Singer Songwriters From The United States

"He was one of a kind, nobody like him. And they all respected him. The unique thing about talking football to another celebrity is that it never comes as real, but with Elvis you could because he understood it at that level and that made it good for me to exchange because I could talk to him as I couldn't talk to an actual novice. He was the biggest personality, was truly big and I'm happy he was a friend of mine"

"He said I was good and I said he was good, we never argued about that. I wasn't just a fan, I was his brother; Elvis was a hard worker, dedicated, and God loved him. Last time I saw him was at Graceland, We sang 'Old Blind Barnabus' together, a gospel song. I love him and hope to see him in heaven. There'll never be another like that soul brother."

"So I said "Why don't we turn out all the lights so we don't see this vast empty looking studio the size of a football field and make it as intimate as we can?" We could barely make Elvis out through the glass from the control room into the studio when we cued him the backing-track. And then, Elvis started to sing. It was magic,. Next thing I know he's curled on the floor in almost a fetal position singing with a microphone next to his mouth. The hair on my arms were standing up. And that's the take that we wound up using on the soundtrack album. I did not use it in the TV show because I'm a total believer that if you're doing television I don't want anyone lip-syncing. I want the real thing. And to be completely honest, as great as the sit-down shows are, had I been able to get cameras and tape him there, it would have been even greater. I never put anybody I worked with on a pedestal, yet the first time I saw him, I was awed, first of all, by the way he looked. If he was not famous, you would still stop and stare. As a director, you're looking to see which is the good side, the bad side. Elvis was perfect from every angle. It was like a god walking in towards me..."

"His privileged access let him show Muhammad Ali away from the ring: preaching or sleeping, posing with black leaders like Malcolm X and James Meredith or playing with his children or with Elvis Presley."

"Time magazine at the turn of the century asked its readers to tell them who they thought was the person who contributed most to the 20th century. Well, obviously people said Martin Luther King Jr, others said Nelson Mandela and Elvis Presley. But who do you think was chosen? Einstein, whose books I saw being burned in 1933..."

"I’m a kid of the ’60s. When I was growing up I used to love going to see Elvis Presley in the cinema. I’m still a big Elvis fan. They’ve rehashed some of his music, with Elvis singing, along with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Really incredible, so beautiful. Myself and my wife actually played one of the songs – And The Grass Won’t Pay No Mind – at our marriage ceremony, as we were walking into the registry office."

"He had an amazing charisma, was so passionate about what he did, and the people could feel it."

"The Elvis effect, resulted in a lot more people getting poliovirus vaccinations. We need a series of ‘Elvises’ to promote vaccination for COVID-19 protection"

"Cilla would record and perform Beatles numbers throughout her career, but in the 60s and up to the mid-70s, she did more than most. Her renditions of "Yesterday", "For No One", "Across The Universe" and others became big favourites with radio DJs, not to mention with The Beatles, who always liked the way she interpreted their material. Previous praise from Randy Newman, for her take on one of his songs had been sweet music to her ears. And just imagine how she felt when Paul McCartney said to her that her "Long And Winding Road" was the song's definitive version. She had, however and this to her dying day, something to be immensely proud of – Elvis Presley had her "You're my world" on his famous jukebox at Graceland."

"I was in a friend's studio when a buddy of his called and told him. 'I got some news for you. Do you want me to tell you now or later?' I said later because I was in the studio when President Kennedy was killed and also when Martin Luther King was killed, so I knew the effect bad news can have on a session. When the session was over he told me and I thought he was joking and it didn't hit me until I lay down to sleep. The one other time that I experienced that was when my mother and my son died. It wasn't because he wouldn't he doing any more of my songs. It was like a piece of the whole business. I mean some people you just figure are never going to die. Inside, they'll always live. When they're gone, a certain piece goes and you just can't believe it."

"He would probably be considered a baritone, but he could reach notes that most baritone singers could not. Much of his abilities emanated from a very intense desire to execute a song as he wanted to do it, which meant that he really sang higher than he would normally be able to. When the adrenaline is going, and the song is really pumping, you can get into that mode where you can actually do things, vocally, that you couldn't normally do. So he had a tremendous range because of his desire to excel and be better, and that's why he could do a lot of things that most people couldn't."

"The moment he walked in, it was almost like all the guys there were bowing down to him, but he didn't care whatsoever. It was an amazing time, because the electricity just floated through the air. Everybody there was on cloud nine but he just acted the way a country boy would act. Elvis was truly a gentleman and a sweetheart of a guy."

"My grandmother, known as Ms Topp at the local public school, lived on Church Street. She taught Elvis Presley music and I'll tell you a funny story about it. Years later when I asked what he was like, she said ‘Oh you know, he really was a sweet boy but he didn’t have a lick of talent’ so that tells you something about how we judge talent in our family that's for sure,” LOL."

"Record producer Phil Spector, who is currently serving his sentence for the 2003 shooting death of actress ,finally settled his divorce with his third wife, Rachelle Short. In the settlement, signed December 4, 2018, they are forced to sell their infamous castle and evenly divide the proceeds, while she keeps many of her vehicles, most notably a 2015 Aston Martin Vanquish and even a small aircraft. He, on the other hand, keeps his various Grammy Awards, Gold and Platinum Records, a 1965 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III and John Lennon memorabilia, including an electric guitar and a lithograph, as well as a pair of diamond cufflinks gifted personally to him by Elvis Presley."

"From Thursday to Sunday, fans traveled in a mob mentality with Tiger Woods, sprinting from hole to hole and emphatically yelling “He’s like Elvis Presley,” and, “We want to roar with you, baby!” along the way. It was the “Walking Dead” meets “Caddyshack.” A strange combination.. but the truth."

"But better Elvis should pay those multi-millions in taxes (thereby doing as much for the War on Poverty) than you or I. "If his manager", said Goldman, "had sheltered his income from the taxman and invested it intelligently, Elvis Presley could have been as wealthy as Bob Hope". Well, I ask you. But I think we can be grateful to Elvis for his grin, his pelvis, his leap, and for the punky, biracial, engaging, ineluctably erotic and still mysterious tenor of his voice."

"Imagine Elvis with a master's degree performing a whole set about mandatory staff meetings."

"He always felt like somebody I should do and I think the Luhrmann film bounced the idea back into my head. So when I came to paint, he just sort of made sense. Elvis is one of these big characters that end up populating your life even if they’re in the background, even if you don’t listen to them or watch them a lot. Years ago I had this quite clear thought that at some point, shortly before death, we’ll each have this sense of ‘Oh those were all the people, not just celebrities but anybody who populated my life"

"Well, they were , , , , and ...."

"I named it Planet Elvis (17059) because I had discovered a similar one, just two days before and which I called Rock and Roll (17058). It just seemed befitting..."

"I like what he's doing. He’s rocking the blues, that's all he's doing. Rock and roll is here to stay because it comes from natural people. Rock and roll is a natural steal from the blues, and the blues will never die and the blues can't die because it's a natural steal from the spirituals."

"I'm sitting in the drive-through and I've got my three girls in the back and this station comes on and it's playing "Jailhouse Rock," the original version, and my girls are jumping up and down, going nuts. I'm looking around at them and they've heard Dad's music all the time and I don't see that out of them.""

"In the live music business, it doesn’t get any bigger than stadium concerts. Thanks to the large seating capacity of most stadiums, artists playing at the top echelon of touring can earn $4 million to $5 million per show — double and triple what they can earn at arenas.But the model for stadium touring business wasn’t drafted by a major concert promotion company or a professional sports executive, but by a 16-year-old girl named Kay Wheeler who found herself swept off her feet by a Mississippi singer named Elvis Presley. According to the new book "Rock Concert" by Wall Street Journal music and arts contributor Marc Meyers, Wheeler convinced the Cotton Bowl to host a concert headlined by the “Blue Suede Shoes” crooner, convinced a local radio station to be her partner, and drew in a capacity crowd thanks a letter writing campaign promoting the concer"

"We at Fox were the only people who could put John Wayne, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe in movies and not have them do any business,"

"That's when the price of art really started going up...."

"i) The late writer Norman Mailer, used to tell me that, in history, only a few names get known. So, you know, Andy Warhol would paint Mao Tse Tung or Elvis Presley. I think Trump always wanted to be in that class of a known name.ii) I see Elvis as someone who was a pioneer in smashing up some of the conformity of the Eisenhower fifties. There was something about him, an aura, that he created which made him one of the revolutionarfigures of Cold War America."

"I'd have Sir David Attenborough though I think everyone would have him. Then Emma Thompson was one that I think would be really nice to have dinner with as she's always seemed like a really interesting lady, so she would be on my alive list of guests. In terms of deceased people, I would have a young Elvis I think, or before he was at his peak anyway. Then JFK. They would be four interesting people, with different backgrounds. You could go right back and say Julius Caesar but I am NOT sure he would totally get what David Attenborough's been doing..."

"In early 1969, at American Studios in Memphis, I had a secret entrance made from an underground garage, a trap door coming from underneath the basement, so Elvis could drive in and the people wouldn't chase him. Girls would pull his hair, as well as his clothes off and all that stuff, which was fun, but eventually it got to be a pain. So I told him how he wouldn't have that problem, he could just go in, come up the steps, and we would record.."

"I didn’t really know what it was, but they were interested in me reading the script. I wasn’t an actor and wasn’t pursuing being an actor. It was just an avenue, to be honest, of making some money because I’d just left school. They flew me to New York, and I had an audition, and I got the thing."

"When you walk into a New Zealander's home there's occasionally a portrait of the Queen or the Pope, but more often than not, hanging on a lounge wall, is a piece of Elvis Presley memorabilia. You'd see a hell of a lot of Elvis. As far as we kiwis are concerned, Elvis never left the building."

"Like most black people in the South, and to whom God has pressed down the harp of a thousand strings, that harp only needed tuning. Elvis' voice was that type of voice that agreed with the thought of Calvary. He had that type of bent and that type of inclination, AND ATTITUDE, that suggested that God could use him. I gave the music a different approach, a new beat, one beat, two beats, high or low, it didn't matter. So, I said come on in here and put your things together. And it was a glorious experience and Elvis was in that group. And when Elvis passed away it was a saddening thing. It was as if the clouds themselves started crying."

"A supplicant asks priest and television star Father Gavlin "Who is more pupular, the Pope or Elvis Presley?" The question is rhetorical..."

"Heartbreak, jealousy, loneliness-, Elvis Presley gave luxuriant voice to these less than cheerful emotions, but did you ever think of him as a balladeer of the unbearable bleakness of being, of the horror of existing without purpose in a godless universe? In the improbably vivacious London-born production of "Woyzeck", vintage Elvis recordings provide much of the background music for Daniel Kramer's adaptation of Georg Büchner's great, prophetic drama of existential emptiness from the 1830's. Dolly Parton and, more predictably, Beethoven, make aural guest appearances but it's the voice of the Pelvis that sets the rhythm of life. And if the "wedding" of Presley and Büchner is more shotgun marriage than natural love match, at least you leave the theater feeling less suicidal than you normally do, after two hours with one of the grimmest heroes in Western literature."

"Winston Churchill would add wisdom, war stories and outrageous comments. As a dyslexic, and I love to learn from people with very different minds to my own, English mathematician and early computer developer, Ada Lovelace would be my second of six guests. Elvis Presley, one of the greatest entertainers of all time and an example of people with great talent, along with Nelson Mandela, would bring magic to the evening. Finally, the only person on my list whom I have already met is Princess Diana, the most delightful company, her presence at my dinner party spreading joy, laughter, and kindness around the room."

"Elvis Presley bloated, over the hill, adolescent entertainer, suddenly drawing people into Las Vegas, had nothing to do with excellence, just myth. It’s convenient for people to believe that something is wonderful, therefore they’re wonderful."

"Elvis defined the concept of celebrity before it became ubiquitous. His evolution from prodigy to recording artist to actor to movie star and ultimately to myth are all depicted in the collage. AI was used to create his final transformation into a resurrected larger-than-life idol"

"I was in Las Vegas giving a corporate presentation, because that's how I made money in the off season. Elvis called and I was skeptical at first. But then there is that specific way he spoke, and it was definitely him. He told me he liked the way I played and invited me to see him. It showed how much of a fan he was, that he wanted an NFL player to come and play with him and his buddies. But I had to catch a flight in an hour and man, it would have been the story of a lifetime, playing backyard football with Elvis. And I still think about it now."

"Some of the girls were telling me about him, this new kid on the block and I was thinking, who is this upstart? Anyways, I was playing a concert with Johnny Horton in Odessa, TX,and when the curtain opened there was only six people in the audience. Elvis was playing nearby and that's where everybody was. So we gave the people their money back and all headed over to the high school field house to see Elvis. We went backstage but he was swarmed by girls. He couldn't even get out. We tried to get his attention but there were too many people. And then I met him. I'd never seen anybody like him. He had a cute half-grin and these sleepy eyes, and he laughed a lot. I was so struck by his looks, that I probably didn't hear the first fifteen things he said to me. Mom didn't care for him in the beginning, but when he snarfed up two of her biscuits in a matter of seconds and whispered to me, 'Does she have any more?' she began to warm to him. She saw him then, I think, as more like one of her own sons. After that, she'd even smile a little when I'd mention him. When we'd travel to shows in Texas or Arkansas, Elvis and I would sit in the backseat and sing gospel songs at the top of our lungs. The guys in the front would plug their ears and we'd just die laughing. We never officially broke up or said goodbyee. That's the last time I ever saw him, until he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show..."

"He was such a nice guy to work with, a quick study. He'd go over and play the demo acetate and listen to a bunch of them. When he finally found one he liked, by the time he walked from there back over to the mic, he knew the song."

"When I was in high school, playing for Crystal City High at an away game in Memphis, I climbed up the wall that surrounded Graceland, reached over to a limb that was from a tree inside the wall, snapped the leaf off the tree and kept that leaf in my wallet for about six years."

"To have Elvis come home, so to speak during this bicentennial year for the state he was born into is very exciting,"

"My celebrity crush was Elvis Presley. I got to first meet him with George at Madison Square Garden in 1972."

"He loved Elvis. He once said to me, ‘Elvis is real pretty. People love him because all the women love him – he’s so pretty. I’m not as pretty as Elvis and he draws all the women out of nowhere’. Now, whenever Muhammad and I were in Elvis’s company he was always down to earth, similar to Muhammad, loving to give and help others. Sometimes when people are that great or popular they have arrogance and an ego, but Elvis and Muhammad did not. He used to play his records all the time..."

"Apparently Elvis heard my demos, because we were both on RCA, and Colonel Parker thought I should be introduced to him and maybe the two of us start working in a production-writer capacity. But it never came to pass. I would have loved to have worked with him. God, I would have adored it. He did send me a note once, which read "All the best, and have a great tour." I still have that note. He was a major hero of mine and I was probably stupid to think that having the same birthday as him meant something."

"We've drafted people who are far, far more important than he is."

"i) We must not condemn music which is not on a level as high as we’d like. A person who is listening to Elvis Presley in a five and ten is listening to a folk singer and is getting something from it. ii) The only thing he does like me is that he doesn´t come back for an encore. When he walks away the show is over."

"Like a bloated Elvis"

"I may consider filing a resolution for Indiana to honor Elvis, after all we should do something to recognize the fact that his last concert was here in Indiana."

"He was not quite a hillbilly, not yet a drugstore cowboy. He was a Southern — in that word's connotation of rebellion and slow, sweet charm."

"We became very good friends, leased homes in Bel Air and visited each other. And back then, in the early 60's of course, I had a wife, and four little children, he was not married, and would come over some afternoons unannounced and visit with me, my wife and my children. They would maybe jump out of the swimming pool, and come running up and get in his lap, and he would become soaking wet, you know, and I would say, 'Girls, don't do that'. And Elvis said, 'Oh, no, let them, let them'. And I knew that he wanted a family."