Long before Graceland became one of the most famous homes in America, long before screaming crowds surrounded Elvis Presley and long before rock ’n’ roll changed popular culture, the Presley family story began with two young people in rural Mississippi. On June 17, 1933, Gladys Love Smith and Vernon Elvis Presley were married. Gladys was 21. Vernon was only 17.
Because Vernon was underage, the couple could not follow the usual path to marriage without parental permission. Graceland’s account says they changed their ages on the marriage licence, listing Vernon as 22 and Gladys as 19. They were married by a Pontotoc County circuit clerk after reportedly travelling away from the part of Tupelo where people knew them. It was an uncertain beginning, but it created the family at the heart of one of music’s greatest stories.
Elvis Presley, A Boy From Tupelo
The first video returns to the world Elvis came from, before the record contracts, Hollywood films and television appearances. It places the Presley story in Tupelo and shows how poverty, church music and the sounds of the American South surrounded Elvis during his earliest years.
Less than two years after Vernon and Gladys married, their lives changed forever. Shortly before dawn on January 8, 1935, Gladys gave birth to twin boys inside the small two-room house Vernon had helped build in Tupelo. The first child, Jessie Garon Presley, was stillborn. Elvis Aaron Presley survived and would grow up as the couple’s only child.
The loss of Jessie remained part of the family’s emotional history, while Elvis became the centre of Vernon and Gladys’s world. Money was scarce and the family frequently moved between homes in Tupelo. Vernon accepted whatever work he could find, while Gladys protected Elvis with extraordinary devotion. In November 1948, the three of them moved to Memphis in search of better employment and a more secure future. Music heard in church, on the radio and around Memphis soon gave Elvis the ingredients for a sound unlike anything his parents could have imagined.
Rare 1956 Interview With Gladys and Vernon Presley
The second video brings the story forward to September 26, 1956. Elvis had returned to Tupelo as an international sensation and performed at the same fairgrounds where he had sung as a child. During the interview, Gladys and Vernon discuss their favourite Elvis songs. Their answers are simple and affectionate, offering a rare opportunity to hear the two people who knew Elvis before the fame speak about the performer the world had suddenly discovered.
That homecoming revealed how dramatically the family’s circumstances had changed. Only a few years earlier, Elvis had been helping his parents survive. By 1956, he was purchasing them a house on Audubon Drive. In 1957, he bought Graceland and invited Vernon and Gladys to live there with him. For Elvis, success was never only about records or applause. It was also about fulfilling his determination to give his parents the comfort they had never enjoyed during his childhood.
The family’s happiness at Graceland did not last long. Gladys became seriously ill while Elvis was serving in the United States Army and died on August 14, 1958, at only 46. Elvis was 23. Her death devastated him and removed the person many believed had been his closest emotional companion. Vernon survived both his wife and his son, later helping oversee Elvis’s affairs until his own death in 1979. Today, Vernon, Gladys and Elvis are buried together in Graceland’s Meditation Garden.