July 17, 2024: ElvisStudying: Graceland

[July 19^th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to a 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 her book Graceland: Going Home with Elvis (1996), scholar Karal Ann Marling writes that Graceland is “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. Living in Graceland was like living on a Hollywood backlot, where patches of tropical scenery alternated with the blackened ruins of antebellum Atlanta.” I think it’s quite nicely telling that Marling references not actual Southern plantations and other interconnected settings (such as Mogambo’s Africa) but cultural representations of them, and specifically cinematic representations, including not just specific films but an overarching, mid-20^th century technological innovation like Technicolor. As I traced in yesterday’s post, Elvis had only just begun his film acting career when he purchased Graceland in March 1957, but it seems clear that he (or at least his designers and team, but likely with his input and perspective as well) worked hard from then on to turn the house into a cultural and cinematic text in its own right, one that echoed both Southern and global tropes that were equally famous and fraught.

While he may have and likely did make such changes (especially to interior spaces like the famous Jungle Room) 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 home as well as property that he purchased. The property and the name Graceland both long predated the mansion—in the late 19^th century the land belonged to the well-known Memphis printer Stephen C. Toof, who named the site Graceland after his daughter. After Grace inherited it from him upon his 1894 death, in the early 20^th century her niece Ruth Moore inherited the land from Grace, and in 1939 Ruth and her husband Thomas Moore commissioned the architects Max Furbringer and Merrill Ehrman to build a 10,000 square foot Colonial Revival style mansion. That style alone reminds us that the Moores too were participating in a cultural project driven as much by narratives and nostalgia as by any contemporary realities, and thus that Graceland featured those layers already by the time Elvis acquired it. But nonetheless, it’s worth being clear that his $102,500 purchase was of an existing home in every sense, one that he built upon but (like every other part of his career) did not himself invent.

As I imagine every post in this series will exemplify in its own ways, though, there’s nothing in Elvis’ life nor his legacy that isn’t intertwined with the development of the collective mythos around the man, and that’s unquestionably the case when it comes to Graceland as well. Perhaps the most striking example of turning Graceland into a holy site for this sanctified American icon is the literal pilgrimage to the place, an annual procession known as Elvis Week that takes its pilgrims to and through the home and past his grave (along with other sites such as the Elvis Mass at the city’s St. Paul’s Church). And no artist or text has summed up this collective phenomenon better than Paul Simon in the chorus of his song “Graceland” (1986): “I’m going to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee/I’m going to Graceland/Poor boys and pilgrims with families/And we are going to Graceland.” In the song’s final verse, he adds, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/We all will be received/in Graceland,” and I would use this idea to link the collective vision of the place to Elvis’ own—that is, perhaps his own mythic reimaginings likewise sought to turn a real place into a sacred shrine, to the ideas of America that he was also always seeking.

Next ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?