Look up almost any picture of Gladys Presley and you tend to see the same thing. A quiet woman with tired eyes, not quite smiling, standing a little behind her famous son. For most people that is the only Gladys they know. Elvis loved her more than anyone on earth, and in the photos she always seems to be carrying something heavy.
Her own family said the woman in those pictures wasn’t the Gladys they grew up with.
Billy Smith would know. He was the son of Gladys’s brother Travis, which made him Elvis’s cousin, and he spent a lot of time around her from the time he was a boy. When he was asked about her years later, the Gladys he described sounded like a whole different person.
“I actually remember her as an outgoing and fun loving person. . . She was always laughing & carrying on.”
Graceland’s own team put together a warm tribute to Elvis’s mother, with family photos and stories about the woman behind the quiet pictures.
Graceland tells the story of Elvis’s mother Gladys
So why do the photos look the way they do? Billy said the sad ones came later, from her health and her worry about Elvis going into the Army. The camera caught her in hard seasons. It missed the years when she was young and full of life.
For that side of her you have to go to Harold Loyd. He was the son of Gladys’s sister Rhetha, another of Elvis’s first cousins, and he spent years gathering up the family’s memories. Harold said that as girls Gladys and his mother would slip off to the dance hall in Tupelo, Mississippi, the little town where Elvis was born, and that Gladys could do just about every dance there was, from the Charleston to the Lindy Hop and the Jitterbug.
Then he mentioned something most fans have never heard.
“Not many people know this, but Aunt Gladys was a singer too.”
Her voice, Harold said, was just amazing. And when you asked him what she loved most of all, the answer was simple.
“But her favorite thing was just to sing and dance.”
A mother who loved nothing better than to sing and dance, and a son who grew up to be the most famous singer and dancer in the world. Nobody can say for sure that she taught him. But now we know where he may have got it.
Elvis loved his mama so much that he filmed her himself. This is his own home movie of Gladys and Vernon at Graceland in 1957, a few happy minutes of the real woman instead of a posed photo.
Elvis’s home movie of Gladys at Graceland, 1957
Harold also remembered how she looked after the people she loved. As a young woman she took odd jobs and used what she earned to sew clothes for her brothers and sisters. That was Gladys long before any camera found her, laughing and dancing and singing in a small Mississippi town. The sad photos are real. They just never caught that part of her.