"Born in Tupelo, Miss., he was an only child whose parents scraped along on odd jobs until the family moved to Memphis when Elvis was 13. He was fanatically and unabashedly devoted to his mother. He was buried near her after the kind of awful, agonized public wake that attended the passing of Rudolph Valentino and Judy Garland. Eighty thousand fans jammed the street outside his Memphis mansion, Graceland, hoping for a view of the body; 30,000 were admitted to the house. Dozens swooned, cried, keened and passed out from the heat outside the mansion gates. Two people were killed when a drunken driver plowed into the crowd. After the funeral at Graceland, a cortege of 16 white Cadillacs led a slow procession down Elvis Presley Boulevard to the cemetery. There the lawn was banked with some 2,200 floral tributes — an imperial crown of golden mums, hortisculptured hound-dogs and guitars, sunflowers in wine bottles. Memphis ran out of flowers; reinforcements were sent in from California and Colorado. From out of the barrage of funeral images, one reaches for a single last memory.searches for an epitaph. Go back to one of his SUN Records, and there is one that seems particularly appropriate. "Well", Elvis starts off, in a raw drawl then rushes into the verse "I heard the news, there's good rocking tonight" Now there is, for everyone. Elvis saw to that. ."
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Actors from MississippiAmerican country singersSinger-songwriters from the United StatesGuitarists from the United StatesGospel singers
Original Language: English
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Sources
Abridged from Jay Cocks's obituary as published by TIME magazine in an article entotled "Last stop on the Mystery Train" and dated August 29, 1977.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley
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Elvis Presley
film actor, singer, composer
1935 – 1977 · United States
(8 January 1935 – 16 August 1977) was an American singer, musician, and actor. Popularly known by his first name as "Elvis," as "The King of Rock and Roll" or simply as "The King," he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century.
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