Everybody knows Graceland. It’s the Memphis mansion where Elvis Presley lived for twenty years, and more than half a million people walk through it every year. But Graceland wasn’t the first house Elvis bought. That one came a year earlier, and it was for his parents.
In early 1956 the money finally started coming in. Elvis was 21. His mother, Gladys, and his father, Vernon, had spent years scraping by in small rented rooms and public housing. So the first thing their son did with real money was get them out of there.
On March 3, 1956, he put $500 down on a ranch house at 1034 Audubon Drive, in a nice Memphis neighborhood. Nine days later, on March 12, he bought it outright from the Welsh Plywood Corporation. The place had been built in 1954. Four bedrooms, two and a half baths, plus a swimming pool out back and a fence with little music notes worked into it.
Things moved fast that spring. His first album landed in stores about a week and a half after he signed for the house. He lived there while he filmed his first movie, “Love Me Tender.” Fans found the address almost right away and started turning up on the lawn.
One story from the block still makes people smile. A neighbor’s young son spotted a business opportunity and began charging fans a dollar to park in the family driveway. It worked great right up until his own dad came home from work and had nowhere to pull in.
Here’s a look inside the actual house, room by room, as it stands today.
A walk through the rooms of Elvis’s Audubon Drive home
When Elvis signed those papers in 1956, the whole house cost him $29,500. Not the down payment. The whole thing, pool and all.
Now jump ahead fifty years. In May 2006 the house went up for auction, and a bid for it reached $905,100. The famous psychic Uri Geller was among the bidders and called it “a piece of history.” In the end the home went to Mike Curb, a record man and former California official, for right around a million dollars. That’s about thirty-four times what Elvis paid, for the very same house.
The Presleys only stayed about a year. By 1957 Elvis had bought the much bigger Graceland and moved the family there for good. These days the Audubon Drive house is looked after by Rhodes College and isn’t open for tours, so footage like this is the closest most of us will get to walking through it.
If you want the full walkthrough, this longer tour covers the whole house and the yard.
The extended tour of 1034 Audubon Drive
It’s easy to drive past a plain brick ranch house on the way to the Graceland gates. But this was the one Elvis picked first, with his very first big paycheck, for the two people who raised him.