The Man Who Wouldn’t Be King
Brutal clouds had banished all gentle light from the night sky. Marching across the firmament from the west, rows of billowing black had marshaled on the eastern horizon since the sun had set over Tupelo, Mississippi. Thunder threatened as hours passed, the continuous barrage following unearthly flashes arrogantly defying the inevitable dawn.
Her pains had started as the storm was forming. By midnight cries of anguish exploded with each surge of agony. Her frail form writhed on the straw-filled mattress in the back room of a shotgun shack as her young husband paced outside the door. This was her first pregnancy, a first child by a first love. It would be her last, but she did not know that as she bore down against the tearing pain in a final heroic effort. Her wail shifted octave and key, as just before sunrise a tiny son was pulled from her body, stillborn. Her man rushed to her side, gathering into his arms the inconsolable woman-child with long, dark hair and pale eyes. Together they wept bitterly, searching for a prayer that would not be found.
All at once, she convulsed in remembered pain. It came again, wave after wave. From somewhere deep within the primordial power of womanhood, just enough strength returned to her. For indeed, there was another. Lightning slashed the darkness as thunder applauded. A second son emerged. Though small, his wail echoed the grief and joy mingled in the tears of the weary girl as she held him to her heart. His voice possessed a melodious mystery that would remain a part of him beyond death.
While sunrise was still just a daydream lurking on the horizon on a Sunday morning in early October, my darling and I set out for the land of the Delta Blues. Joe and I spent most of the day racing across the wide flat earth of Illinois trying to outrun the rain. Along the way we listened to blues and jazz, but mostly to Elvis’ musical tales of living in heartbreak, rocking the jailhouse, and grieving tender love lost to suspicion. Scattered throughout the playlist were songs to comfort the poor and forgotten of the earth, good news about a brighter day in a better place.
An immense pyramid, alternately brooding then glittering in the fading and fickle sunset, watched enigmatically as we crossed the Old Blue for the last time before making the turn off the bridge toward Union Street. A delta is where a river meets the tide. The capstone of the Mississippi Delta Basin, Memphis is named for the ancient city at the estuary of another great river in the land of the pharaohs. The Blues City presides over her own valley of kings. The exact location of the mouth of the Big Muddy supposedly rests beneath a carved marble fountain in the heart of the legendary Peabody Hotel, home to us during our stay.
Each night in the lobby lounge a baby grand piano loosened the threads of the veil twixt past and present. Jazz standards of Porter and Mercer sparkled in the air above the hum of quiet conversations. The elegance of an era past flirted like a southern debutante, disappearing around each art deco corner on the mezzanine. How many dreams had floated up to the vaulted, carved-wood ceilings to flutter in the glow of the stained glass skylights like so many wistful prayers?
Once upon a time a young hopeful nervously shifted in his seat, as he pushed back an insistent lock of hair stubbornly curled above his right eye. Born to a poor couple in a shack in neighboring Mississippi, he had been raised in the heady atmosphere of the unseen realm that is the soul of Memphis, where a tumultuous love affair between gospel and blues blows hot and cool. He felt out of place in the refined elegance of the Peabody Hotel even as he longed to become a part of it, to conquer it. Signing his first contract in a career that would ultimately find him at the very top of an emerging paradigm shift in music, did he know how far his dreams would take him?
Graceland. It is not the stately refinement of the pre-WWII era architecture and estate that impresses. Not the mid-century décor ranging from regal to mod to exotic, even eccentric. No, something else, something ephemeral permeates the grounds. One is surrounded by a sense of lives lived fully, yet incompletely. There is simple beauty, of course, in the barn and the hills with horses grazing in a meadow fenced all around as much as if to keep something out as to keep them safely within. The pool sits jewel-like above the Meditation garden. The grasping for something beyond the fleeting trappings that space and time can offer is palpable there, a poignant, desperate search for faith that something more real exists, someday, somewhere. The generations rest there, waiting…
A name on one of the bronze grave markers is said to be misspelled. If so, it is an eerily incongruent note in a symphony of attention to every detail. Debates rage among the faithful, mocked by the cynical, over the truth concerning Elvis’ middle name, and, if the marker is wrong, whether it is an error or a sign. Many simply cannot bear what became of the boy from Tupelo, who was gone too soon. They cannot quite accept the irrevocable changes to a world they thought they knew, the aging of their own frail vessels, their own unfinished business and unrealized dreams.
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose the soul where the music lived since his first cry of loss and victory on that stormy night? Surely the King of Rock and Roll gained all one could ever want: riches, fame, the adoration of millions, across generations, even long after he left the stage for the last time. The shy boy, on a spiritual quest from the womb, mourning the loss of his twin before he could even speak, seemed to vanish in the shadow of an image others created and still others worshipped. Or did he?
Elvis burst onto the music scene like the rockets’ red glare. Unlike other icons of Rock ‘n’ Roll, he was pure Americana, a working-class fusion of blackness and whiteness. Such was the summary estimation of none other than the King of Blues, the inimitable B.B. King, commenting in an interview on the unusual young man who he saw as a perfect storm of talent and presence. Painfully shy, devastatingly handsome, something in him would cut loose when he performed as if he was singing for the music alone, whether swinging hips and guitar to make the girls swoon, or jamming gospel tunes late one night in early December with the rest of the million-dollar quartet. Sam Phillips saw it, too. Elvis embodied the elixir he had sought like a grail in his search for a new sound. It’s why he pressed play that night.
Our day spent at Graceland could only end with a visit to Lansky’s upon arriving back at the hotel. As Joe was fitted for a pair of blue suede shoes, the young sales clerk regaled us of the lore and legend surrounding Elvis Presley and the Clothiers to the “King.” Guitars once belonging to others of musical renown who’d come to pay homage filled every available space on the walls throughout the store at the Peabody. A full-length coat was prominently displayed in a case on a center column. The young man told us it had been dropped off for repair in the summer of 1977 but had never been picked up. He went on to explain that all through the years despite fame and fortune, the “king” had never stopped calling Mr. Lansky, “Sir.”
Returning to the store a day later to pick up a keyboard patterned belt Joe had his eye on, we were waited on by a lovely woman impeccably turned out from head to toe. Her conversation reflected a formality tempered by easy graciousness that typifies southern manners. Surrounded by the memorabilia her comments turned to Elvis. “He was always humble, always. He never lost that,” she observed. Her lovely face grew misty for a moment. “For a time there, he even brought together black and white, you know.”
Presley’s music appealed to the lower classes, and to the kids who would tune in long after they were supposed to be asleep, listening to Dewey Phillips play the forbidden music they loved, black blues. Elvis and what he represented was despised and mocked by an elite class who feared the encroachment on their neatly established and nicely maintained status quo. A balanced order, but tipped in whose favor?
The ghosts of Graceland still haunting my thoughts, the next day we set out for memorials to other kings: The birth of blues, the death of one of freedom’s heroes. Sadly those locales were closed but as serendipity coaxed us along the sidewalk in front of the Museum of Soul and Rock and Roll, we met a thin reed of a fellow down on his luck. One man to another, Joe slipped him a handshake laced with a little help. Then this sweet, humble guy I married put an arm around the stranger who was wiping his eyes while trying to cover his embarrassment over missing front teeth. Joe bowed his head to offer a word of prayerful encouragement. As we walked away, my sweetheart took my hand. “I think he’s the reason we came here,” he said simply, just above a whisper.
Storm clouds piled up overhead as we hurried back to our hotel. Raindrops thick as syrup had us soaked through just as we had the Peabody in view. A hot shower never felt so good. By the time we caught our ride to the restaurant for our anniversary date, the weather had cleared, leaving the air sultry as the dusk arrived all dolled up in indigo velvet. We dined at Itta Bena, named for the birthplace of the “King” of blues. A choice jewel perched up above the B.B. King Blues Club on Beale Street, the bistro’s fare freshly imagined local culinary heritage. As we walked back to the hotel, music began to spill out of the doors of the clubs that lined the lane W. C. Handy had made famous. Blue notes crooned to a shy slip of a moon peeking demurely from behind a cloud.
“There must be lights burning brighter somewhere
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue
If I can dream of a better land, where all my brothers walk hand in hand
Tell me why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true, oh why”
Our last morning led us to the memorial where a King of another sort had died in pursuit of a dream big enough for a nation’s future, grounded in the promissory note of America’s past. His start as a minister of the gospel led him on a mission to save the soul of his country with a message of freedom, justice and peace for all. Gazing with a clenched heart at that perennial wreath of red and white hung on door 306, I recalled the song sung by the boy born during that long ago storm. “If I Can Dream,” was performed during the 1968 Comeback Special only a couple of months after the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murder. Elvis had dedicated it to this revered martyr to the civil rights movement whom he had so admired.
Some say that Elvis’ star was already fading when Act III of his career brought down the final curtain. To many of his fans, he lives on, in the memories and the music, and in the tributes of myriad impersonators. His former and only wife, when asked what he may have gone on to do in later life, said he would always be in music, maybe gospel, maybe even a little preaching.
Of course, there are theories that he is still alive, that he staged an escape to obscurity. The purveyors of these alternate realities say he arranged it all while providing a secure financial legacy for his cherished, only child. Some claim he is now a singing preacher who emerged on the internet in the last decade or so, with a small congregation in Arkansas. Could he have cheated death for a season by feigning it? Would he have given up all he obtained at the cost of so much of himself? Could he have done so in the end, with so many depending upon him for so much?
As to the sightings and the stories, I remain an agnostic. Instead, I find my imagination captivated by the enigma of a humble, awkward boy, his gift slung over his shoulder, guided by an ambitious dream as he listened to, and studied the masters of Beale Street. Part of me would love to think he is still out there somewhere in blissful anonymity living out the simple truth that there is no place quite like home. Either way, as the Delta faded in the rearview mirror like a vision in the mist, I hoped that he had found the peace that passes earthly understanding.
The dream began in a fever. Lightning flashes swept the final concert venue as music thundered. Elvis was in the building. The fanatics and the curious of all ages roared in response to the thunderstorm massing on the stage. They had waited long hours to get inside, waiting still longer in their seats, undaunted by vendors hawking their tawdry memorabilia. The anticipation grew with the waiting until it was an electrical current searching for a lightning rod.
Like a sunburst through clouds on the horizon, the still reigning monarch of rock ‘n’ roll dawned, clad in white and gold, Apollo’s star emblazoned across his chest and shoulders. Music fought to be heard above the screams of his devotees. As a familiar melody broke through the cheering, wave after wave of ovation crashed against the shores of the platform that held the object of their adoration. They held their collective breath for one split second as he lifted the mic to his lips. As the intro to the first song cascaded, from somewhere across the ocean of faces a solitary voice lifted the highest praise.
“Elvis! We love you! You are the King!” Her tear-stained cry of joy, almost a sob, could not be contained.
The sovereign raised a bejeweled hand calling a halt to the proceedings. The band fell silent. The Inspirations looked on uncertainly. The crowd was still as stone, stunned and waiting.
“No.” He spoke with humble authority. “No. I am not. That title belongs to only One…”
