When Elvis woke up at Graceland, he liked a little company. Not a crowd. Just one person.
He’d send for his little girl, Lisa Marie, and she would come up the stairs to sit with him in his private rooms.
Years later, all grown up, Lisa Marie wrote about those mornings in her memoir, “From Here to the Great Unknown.” She didn’t get to finish it herself, so her own daughter, Riley Keough, completed it for her, and the book came out in 2024. One small thing from upstairs stayed with Lisa Marie for the rest of her life.
“He had a little plaque on the wall up there with a poem that always broke my heart,” she wrote.
Think about that. The most famous man in the world, waking up in a mansion full of gold records and awards, and the thing on his wall is a short poem on a plaque. The kind you might find hanging in any family home.
The poem was called “Why God Made Little Girls.”
If you’ve never heard it, here’s a reading of the whole thing, and it makes real quick sense why a daughter would never forget it.
A reading of the poem that hung on Elvis’s wall
It starts by imagining God dreaming up the whole world, the mountains and the oceans and the sky, and then deciding there was still one thing missing. I won’t spoil the rest. The reading does it far more justice than I ever could in writing.
What gets you is the picture of it. Elvis chose that to look at first thing every morning, in the most private corner of his home, long before anyone outside those walls ever knew it was there.
He was a daddy before he was anything else to Lisa Marie. The screaming fans and the stage lights were somebody else’s Elvis. Hers was a man who called her upstairs to sit beside him, with a little verse about little girls hanging where he could see it.
No wonder the memory stayed with her. No wonder it broke her heart a little every time.
Press play on the reading above and listen to the words Elvis kept close. Then tell us in the comments if you’d ever heard of this poem before today, because a lot of lifelong fans never had.