Riley Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. You may know her as an actress from “Daisy Jones & The Six” or the “Mad Max” movies. Her mom was Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s only child, so Riley grew up inside one of the most famous families in music even though she came along years after her grandfather was already gone.
In August 2022, Riley and her husband, the Australian stunt performer Ben Smith-Petersen, welcomed a baby girl, who was carried by a surrogate. For about a year they kept the news, and the baby’s name, almost completely to themselves.
Then Riley finally let it out in a Vanity Fair cover story in the summer of 2023.
The name she picked is a tribute. Really it’s two tributes folded into one little girl, and both of them point to people she’ll never get to meet.
Here’s Riley talking warmly about her family and finishing her mother’s memoir, which tells you how much the Presley story still means to her.
Riley Keough on her family and her mother’s memoir
The first name is Tupelo.
If you know your Elvis, you might already be grinning. Tupelo is the small town in Mississippi where Elvis was born on January 8, 1935, in a tiny two-room house his father built by hand. The family had almost nothing back then. That’s where the whole story started, long before Memphis and Graceland, and fans who’ve made the trip say the little house still stops you in your tracks.
Riley said she loved how quiet the word felt. Choosing Tupelo instead of something obvious like Memphis made it feel personal rather than showy. “It’s not really a well-known word or name in relation to my family,” she told ET. She’d picked it before the “Elvis” movie came out and the town’s name was suddenly everywhere.
Walk through that first little house in the clip below and you’ll see exactly what she was honoring.
A tour of Elvis’s two-room birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi
The second name is the tender one. It’s Storm.
Storm was the middle name of Riley’s younger brother, Benjamin Storm Keough. Ben passed away in 2020. He was the baby of the family, and by every account Riley adored him. Handing her daughter his name was her way of keeping him close.
So the little girl’s full name is Tupelo Storm. One half reaches all the way back to a two-room house in Mississippi and the man who was born there. The other half carries a brother who’s no longer here.
Both clips are waiting for you up above. Riley in her own words, and the quiet Tupelo house her daughter is named after. That’s a lot of family packed into two short words, and the video at the top lets you hear Riley tell the story herself.