One of the very first things Elvis Presley did when the money started coming in was take care of the two people who had gone without for so long: his parents.
In 1956, barely famous, he bought Gladys and Vernon a house on Audubon Drive in Memphis. A year later he bought them something far grander, an eighteen-room mansion called Graceland. The family that had scraped by in a tiny home in Mississippi suddenly had cars in the driveway and more room than they knew what to do with. For Elvis, that was the best part of making it. He finally got to hand his mother and father the life they had only ever dreamed about.
Then came the kind of loss no amount of money can touch.
In the summer of 1958, Elvis was serving in the Army when word reached him that his mother was seriously ill. He was given emergency leave and rushed home to Memphis to be with her. On August 14, Gladys died of heart failure. She was only 46. Elvis was 23, and he was shattered. At her funeral he broke down completely. The young man who could now afford almost anything had just learned there were things no fortune on earth could buy back.
He never fully got over it. Gladys had been the center of his world, the person he most wanted to make proud, and years later he poured that ache into a quiet song about a mother and the roses she loved.
Mama Liked the Roses
Listen to it knowing who he was singing to. It is not a big dramatic number. It is a grown son remembering his mom, sung by a man who would have traded every record and every car to have her back.
Vernon stayed close to his son for almost twenty more years. He lived at Graceland and watched Elvis climb higher than anyone imagined, then watched his health slip away. On August 16, 1977, the hardest thing a parent can face happened to him. He stood at the funeral of his only child. Elvis was just 42. Vernon followed less than two years later, in 1979.
In the end the whole little Presley family that once struggled together was gone. Elvis spent his life trying to give his mother and father everything the world had denied them. The one gift he could never give them was more time, together, in the home he had worked so hard to buy.
Press play and hear the softest side of the King, a son who simply missed his mother.