[July 19th 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-20th 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 19th 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 20th
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?
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