In the summer of 1975, at a run of shows in Asheville, North Carolina, Elvis was in one of his famously generous moods. He was pulling diamond rings off his own fingers and handing them out to band members and fans in the crowd.
Then he did something bigger. He lifted the black Gibson Dove guitar off his shoulder and passed it down to a young man named Mike Harris, standing near the front. As he handed it over, by the best accounts, he told him something close to this. Hold on to that. It’ll be valuable one day.
What Harris may not have fully taken in at that moment was which guitar he was now holding.
Elvis playing the same guitar at Aloha from Hawaii (1973)
That black Dove wasn’t just any guitar. It was the one Elvis played on his Aloha from Hawaii broadcast, the satellite concert that was beamed out to many millions of people around the world. The guitar in his hands that night in Honolulu was the same one he gave away two years later in Asheville.
Harris took the King at his word. He locked the guitar away in a bank vault and kept it there, turning down offers over the years, for more than four decades.
Elvis’s giveaway guitar heads to auction
In 2016, forty one years after Elvis pressed it into his hands, the guitar sold at auction for three hundred thirty four thousand dollars. Hold on to that, Elvis had told him. It’ll be valuable one day. He wasn’t wrong.