Residence 1
📍306 Elvis Presley Drive, Tupelo, MS 38801, USA
1935 – 1948“The house I was born in was two rooms — a bedroom and a front room — built by my father Vernon with lumber he bought on credit and help from his father and brother. We called it a shotgun house: you could fire a gun through the front door and it would go straight out the back. We were poor in the way that Tupelo was poor, which meant we were poor alongside everybody else and did not think much of it. The First Assembly of God church on Adams Street was where I first understood what music could do to a room full of people. The pastor let me sing at five years old, and the congregation responded in a way I never forgot. On the radio I heard blues coming up from the Black neighbourhoods, gospel from the church, and country from the hills — three kinds of music that nobody had thought to mix yet. When we left for Memphis in 1948, I was thirteen and I already knew what I was going to do with my life. I just did not know yet that I was going to do it to the whole world.”
👍 LovedThe church choir and the radio — two different kinds of music that told me the same thing about what sound could do to the human heart
👎 DislikedThe poverty that ground my parents down daily, and the knowledge that everything we had was always one bad month from disappearing
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Residence 2
📍Graceland, 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
1957 – 1977“Graceland was never just a house — it was a statement, a dream made solid, the impossible thing I had promised myself when I was a poor boy from Tupelo who had nothing. I bought it in 1957 when I was twenty-two years old, and I spent the next twenty years making it my own: the Jungle Room with its waterfall and green shag carpet, the Trophy Room lined with gold records and Hollywood costumes, the racquetball court where I played at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep. Memphis was always home to me in a way that Hollywood never was — the people here knew me before I was Elvis, and that meant everything. I could drive through Whitehaven at night with the windows down and feel the warm Southern air and remember who I was before the world decided who I should be.”
👍 LovedThe Southern warmth — the food, the people, the pace of life. The privacy that Graceland's gates and grounds allowed me. Being close to my Memphis Mafia, my friends who had known me forever. The freedom to be eccentric in my own home without judgment.
👎 DislikedThe isolation that fame created even within those walls. The difficulty of sleeping, of finding peace when the mind wouldn't quiet. The knowledge that the gates that kept the world out also kept me in.
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Guralnick, P. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999), Little, Brown; Nash, A. The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker (2003), Simon & Schuster; Graceland official archives
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