Long before Elvis Presley was born, his parents already had a remarkable story of their own.
Vernon Presley was only 17 when he fell in love with 21-year-old Gladys Smith. The two had met through church in Mississippi and quickly decided they wanted to marry.
There was one problem: Vernon was too young.
So the couple eloped. On their marriage license, Vernon claimed he was 22, while Gladys gave her age as 19. They were married by a Pontotoc County circuit clerk in Verona, Mississippi, on June 17, 1933.
Their early married life looked nothing like the world their son would eventually inhabit.
Vernon took whatever work he could find, including farming, WPA work and driving a delivery truck. The family had very little money, and Vernon later admitted there were periods when Gladys walked to work because they could not even spare the carfare.
With help from his father and brother, Vernon built the small two-room house in East Tupelo where Gladys would give birth to twins on January 8, 1935. Jesse Garon was stillborn, while his twin brother Elvis survived.
Neither parent could possibly have imagined what that little boy would become.
By 1956, Elvis had exploded into national fame. Suddenly, the poor Mississippi family was being interviewed by reporters trying to understand where this strange new superstar had come from.
One especially valuable recording survives from Elvis’s triumphant return to Tupelo on September 26, 1956. Radio station WTUP interviewed Vernon and Gladys at the Mississippi-Alabama Fairgrounds as their son returned to perform in the town where he had grown up.
Rare 1956 Interview With Vernon and Gladys Presley
In another extensive 1956 interview, Vernon openly remembered their poverty, while Gladys talked proudly about how they had tried to raise Elvis with good manners, faith and respect for others.
The contrast is extraordinary.
In 1933, Vernon and Gladys were two young Mississippians who had to falsify their ages and elope just to marry.
Twenty-three years later, reporters were sitting down with them because the child they had raised with almost nothing had become Elvis Presley.
Before Graceland, Cadillacs and the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, the Presley story began with a 17-year-old boy and a 21-year-old woman determined simply to be together.