"Before Elvis, everything was in black and white. Then came Elvis. Zoom, glorious technicolour.” (Keith Richards).
Greetings fellow travellers, following our journey across the sacred site of the Acropolis, we now move across time, to the Southern United States, to an area in the Mississippi known as Tupelo. If we travel along the Old Saltillo Road in East Tupelo overlooking the city by way of Shake Rag (African American section), an area of the town occupied by both poor black and white families and, as the saying goes, the wrong side of the tracks. As you travel along, you’ll come across a small two room house built by Vernon Presley (1916-1979), his father and brother, in 1934. It was here on January 8th, 1935, Gladys (1912-1958) was about to give birth to twins. The first child, Jessie Garon, was still born, and Elvis Aaron Presley was born thirty minutes later. Gladys said that “when one twin died, the other that lived got the strength of them both.” He was a child of the culture, music and the evangelical religion of the deep south. He grew up in a close-knit family which included grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Elvis, with his parents, attends the Assembly of God church and the music there influences him, along with the blues men and country music which he listens to on the radio with his parents.
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