O, Come, All Ye Faithful: Elvis Presley's Birthplace, Tupelo, MS

The Elvis Presley Museum (no photos allowed inside)

This article is dedicated to our good friend Harry Sewlall, one of the biggest Elvis fans in the world, and certainly one of the biggest Elvis fans in South Africa.

If there is a cultural religion unique to American history – a source of devotion, dedication, and discipleship that can almost entirely be traced to happenings on American soil – my vote would be for Rock and Roll. As a New Religious Movement of the 20th Century, Rock and Roll is a syncretic religion, with obvious influences from other belief systems (Blues, Folk, Country, and Gospel), but with its own set of leaders and prophets.

Before our journey to Tupelo – which in itself is a nice little town, one that with its three local universities would most likely have retained its hip vibe with or without the presence of Elvis – I was among the rock history purists who balked at the idea of this greasy-coiffed hillbilly being the inventor of rock and roll. But no more, for I have seen the light!

Before I really begin flogging this metaphor to death, (and with comparative religion being one of my pet interests, I know very well that I could,) I will quickly jump to my conclusion: Elvis, for a segment of the population, is revered as a Christ-figure in our cultural landscape. Some of the more dedicated make pilgrimages to his tomb at Graceland, to where he did most of his early preaching in Memphis at Sun Studios, and also to his boyhood home in Tupelo.

The Lyric Theatre, a former Vaudeville venue where Elvis performed on a return visit.

The Elvis Presley Birthplace and Museum is set on a gorgeous piece of land just off of the main drag, with several unique exhibits. The first is the actual home where Elvis was born and subsequently spent the first 13 years of his life. A two-room shotgun house, recreated with period furniture and with wallpaper that is consistent with a few photographs taken inside the house, Elvis came from startlingly humble beginnings.

Across the pavilion, which Elvis had commissioned to double as both a museum and a park, is the Pentecostal Church the Presley family attended in Elvis’ youth. The church originally sat about half a mile down the road from the site, but in 2008 the Museum gathered the funds to pluck the church out of the ground and haul it to their park. Inside the church is a unique video presentation, where three screens come down from the ceiling, projecting a surround audio-visual experience of a typical Pentecostal church service. When we were there, a busload of senior citizens were visiting as well, and their reaction to the experience was similar to the awe of a child seeing Disneyworld.

Inside the museum itself is a massive gift shop. It has a lot of the usual Elvis ephemera – cookbooks, lunchboxes, t-shirts – but it also features every single one of his movies, a large number of complete concert and performance anthology DVD’s, and nearly every album Elvis released during his lifetime – although that awful Having Fun With Elvis On Stage album, the one that features only Elvis’ onstage banter between songs still has yet to be digitized. (On the one hand, this is probably for the best, but then again, I do have a morbid curiosity about it – the album reached #130 in the rock charts in 1974, and perhaps more disturbingly, hit #9 in the country charts!) Beyond the gift shop is a theater that shows a dramatized account of Elvis’ time in Tupelo. Shot locally with amateur actors, the end result is professionally done and actually boasts some great performances.

The actual museum gallery is roughly the size of the gift shop, a bunch of glass cases containing many of the physical artifacts from Elvis’ youth. With the help and generosity of a childhood friend-turned-collector named Janelle McComb, the museum also features items from Graceland and even some gifts given to her by Elvis himself. When we got to the exhibit featuring Elvis’ gator-skin shoes, his fur coat, and the church-meets-crushed-velvet aesthetic of Graceland, I turned to Alexa and said, “He lived like someone who won the lottery!” With his roots in extreme poverty – his father even spent time in jail for check forgery, altering an amount paid to him in an effort to pay of his debts more quickly – Elvis is the rags to riches story. He may have lived extravagantly, but it seems less like, say, The Great Gatsby and more like the scene in The Jerk when Navin Johnson makes his fortune.

At the middle of the pavilion is a statue of 13-year-old Elvis, clutching a guitar and clad in overalls, with a circle of plaques and engravings that detail major life events during Elvis’ time in Tupelo. Furthering the religious connection is a chapel on the premises, another component of Elvis’ plan for the site. Although it was closed, it was a modern-looking chapel with gorgeous stained glass windows. There are also markers placed by two separate Mississippi institutions, one honoring the history of Country music, the other honoring the Blues.

This duality of Elvis’ musical influences, of both white and black musical traditions – made obvious by the film, the church experience, and the museum gallery – shows why he is so relevant to the history of Rock and Roll. It doesn’t matter that he never wrote a song, that he was not a virtuoso musician, or even that he was a good-looking fellow with shaky hips. One need look no further than his first single, released on Sun Records, “That’s All Right, Mama” backed with “Blue Moon Of Kentucky.” Elvis took Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s blues tune and injects it with some country swagger on the A-side, and on the flipside gave Bill Monroe’s mournful ballad a jumpy blues background. It is that marriage of two seemingly disparate musical styles that gave us Rock and Roll, bereft of racial politics and who-did-what-first-ism.

Although I may still balk at Rolling Stone’s rockist white-boy assertion that “That’s All Right, Mama” was the first Rock and Roll record – such a statement only serves to generate debate, prompting the public to buy their publication, or at least bring traffic to their website – but my position on the lad responsible for the record has definitely evolved for the best. 

Praise Elvis!