Billy Smith was Elvis Presley’s first cousin. His father Travis was the brother of Gladys, Elvis’s mother, and the two families had grown up poor together in Mississippi and Memphis. So when Elvis bought Graceland and moved his family in, he brought the Smiths along too. Billy and his brother Bobby, both still young teenagers, got a house of their own right behind the big mansion.
Think about what that must have felt like. One year you’re a boy with next to nothing. The next you’re living on the grounds of the most famous home in Memphis, and your cousin is the biggest star in the country.
Billy told the whole story years later to the Elvis Information Network, in a long interview from January 2006. He didn’t lead with the cars or the parties or the money. He led with the little things Elvis did to make two poor kids feel like they belonged.
Before you hear what Elvis did for the boys, here’s the Graceland they walked into, filmed by Elvis himself in 1957.
Home footage of Graceland and Elvis’s family in 1957
Soon after the boys moved in, Elvis took them shopping, and he didn’t stop at a shirt or two.
“I remember once Elvis took us shopping and brought us a complete wardrobe shortly after we moved to Graceland,” Billy remembered. “Can you imagine how we felt living in a place like that?”
For kids who’d worn hand-me-downs their whole lives, a complete wardrobe was never really about the clothes. It was Elvis telling them they weren’t guests and they weren’t charity. They were his, and they’d be looked after.
Years later, asked what he remembered best about his famous cousin after all that time at his side, Billy didn’t bring up the wardrobe or the house at all. His answer was simple.
“He always told me that he loved me.”
Billy had known Elvis since long before any of the fame. There’s a family story about Elvis once fishing him out of a garbage can he’d tumbled into headfirst as a tiny boy. That was the cousin they knew, the one who looked out for the smaller kids years before the rest of the world ever heard his name.
And he stayed close right to the end. Billy worked alongside Elvis all the way through 1977, one of the small handful of people who got to know the private man and not just the performer on stage.
No camera was there for the shopping trip, and there’s no film of it. What we do have are the photos of Billy and Elvis together at Graceland over the years, and home movies like the one above that show the world those two boys suddenly found themselves living in. Watch it and you get a real sense of what a long way they’d come.