Gospel Singers

"You were either brought up on the Beatles or Elvis. I was raised on Elvis, and every song he sang, every film he was in and every move he made is part of my DNA."

"I walked into the lobby of the International Hotel in Las Vegas with Tom Jones, which was like walking in with the Good Lord himself, and next minute we were in Elvis Presley's dressing room. As I stared at him, stunned, one of Elvis's assistants said to me, ‘Sir, will you give this drink to Elvis?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ took the drink and stood there gaping, like a stagestruck schoolgirl. Couldn't move a muscle. Tom nudged me and said, ‘Give ’im the drink for God’s sake. I struggled to speak to Elvis because I was so overwhelmed and amazed to be in the presence of such a great singer. Next night, it was Elvis who came to Tom’s room. I was in heaven..."

"Elvis Presley has a very definite form of dance rhythm and this may well be what creates the hysteria."

"Each singer (of the so-called folk variety), is recognized as much from its characteristic sound, as from what they actually sing or play, and they manipulate tone colour with a virtuosity that owes nothing to either the classical, or the Tin Pan Alley tradition; one thinks, for example, of the voice of Elvis Presley, an expressive vehicle, shifting from high to low tones, groaning, slurring, and producing breathless changes of rhythm; to many listeners, the voice may have seemed crude, but its folk immediately resided in its crudeness."

"Remembering the legend and the super energetic actor who carved an extraordinary niche for himself, especially for his grooving dancing style. He was ahead of his times in everything and was the first among contemporaries to have mastered the internet. He was truly deserving of the title 'Elvis Presley of India'"

"Elvis Presley. I don't do impersonations, but Elvis is the most impersonated performer in the world. Just the more I've read about him, the more he's someone I've wanted to get into. I want to do the "Walk the Line" version of Elvis. Like Joaquin Phoenix doesn't look like Johnny Cash but I still felt like I was watching Johnny Cash in that movie."

"Elvis' songs can be heard everywhere worldwide, which is perhaps why everyone is familiar with his voice. When you hear a deep tuneful voice with a Southern drawl in a rock 'n' roll song, it can't be anyone but Elvis (in spite of that voice actually being that of someone else "successfully" mimicking him)."

"As a child, I’d stand on a table and sing Elvis at the drop of a hat."

"At the risk of being sad for two seconds, I drink a toast to a wonderful fellow who left yesterday and did much for American Music. I knew him for maybe 12 or 14 years and we know, what he did in his career, but I knew him as a man, a gentle, good, fine man, gracious and generous in every sense of the word. Things which people never heard about him helping organizations, and children's hospitals but I knew all about that. He was some kind of cat and I hope God's good to him. ii) I am just a singer. Elvis was the embodiment of the whole American culture. Life just wouldn't have been the same without him. There have been many accolades uttered about his talent and performances through the years, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly. I shall miss him dearly as a friend."

"He performed at the auditorium in 1955 and 1956. For the first appearance, Elvis was paid $150. He grossed $9,000 when he returned a year later."

"My heart melted when I saw him in person but when he and my dad met for the taping, they were both nervous..."

"He rarely over-sang when recording, delivering a vocal to suit the song. So, he can loudly accuse in "Hound Dog" (1956), rasp and rage for "Jailhouse Rock" (1957), bare his soul and beg on "Any Day Now"(1969) and sound quietly, sadly, worldly-wise on "Funny How Time Slips Away". (1970). This gift may explain why his music endures so powerfully and why his performances remain so easy to hear."

"I was in Holland and our dressing room was next door to the one being used by the supergroup The Last Shadow Puppets. Anyways, I went to the toilet and who walks in but Alex Turner? He is a hero of mine and, to me, he looked like Elvis Presley..."

"He didn't buy it for himself, he never used it, it was from the start an act of charity, and I certainly hope that once we auction it, it will one day be enshrined, as it has been the witness of history for almost two decades, especially during Pres. FDR's time."

"Imagine growing up in post-war Britain. Ration coupons. Rain-slick streets. Bombed-out terraces of dingy brick. And then, shimmering on the horizon, the prospect of salvation: American popular culture. Who needs spirit-sapping austerity when Elvis Presley can cheer you up?"

"Actually, he was an easy-going guy. No putting on airs, like he was some big star. An ordinary person, very polite, very obliging, a wonderful man, when I look back on it. It's a shame he had to go so soon.”"

"Back in 1956, Elvis Presley recorded his massive hit “Don’t Be Cruel.” With all due respect to the King, this great song has many virtues but providing a guide to policy isn’t one of them. Yet it appears to be dictating Democrats’ current approach to the red-hot immigration issue despite its profound inadequacy in the policy realm. Consider that Democrats have been unremittingly hostile to Trump’s immigration policy since he began his second term, despite its undisputed success in completely shutting down the southern border to illegal immigration. Instead, Democrats have focused relentlessly on the question of interior enforcement—that is, the activities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) aimed at detaining and deporting illegal immigrants currently living within the United States. The general approach has been to portray all ICE actions as essentially illegitimate, arbitrary and, well, cruel.Conspicuously lacking has been any recognition that, in fact, interior enforcement against illegal immigration is an entirely legitimate law enforcement operation and that ICE is the government agency charged with these legitimate activities. Therefore, what ICE does is presumptively legitimate not illegitimate. Obviously, the current Democratic vogue for treating all ICE activities as illegitimate and susceptibility to dumb maximalist slogans like “Abolish ICE” points them in precisely the wrong direction for dealing with the thorny and complex realities of the immigration issue. They’re just setting themselves up for future failure. In short, it’s time to stop coddling the “In This House, We Believe” crowd and adopt a serious, grown-up approach to immigration and immigrants. “Don’t Be Cruel” isn’t gonna cut it."

"Ladies and gentlemen, the McDonnell Douglas aircraft have left the air. Yeah, they were as iconic as Elvis Presley."

"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...."

"The first time I heard his music, back in ’54 or ’55, I was in a car and I heard the announcer say, “Here’s a guy who, when he appears on stage in the South, the girls scream and rush the stage”. Then he played ‘That’s all right, mama’. I thought his name was about the weirdest I'd ever heard. I thought for sure he was a Black guy. Later on I grew my hair like him, imitated his stage act – once I went all over New York looking for a lavender shirt like the one he wore on one of his albums. I felt wonderful when he sang ‘Bridge over troubled water’, even though it was a touch on the dramatic side – but so was the song. It was unbelievable,and I thought to myself, how the hell can I compete with that?"

"As the lad himself might say, cut my legs off and call me Shorty! Elvis Presley can act. Acting is his assignment in this shrewdly upholstered showcase, and he does it."

"Just as the producer's job is to achieve the best recording possible – the kind of perfection that so grabs listeners like - so the editor should push the writer beyond the bounds of what he thinks he can achieve. It's hard to escape the feeling that there's a better book here waiting to get out. Essentially, this is a memoir consisting of 10 essays each of which attempting to examine a fairly arbitrary category of music. “Boys and Girls and Girl Groups”; “Vulnerability”; “The Spectacle of Anguish” etc. The opener looks at “The Horsemen in the Box” - Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley – who he feels would have represented the end of pop music history had the Cuban Missile Crisis not turned out so well."

"But it wasn’t until 1958, when Elvis Presley teamed the item with brilliantine and attitude in the movie "King Creole" that the jacket crossed over to Main Street and became a much-copied American staple. Elvis always floated between Ivy League style and serious fashion and the Baeacuta G9 came in some great colors. When Elvis wore it was called the "Jivey Ivy" , which was Ivy League with a twist. After that almost every clothing company in the US copied it."

"In Jailhouse Rock, he was everything rockabilly's about. Nah, nah, I mean, he is rockabilly: mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie, he couldn't give a fuck about nothin' except rockin' and rollin', livin' fast, dying young, and leaving a good-lookin' corpse, y'know?"

"He is a huge Elvis fan, his favourite songs being ‘Jailhouse Rock’ and ‘Suspicious Minds, and he can move like Elvis"

"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."

"I'd like to wake up in the morning and hear on CNN that Elvis lives again"

"Elvis are you out there somewhere Looking like a happy man? In the snow with Rosebud And King of the Mountain."

"Little hellions, kids feelin' rebellious, Embarrassed their parents still listen to Elvis."

"Elvis Presley, the 21-year-old bobby-soxers' delight, shot the Ed Sullivan Show's rating up to 43.7—highest in two years. Actor Charles Laughton, his glib tongue in his dumpling cheek, introduced Elvis with: "Ed insisted I give a high tone to the proceedings," then, to the frenzied shrieks of the teenagers, let Hillbilly Presley take over. Crooner Presley, sideburns dripping with sweat and goose grease, mumbled through three songs, gave his guitar a thorough clouting, contorted his mouth suggestively and his pelvis more so. When it was over, parents and critics, as usual, did a lot of futile grumbling at the vulgarity of this strange new phenomenon that must somehow be reckoned with."

"Do you know how hard it is to fake your own death? Only one man has pulled it off — Elvis."

"Our childhood housekeeper kept us supplied with a handwritten list of records. And when our mom would go out shopping and say, “Kids, can I get you something?,” we'd say, “You going by the record store? Here’s the list.” And sure enough, it was Jimmy Reed. It was Larry Williams. It was Ray Charles. All the good stuff. My sister and I played the sides off of those records. We'd turn those 45 rpm singles white. And I remember my mom taking us to see Elvis Presley and that kind of did it ... we had the music bug. And then my father took me down to a recording session at ACA, that was Bill Holford's place. And he put me in a chair and he said, “I’ll be in the office if you need me. Stick around because there are some musicians gonna make a recording session.” And I was kind of enjoying it, and who should walk in but B.B. King and his band. So between seeing Elvis and watching B.B. King record, it was carved in stone."

"Gather 'round, cats, and I'll tell you a story, about how to become an All American Boy."

"Elvis Presley. I'm not sure if he's "of the "moment" but now and then there is a new release of his music."

"And as Charles de Gaulle made it into power, promising the colonial population in Algeria "the 1,001 nights", and even as the Bastille seemed like it was never, ever to be taken again yet, in spite of it all, the voice of Elvis kept singing "Good Rockin tonight""

"Jerry and I were big Elvis fans and the name held some fascination. We were also looking for someone who had never performed comedy, who could recite the most hilarious piece of dialogue without thinking the lines were MEANT to be funny. We saw a certain naïveté and inexperience in Priscilla Presley that we knew would work for what we had planned."

"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..."

"I knew him when he was a kid. He used to play the guitar and go around with quartets and to Negro ‘sanctified’ meetings. He lived near the colored section, and people around here say he's one of the nicest boys they ever knew. He just doesn't impress me as the type of person who would say a thing like that."

"No, many thanks but I am just a tourist here and prefer no photos are taken."

"Elvis' 1969 opening night in Las Vegas was his first time back on a live stage in more than eight years, playing the biggest showroom in the biggest hotel and drawing more people for his four-week engagement than any other show in Las Vegas history. His performance got rave reviews, “Suspicious Minds” gave him his first number-one hit in seven years, and Elvis became Vegas's biggest star. Over the next seven years, he performed more than 650 shows there, and sold out every one. Las Vegas was changed too. The intimate night-club-style shows of the Rat Pack, who made Vegas the nation's premier live-entertainment center in the 1950s and ‘60s, catered largely to well-heeled older gamblers. Elvis brought a new kind of experience: an over-the-top, rock-concert-like extravaganza, setting a new bar for Las Vegas performers, with the biggest salary, the biggest musical production, and the biggest promotion campaign the city had ever seen. In doing so, he opened the door to a new generation of pop/rock performers, and brought a new audience to Las Vegas—a mass audience from Middle America that the city depends on for its success to this day."

"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"

"He is the Elvis of cultural theory"

"What was the Strip like back then, or what was it like to see Elvis Presley....."

"I shall always regret not having seen Elvis Presley live..."

"So I picked up the two Guralnick biographies and started reading them, and as you do if you're reading books about music, you start listening to the tracks as you're going along. Before I'd finished the first book I became a diehard Elvis fan, and by the time I'd finished the second one I had an Elvis tattoo. He might not have written his own songs, but he was the master producer and engineer of his generation. It's also popular opinion to say that the original Hound Dog is better, but no it fucking isn't. That's just bollocks. Elvis' version of that song is lightyears ahead, and if you listen to the two of them back-to-back you can hear what he was doing. This was obviously the ‘50s so it was all cut live, and he’d stand in the middle of the room with all the musicians around him and they’d do 60 takes in a row. He’d be like, ‘Bar three, verse two; drop that F sharp to an E. Now let’s do it again.’ He was in full control of his vision. It's taken me until my mid-30s to realise it, and when I was younger I didn't really get it."

"Et Charles de Gaulle prenait le pouvoir, promettant les milles-et-une-nuits au pieds-noirs, et la Bastille en a tellement vu, qu'on ne l'y reprendra jamais, jamais plus, et la voix d'Elvis chante "Good rocking tonight""

"Some of those we have lost in 2019ː Elvis Presley (singer, actor, 84), perpetrator of the finest prank in history and of two of the best comeback concerts ever seen..."

"He was the son of Afghanistan’s former prime minister, a prolific recording artist and a music idol for the masses. His music drew from Persian poetry as well as Indian classical styles, and it increasingly revealed a political edge, criticising the Soviet-backed Marxist regime who had seized power in Afghanistan following a 1978 military coup. There is some dream-like footage online of a 1970s gig at Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, showing an energetic figure leading a multi-instrumental band. The performer’s hip looks (dark quiff and sideburns; loosened tie) and rollicking, psych-roots grooves reflect the ‘Afghan Elvis’ nickname he earned."

"This is the mysterious part about music, the people who mean it, like Elvis, are generally the ones who are processing some kind of loss, and we connect to it."