the street, and now bringing you right back into the real world again. The modest wooden building, largely built by Gladys Presley’s uncle Gains Mansell, was the venue for the young Elvis’ first public performance and houses an immersive audio/visual reconstruction of that very event, making it quite clear how central the church was to the lives of the community the Presleys came from, and what a profound affect the charismatic preachers had on the lives of their congregation.

And from there you move to the Birthplace itself. You can see pictures of it, you can know how modest a building it is, you can recognise intellectually the grinding poverty that Elvis was born into, but that really doesn’t prepare you for the experience itself. If you didn’t linger, you could pass through the entire building in 20 paces, maybe less; a porch, a bedroom, a kitchen and that’s it. A bit of an outhouse at the back, a nice swing out the front. Quite leafy. On you go.

But you can’t not linger, you just can’t. It is dizzying to stand in those two rooms where it all began and to let the weight of that reality sink in. Elvis got out of this when so many didn’t—and he became Elvis. How is that even possible? You may have to take a moment at this point.

Drive down the road into Tupelo proper, and you can follow the route of Elvis’ early life quite clearly. On that side of the road is Johnnie’s Drive-In, Elvis’s favourite diner, where you can sit in his favourite booth and where they still make their burgers to that same recipe. In front of the City Hall is the site where Elvis performed at the Dairy Fair in 1956 and where you can see a life-sized statue of the King posed after the famous photo from the same event and surrounded by tributes from all around the world.

Across the street, X quite literally marks the spot in the Tupelo Hardware Company store where Gladys bought Elvis his first guitar, and around the corner is the Lyric Theatre, formerly the Strand cinema, where Elvis would spend hours soaking up the fantasies of a bigger, better world. And over there are the train tracks that go out of town, and it’s very tempting to think of them as a symbol of Elvis’ escape, a mystery train to take him over the hills and far away.

But then you think back to that small town medic delivering twin boys, one dead, one alive, on a cold winter’s day in 1935, and you think back to that preacher in that clapboard church with his passion and his faith and you think of the limits of that world, that world where a doctor and a priest are at the centre of the world and you remember that Graceland was originally built for a doctor. And then you realise that despite everything Elvis never really moved all that far from Old Saltillo Road in Tupelo, Mississippi after all.

THE END

 

It is a quote. VINTAGE ROCK PRESENTS – ELVIS COLLECTORS EDITION 2015