On 27 September 1957, Elvis Presley drove back to the town where he was born and played a free concert.
He was 22 and, by then, America’s most famous young man. He grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a two-room house his father built, in a family so poor they once lost the house entirely. He had left for Memphis at 13. Now he was coming back.
He made the drive with his girlfriend Anita Wood, his parents, and a few friends. And the local paper prepared the town for it with a line that has stuck ever since, urging everybody to give him a warm welcome and calling him “the best ambassador any town could have.”
Elvis Presley live in Tupelo 1957 HD
The show was at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show fairgrounds — the same fairgrounds where, at ten years old, a small boy in glasses had stood on a chair to reach a microphone and come fifth in a talent contest.
Roughly 12,000 people turned out. He performed in the famous gold lamé jacket, backed by a stripped-down band that included his drummer, D.J. Fontana, and guitarist Hank Garland.
Tour of Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi
And here is the point of the whole evening. Elvis took nothing. Every penny raised — a little over $14,000, a serious amount of money in 1957 — was earmarked for a youth recreation center to be built in East Tupelo, near the house where he was born. He wanted local children to have somewhere to go. Nobody asked him to do it.
Then came the frustrating part. Years passed, and nothing was built. The money sat there. So in February 1961, Elvis picked up the phone to the Mayor of Tupelo and, according to a local historian, told him that if dirt wasn’t moving by the end of the month, there was going to be hell to pay.
It got built.
And there is a perfect ending to it. That youth center still stands — but it is not a youth center anymore. It is the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum, standing a few steps from the house he was born in.