July 17, 2024: ElvisStudying: Graceland

[July 19thwas a doubly significantday for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single wasreleased; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So thisweek I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up toa special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On mythic façades,the realities behind them, and a third way to look at Elvis’historic home.

In herbook Graceland:Going Home with Elvis (1996), scholar Karal Ann Marling writes that Gracelandis “a Technicolor illusion. The façade is Gone with the Wind all the way.The den in the back is Mogambo with a hint of Blue Hawaii. Livingin Graceland was like living on a Hollywood backlot, where patches of tropicalscenery alternated with the blackened ruins of antebellum Atlanta.” I think it’squite nicely telling that Marling references not actual Southern plantationsand other interconnected settings (such as Mogambo’s Africa) but cultural representationsof them, and specifically cinematic representations, including not just specificfilms but an overarching, mid-20th century technological innovationlike Technicolor. As I traced in yesterday’s post, Elvis had only just begunhis film acting career when he purchasedGraceland in March 1957, but it seems clear that he (or at least hisdesigners and team, but likely with his input and perspective as well) workedhard from then on to turn the house into a cultural and cinematic text in itsown right, one that echoed both Southern and global tropes that were equally famousand fraught.

While hemay have and likely did make such changes (especially to interior spaces likethe famous JungleRoom) during the two decades that he and his family lived in Graceland,however, Elvis did not in any sense build it from scratch—it was an existing homeas well as property that he purchased. The property and the name Graceland bothlong predated the mansion—in the late 19th century the land belongedto the well-known Memphis printerStephen C. Toof, who named the site Graceland after his daughter. AfterGrace inherited it from him upon his 1894 death, in the early 20thcentury her nieceRuth Moore inherited the land from Grace, and in 1939 Ruth and her husbandThomas Moore commissioned the architects Max Furbringerand Merrill Ehrman to build a 10,000 square foot Colonial Revival stylemansion. That style alone reminds us that the Moores too were participating ina cultural project driven as much by narratives and nostalgia as by any contemporaryrealities, and thus that Graceland featured those layers already by the timeElvis acquired it. But nonetheless, it’s worth being clear that his $102,500 purchasewas of an existing home in every sense, one that he built upon but (like everyother part of his career) did not himself invent.

As Iimagine every post in this series will exemplify in its own ways, though, there’snothing in Elvis’ life nor his legacy that isn’t intertwined with thedevelopment of the collective mythos around the man, and that’s unquestionablythe case when it comes to Graceland as well. Perhaps the most striking exampleof turning Graceland into a holy site for this sanctified American icon is theliteral pilgrimage to the place, an annual procession known as Elvis Week that takesits pilgrims to and through the home and past his grave (along with other sitessuch as theElvis Mass at the city’s St. Paul’s Church). And no artist or text has summedup this collective phenomenon better than Paul Simon in the chorus of his song “Graceland” (1986): “I’mgoing to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee/I’m going to Graceland/Poorboys and pilgrims with families/And we are going to Graceland.” In the song’sfinal verse, he adds, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/We all will bereceived/in Graceland,” and I would use this idea to link the collective visionof the place to Elvis’ own—that is, perhaps his own mythic reimaginingslikewise sought to turn a real place into a sacred shrine, to the ideas ofAmerica that he was also always seeking.

NextElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other takes on Elvis?