From the outside, Graceland looked like a house that never got quiet. But Nancy Rooks saw the afternoons when it did.
Nancy was hired at Graceland in May 1967 as Elvis’s cook. She spent years in that kitchen, and later she put her memories into a book called “Inside Graceland.” She also co-wrote “The Presley Family Cookbook.”
Years ago she sat down with interviewer Gary James for the music website Classic Bands. Elvis Australia, a long-running fan site, shared that interview again in 2023. At one point James asked her a simple question. Did she ever hear Elvis singing around the house?
She had a story ready.
Nancy said Elvis came to her one afternoon and told her he was lonely. He asked her to sit with him and talk for a while.
Talking turned into something else. Elvis wanted to sing, and he wanted her to sing with him. Nancy was honest about her voice.
“You know I can’t sing, but I’ll try to help you,” she told him.
So Elvis sat down at the organ and started to play. The two of them sang “Precious Lord Take My Hand And Lead Me On,” the old gospel hymn. Neither one knew every word, and Nancy said that didn’t slow them down a bit.
“We’d just hum through,” she said.
There they were, Elvis Presley at the organ and the woman who cooked his meals beside him, working through a hymn and humming whenever the words ran out.
Then somebody walked in.
It was one of Elvis’s bodyguards. Nancy believed it was Billy Smith, Elvis’s cousin. He took one look at the two of them and asked, “What are you doing?”
Elvis didn’t miss a beat.
“What you think we’re doing? We’re singing!”
That did it. “The bodyguard and Elvis, and we all started laughing,” Nancy remembered.
Nobody filmed that afternoon, but you can hear how Elvis sang the very same hymn on record in this official audio of his own version.
Elvis’s own recording of the hymn he sang with Nancy
It wasn’t the only time Nancy heard him sing at home. When James asked about it, she said Elvis would sit down in the music room at Graceland and sing another hymn he loved.
“He would play in the music room and sing “How Great Thou Art”,” she said.
Gospel was the music Elvis loved most, and at Graceland he sang it with no crowd around at all. On that lonely afternoon, his only singing partner was a cook who swore she couldn’t carry a tune.
Nancy also gave Elvis credit for something smaller that stuck with her. She told the interviewer that “he learned me how to say thank-you.” It was a habit he had picked up from his own mother, Gladys.
So the next time you hear Elvis sing that old hymn, think of Nancy at the organ next to him, humming her way through the verses she didn’t know.