Music

Elvis Presley

Born in a two-room shotgun house; his mother could afford the guitar, not the bicycle.

Born: 1935 · Tupelo, Mississippi, US
Roots: White American; Southern working poor
Family: Poverty; His identical twin was stillborn; his father served eight months for check forgery and the family lost the house his father had built.
Education: Humes High School, Memphis; the family lived in public housing
Started with: A $7.75 guitar; From Tupelo Hardware, on his eleventh birthday — the bicycle he wanted cost too much.
Affiliations & societies: None documented.; Information only — claims like these are often unverifiable and may be wrong.

The pathway

1946 · age 11
The guitar$7.75
Pentecostal church music and Beale Street radio shape the sound.
1953 · age 18
A truck driver at Sun Records$4
Pays about four dollars to cut two songs — a gift for his mother, by the studio's telling.
1954 · age 19
That's All Right
An off-hours jam Sam Phillips puts on tape; Memphis radio plays it fourteen times in one night.
1955 · age 20
RCA buys the contract$35K
A record price for a singer at the time.
1956 · age 21
Heartbreak Hotel
Ed Sullivan, filmed from the waist up, and the first of eighteen US number ones.
1968 · age 33
The Comeback Special
Black leather, live and stripped down, after a decade lost to formula films.
1977 · age 42
Dies at Graceland
Cardiac arrest tied to prescription-drug misuse; the estate becomes one of the most visited homes in America.

Sources

Compiled from these references and contemporaneous press reporting. Figures are approximate; verify before relying on them.