In 1947, a new boy joined Mrs. Camp’s sixth-grade class at Milam (Junior High) School in Tupelo, Mississippi. He was quiet. He was thin. And he wore overalls, even on class picture day.
His name was Elvis Presley.
One of the girls in that room was Evelyn Carter. She’d later become Evelyn Helms, and decades after that, her daughter Marilyn Helms wrote down her mother’s memories of the boy from sixth grade. The piece was called “Mama Knowed Elvis.” It first came out in 2007, and Elvis Australia reposted it on Jul 15, 2026.
To be clear about who’s who, Evelyn was the classmate. Marilyn is her daughter, the one who put the story on paper.
The piece calls young Elvis “the shyish, skinny kid.” That’s not how most people picture him, but it fits a 12-year-old who’d just landed in a new class. Tupelo is where it all started for him, and this tour of the Elvis Presley Birthplace gives you a feel for the town he came from before that sixth-grade year.
A tour of Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi
Shy or not, the boy had one habit that every kid in Mrs. Camp’s room got to know very well.
It happened during activity period, and Elvis spent it the same way every single week.
“Every Friday in activity period he sang Old Shep and Frankie and Johnny.”
Same two songs, for a room full of classmates who’d heard them plenty.
So what did the class think of this future superstar’s weekly show? Evelyn didn’t sugarcoat it, even decades later.
“He sang all the blessed time and drove us all crazy.”
There it is. The kids who got a private concert from Elvis Presley every Friday mostly wished he’d give it a rest.
Anybody who ever sat in a classroom knows the type. Every class had a kid who just wouldn’t stop singing. In Tupelo in 1947, that kid happened to be Elvis.
Evelyn’s story has a second chapter, too, and it’s a sweet one.
Many years later, her mother had a suggestion. “You ought to look through those snapshots. I think there’s one in there of that Presley boy.”
Evelyn had forgotten all about the class picture. But she went looking, and she found it. There was the whole sixth-grade class. Elvis was at the end of the third row in his overalls, and Evelyn was standing near him. She gasped when she saw it was Elvis.
She knew just where it belonged: Graceland, Elvis’s home in Memphis, where fans come to tour the house. “So I sent a 5 x 7 to Graceland as a gift.”
On her next tour of Graceland, she got a surprise. The photo she’d mailed was hanging in the hall near the Trophy Room, according to the story her daughter wrote down in 2007.
It’s a funny thing to think about. The girl who couldn’t wait for that boy to stop singing ended up walking through his home and finding her own sixth-grade class on the wall.