Elvis Presley

"They're talking ‘bout the hood, talkin’ ‘bout where we all come from. My mother always listened to Presley' song when I was young. It talk about the things she went through, you know. She had a bunch of kids, like 9 kids, you know what I’m sayin’. That's how you get somebody to listen to your song, you talk about what they know about and what they want to hear.”"

"To make things even harder, public-health communicators no longer have the benefit of public figures such as Elvis Presley, who once gave a lift to a national immunization campaign with a single photograph of a rolled-up sleeve. These days, even our most mass-appeal celebrities are not nearly as appealing. Each of them has done something to annoy some chunk of the population, and I’m even talking about Bruce Springsteen right now, and I’m even talking about Hilary Duff."

"Are you kiddin̠g? I am not gonna do an Elvis song, not at the White House̜. No one can outsing the King."

"i) A double voice that alternates between a high quaver, reminiscent of Johnnie Ray at his fiercest, and a rich basso that might be smooth if it were not for its spasmodic delivery. 'Heartbreak Hotel', yelps the high voice, is where he's going to get away from it all. Answers the basso: 'he'll be sorry ii) Without preamble, the three-piece band cuts loose. In the spotlight, the lanky singer flails furious rhythms on his guitar, every now and then breaking a string; in a pivoting stance, his hips swing sensuously from side to side and his entire body takes on a frantic quiver, as if he had swallowed a jackhammer; his loud baritone goes raw and whining in the high notes, but down low it is rich and round. As he throws himself into one of his specialties— "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Long Tall Sally", his throat seems full of desperate aspirates or hiccuping glottis strokes, but his movements suggest, in a word, sex."

"Elvis Presley was also known for his work on the big screen. The “Heartbreak Hotel” singer made his debut in 1956's Civil War film “Love Me Tender“. It was a stunning one, and it helped propel him to the top ten of the box office for a decade in movies like "Jailhouse Rock“ and “King Creole" Eventually, he would return to music entirely after Hollywood stopped giving him challenging film roles but by then, he'd proven that he could tackle everything.""

"I've got a cutout of Elvis Presley outside my door so people at the US Capitol can find my office. Right now, he's wearing a big pennant that says ‘Go Golden Knights,"

"I think Elvis Presley will never be solved."

"Listening to these songs today, their most remarkable feature is Presley's voice itself. He takes the Platters' Tony Williams's techniques, and any other predecessor's, to new, uncharted pinnacles. For a singer who was only just encountering widespread popularity, his singing resonates with amazing fortitude and confidence, especially on "Heartbreak Hotel," (1956), where Presley alternately shouts words with full lungs, then gulps the following back, as if under water but without missing a beat. In "Loving you" (1957), Presley's baritone on this, the ultimate slow dance number, is almost too powerful, virtually rumbling the floor..."

"My first political act was to get kicked out of class for arguing with a teacher for criticizing Elvis"

"Before I made my first record, we had a three night tour of an Army base in Freidberg, Germany. I was told: “Jackie, there’s someone I’d like you to meet". So I walked in through the front door of a house in Bad Neuheim, off-base, to find Elvis himself smiling at me. I nearly fainted! We sang together, talked plenty, and I kinda fell in love with him..."

"It was the very first day on set and I was so nervous. Everyone was having lunch and I really didn't feel like eating because I was that nervous. So I decided to go take a nap and if I was needed on set, they would call me. I went to my trailer and the air conditioner wasn't working. I was just hysterical -- really hysterical. I thought, ‘Oh no, this isn’t happening.’ You could only imagine how hot it was. And there was no one around because everyone was having lunch. There must be an air conditioner there. I thought. All of a sudden, there was a hand stopping me. I immediately apologized without even looking up. And I was told, ‘That’s Elvis’ dressing room. You can't just go in. I'm going to have to ask if you're allowed." At that moment, I didn’t see Presley, but I was given the green light to hang out in his room. Upon entering, I immediately felt the relief of a running air conditioner and collapsed on a nearby couch. When I opened my eyes after a restful sleep, I saw Presley’s face closely staring right back at me. He was putting a cold compress on my face. He thought I must have passed out or something, He was absolutely beautiful. I mean, people with great voices are attractive to me, but this was something else. I didn’t even know what to say because I was so shocked. And then he went, ‘Don’t worry about it. I just want you to feel good. Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat? Are you thirsty?’ I couldn't even talk!” I was overwhelmed by everything I was experiencing. He smelled like baby powder and milk. But he just kept insisting if I needed or wanted anything. Elvis also had told me I could stay for as long as I liked and not to worry about it. After he left, I eventually got up and stepped outside where I saw Presley surrounded by his entourage. At the time, he was fascinated by martial arts and when I told him I knew Bruce Lee, then that was another reason we bonded easily. He was a Southern Baptist and my family was very Christian, so we had already connected from that alone. He was very spiritual. I remember the last time we spoke, we were hanging out in his trailer. He just looked at me and said, ‘Keep that light burning baby.’ And that was it. I guess he lost his light. Couldn't find his way home, you know? I truly feel he just worked himself to death. It was very tragic.”"

"Even Plato, I think, said that you need to be trained in government, to exercise it, to practice it. But the American public is now satisfying itself with being interested in entertainers. I was at a seminar a few weeks ago down at the Smithsonian. They held a conference on the subject of the hero. And I guess I should have realized that this was what it was about, that the level would not be exactly my idea of a hero. And it certainly was not. It was quite weird, what they considered heroes. The real hero of the discussion was this little girl who’d fallen down a well, and everybody was rescuing her. I mean, after all, she didn’t do anything to make herself a hero. She was just in the news. And another hero they discussed was Elvis Presley"

"Even as we focus on perhaps the final election of the 2018 season in North Carolina's 9th District, pundits and scholars are already debating whether or not there was a “blue wave” during the 2018 election, or if it was an Elvis Presley-like “Blue Christmas” for the Democrats, a missed opportunity for the party."

"Well, this was during the time that Elvis Presley was driving a gravel truck and we were playing on 11th Street and they didn't allow whites there. It was a whole black street. And at that time I didn't know who Elvis was, whether he was a musician, he was just a guy that I liked. He liked music, so I liked him because he liked music. I'm assuming that was it and we had some form of rapport together. So I would slip him into the back of the club, the piano sitting like this and the back door was sitting there and I would sit him and have him behind the piano, because in those days I would stand up to play the piano, and I'd play the piano backwards and just clowning with the piano. But I never knew that this guy was even an entertainer. But meantime, I'm just assuming a year or so, I hear this "Blue Suede Shoes" but I never put this with this guy at all. I don't even connect the two. And many years later, in Las Vegas, I was playing the lounge room at the International Hotel, and Elvis was in the main room, but you know I never was interested in other acts, you know, I always was interested, like if I get to know you, OK, but for me to go over there, Red Foxx was in the lounge also at that time. And one night, I won some thousand dollars, and I was coming down through the back, had all this big old rack of chips and stuff and this white guy says, "Hey you don't remember me?" And I said no. So that's when he [Elvis] told me that he was the one that used to come to West Memphis and hide behind the piano, in this black club. You know, it was amazing, you know?"

"But even the power of organized religion paled beside the personal changes I felt come over me in the mid-1950s when I heard Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" on the radio for the first time. Determined to get a berth of my own on the fast-moving train of rock 'n' roll, I quickly made my way up to Memphis and the legendary Sun Studios. There, I talked producer Sam Phillips into giving me a shot at making some records of his own."

"This is the best way to hear Elvis the Superstar, with "Hound Dog," (1956),"All Shook Up,(1957), "Are You Lonesome Tonight" (1960), and the ever zany "Suspicious Minds" (1969), still sounding fresh and immediate —impressive given how many times most the world has heard them —, and showing off the diversity of Elvis' singing, from the purity of his gospel falsetto to his rock and roll purr."

"Blue laws began in Texas in 1863 and were still being passed in 1961. Many states prohibited the selling of alcoholic beverages on and off premises in one form or another on Sundays, or at restricted times. Also, blue laws of Texas did not prohibit most businesses being open on Sundays, but all of the restrictions made it impractical to open. Can anyone imagine when some Sunday shopping was a crime? If this blue law was still in effect today, we would all go to jail and cause a Jailhouse Rock with an 8.6 magnitude on the musical Richter scale like Elvis did back in his heyday."

"I was 11 when he died, but I remember that. He gave Ali that robe. Everybody loved him. He was a beautiful person in real life."

"It is not enough to reject the capitalist decadence with words, to speak out against the ecstatic singing of someone like Elvis Presley. We have to offer something better..."

"The course examines the history of rock music, primarily as it unfolded in the United States, from the days before rock (pre-1955), to the end of the 1960s. It covers the music of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and many more artists, with an emphasis both on cultural context and on the music itself. The course will also explore how developments in the music business and in technology helped shape the ways in which styles developed."

"Elvis Presley, for example, became a key supporter of Father Don Mowery's work, having grown up in Lauderdale Courts, one of the many Memphis housing projects well served by Youth Service during this period. Interestingly, Elvis' donations always came with a catch, namely that they never be put into the general-operating fund, but instead set aside for “special projects.” By 1985, Memphis-style programs were operating in dozens of cities all across America, father Mowery's concept generally considered the most innovative social-service effort developed between the military and civilian sectors in the late-twentieth century. And although no one knew at that time how much of an impact Elvis' contributions would have on the future of the organization, much of the funding for this national expansion came precisely from that “special projects” fund that Elvis Presley had supported in the 1960s."

"Society is always on the lookout for a cultural target for finger pointing when the establishment has issues, especially generationally with its youth. In the '50s, comic books became the easiest target to blame for the post-World War II rise of juvenile delinquency in America because certainly, society never believes anything is the fault of the establishment, itself, nor its parents, teachers, clergyman, politicians, etc. So in the early '50s, comic books were mounted on the cultural crucifix. To this day, I believe that the comic books as we know them would not have survived that attack had it not been for the emergence of Elvis Presley. Quickly, the finger turned and pointed at him, instead. Of course, this was followed by 45 RPM record burnings in cities across our nation. Over the decades, that witch-hunt of blame has moved from comic books to Elvis Presley to Saturday morning cartoons to rap to hip-hop to video games, because, again, nothing is ever the fault of society, itself...."

"It is an honor for me to be with you, here where the most celebrated people have made history. In this iconic arena, think of this, here, where I stand, is where the King, Elvis Presley played for 80,000 screaming fans"

"The only time I met him was in Las Vegas, at night, but what a time that was!!!"

"Oh I Go, I was going to die, join the 27 club, I had more pressure than anybody to record a song, even Elvis.."

"When I was a very little girl, my aunt told me never to listen to Elvis Presley’s music. She asserted (forcefully, I might add) how Elvis (supposedly) said, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” My aunt also declared he stole black music, so, I now ask myself, why would an African American woman defend a white man she was raised to hate? I decided on a full study and complete unmasking of falsely reported news surrounding the life and career of Elvis Presley. The truth about the invented slur lies in white liberals owning media outlets like , magazine where they could make money exploiting statements and falsifying others because so many whites during the era openly made stupid remarks against black people. So when a black radio station decided to play Elvis' music and black people started acknowledging that they listened to and bought Elvis' records, white liberals went into panic mode and the slur was invented."

"I listen to Elvis Presley, Chainsmokers, Miranda Lambert, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift and Royal Blood."

"- My earliest connection with Elvis was that my substitute English teacher at Paxton High was , who seven months later would go on to write "Heartbreak Hotel". Mae was also a show promoter and in the late spring of 1955 she brought the Show to the Gator Bowl Baseball Stadium and that was how I met Elvis. Before the start of the show, I got backstage, talked to him for a long time and then I finally introduced myself to him. He then said "Well I'm Elvis Presley" and I thought 'Wow, that's a strange name' as I had never even heard his name before that. I was there actually to see Snow who headlined and so forth, but as soon as he hit the stage I knew who he was! I'd been thinking that he was just a guitar player but when he went out on stage they came out of the bleachers, pushed so hard you just couldn't hold them back. There just wasn't enough protection as this was a Country show. Elvis was bottom of the bill that day and he hadn't even had a major hit yet, so you wonder what Snow must have thought of the reaction. That day, on May 13, 1955, was the first time I had ever seen a show with so much screaming and fan input. I'd never seen anything like that. It was unbelievable."

"The one thing that I envy is Bill Belew having the job of dressing Elvis Presley. That job I would've liked'."

"Well, 'Viva Las Vegas,' Is was fun for Sergio and I to don special race suits for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, as we drew inspiration from Elvis, iconic gold belts and all."

"After seeing "Jailhouse Rock", where Elvis gets out of jail and makes his own records, takes them to the radio stations himself to finally put his records in the stores, I then made records and put them in stores."

"Yes, I believe I am an Elvis, the Elvis of Vallenato"

"I asked him how he felt about Estes Kefauver and Adlai Stevenson from the Democratic National Convention, and about the Andrea Doria disaster, the Empire waistline in the world of fashion, and Pablo Casals, the world's greatest cellist. His answer was that he would rather keep his views to himself because he did not want to be labeled, so I left him alone. Later I found out that Elvis always enjoyed telling the story of how he managed to outsmart me and every other reporter by answering questions without really answering them."

"Long before the plans for an actual rock museum in Cleveland were hatched, a group headed by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner and Atlantic Records' Ahmet Ertegun started off the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with two induction ceremonies-cum-concerts, in 1986 and 1987, bringing in a total of 25 blues-and-rock groundbreakers primarily from the ‘50s, including Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley. Presley is in fact rock’s greatest presence, shaking a country with a single-handed nuclear reaction of country, gospel, and the blues. Along with the Beatles, he is the epitome of pop stardom as well."

"It was my mother's Elvis concerts from the 70's on VHS tapes that first drew me to the sheer thrill of an all-you-can-eat live performance. I just had this fascination for him. I was going to the Punters Club in Fitzroy but a lot of the bands I was watching were staring at their shoes, I mean shoe gaze was massive. Then I'd go home to my mother's Elvis' tapes and nobody was owning a spotlight like that, nobody. I wanted to start a band that was putting on show. I wanted to reward people for leaving their living rooms if they were going to come out to watch a band, let's give them something visual as well as a band that sounds good."

"I think about Elvis all the time."

"In fact, I first provided clothing for her during her first pregnancy in 1981, and continued to do so until her death in 1997. One such outfit, which Diana herself called her ‘Elvis Dress’, was worn by her both to the British Fashion Awards in October 1989 and then on an official visit to Hong Kong. The year of her passing away, the dress was bought for £81,203 at a benefit auction by The Franklin Mint, a company which produces memorabilia such as a portrait doll featuring her wearing this dress, thus making it one of the best-known of Diana's many outfits, and the second highest prized. The Mint returned the dress to the Diana Estate a few years later."

"I had a 45 rpm record player, one of those that accommodated little records with big holes in the middle and with the capacity to hold, what, 10 or so records, to drop down one at a time, until all 10 had played. But that's too general for what I've been thinking about. Specifically, it's one of the songs, really the only song I can say with certainty that I played, over and over and over again. “Lavender Blue” by Sammy Turner. And it, and others, made me know I loved music — most all kinds excusing jazz and opera. And then, it was Elvis. Controversial Elvis Presley. Would my folks let me listen to his music or watch him on our little black and white television? Then, before we knew it, Elvis was too big to be avoided or ignored. You had to watch him..."

"Well, now wait. You say he has no talent and yet I think that you'll agree that he has been taken into the bosom of America in a certain sense and has been very well paid for it..."

"With the way he was marketed, he didn't even need to be able to sing the way he could. But Elvis had talent, plain and simple. The guy had a thousandth-octave range, and a variety in his vocal styles and approach, he could make more vocal tones, with just his voice, than a guitar player with 50 pedals and gadgets. If you never even saw the guy, you could plain feel, not just hear, the emotion and passion in his voice, and you are immediately taken in, one hundred percent. On the merit of vocals alone, he had more talent in the barbecue stuck in his teeth than the singers who sell millions of records do today."

"This is something I've always wanted to do: Take an evening, invite an audience and just be me. What you can expect is me playing music, answering almost all questions anyone would ask (except the ones that may incriminate me), a big screen power point presentation put together and narrated by me, guitar shop talk, slide guitar 101, true stories of road craziness, playing more music and I’m particularly excited to talk about my Elvis experiences —what he meant to me and what I meant to him. We’ll conclude with a Town Hall Meeting, including a strategy and platform discussion for my candidacy to run for President of the United States in 2020 and sing ‘God Bless America’ or something else (Elvis would want that).""

"Is it true Elvis took you often to tour the morgue? Why̞?"

"i) I liked Dylan, the way he created a brilliant new style. I even gave him one of my silver "Double Elvis" paintings. Later on, though, I heard rumors that he had used it as a dart board up in the country. When I'd ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I'd invariably get hearsay answers like ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone — I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse, man.’. I didn't know exactly what they meant by that — I never listened much to the words of songs — but I got the tenor of what people were saying — that Dylan didn't like me ii) For forty-five minutes nonstop Ali raged on about prostitution on the steps of the White House, gravity, meteorites, jumping out of the window, Israel, Egypt, Zaire, South Africa, drugs, broken skulls, delusions, angel food cake, yellow hair, judgment day, Muslim morality, Jesus, boxing, Sweden, the Koran, friendship, and Elvis, relating it all to the central point that ‘man must obey the laws of God or perish!’”"

"Elvis Presley existed not only as a flesh-and-blood person but also as millions of pictures on album covers and movie screens, in newspapers and magazines. He was infinitely reproducible. Similarly, through use of the silkscreen printing process, Warhol could produce as many Elvis paintings as he pleased."

"As a single woman, I could always spot a handsome man. Elvis Presley was one of the prettiest, yes, prettiest and nicest people I ever known. Pictures and videos of him really did not do him justice. In 1969, when I opened at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and he had opened at the International, I once went to see my aunt Cissy Houston (a member of Elvis' vocal backing group, the Sweet Inspirations), during one of their sound checks. Elvis was there and Cissy introduced me to him. He let me know he was a a fan of my recordings then had all the Vegas record stores place a photo of him inside of my albums. This he announced from the stage and added that anyone who bought any of my albums would find an autographed photo of him inside of it. That week I think I sold more albums in Las Vegas than I ever had. I will never forget this act of kindness. We lost an icon when he made his transition."

"There would be no current popular music without Elvis. He not only synthesized everything that had come before him in a really unique way, but he influenced everybody who came after — so you can have Blake Shelton and Adam Lambert influenced by the same cat."

"I better watch out. I believe whitey's picking up on the things that I'm doing"

"In my seventeen years as doorman to the top hotel in Hollywood, the biggest star that ever stayed there was Elvis Presley. He was indeed one of the nicest people I have ever met in my life. If I introduced any person to him, he would show the utmost courtesy and respect that they ever encountered. Sometimes, over the long years I felt that God had put him on this earth for a very special reason. When you use the phrase "a very special person", that was Elvis Presley, in my opinion."

"Keith Richards taught me rock and roll. We’d have nothing to do all day and we’d play these records over and over again. I learned to love Muddy Waters. Keith turned me on to how good Elvis Presley was, and I’d always hated Elvis up ’til then."

"We faced unique challenges filming during the pandemic, particularly recreating a performer whose signature move is to get down from the stage in the audience and kiss just about every member of the audience you can find. There was something about making a film in this kind of perfect isolation and perfect focus that I think produced an extraordinary result.."