In September 1956, New York newspaper columnist Sidney Fields traveled to Memphis. Elvis Presley was the most talked-about young man in America, and half the country believed he was a menace—vulgar, dangerous, a bad influence on teenagers.
Fields wanted to find out who he really was. But Elvis was away in Hollywood filming Love Me Tender.
So Fields went and asked his parents.
What Gladys Presley told him was printed in the New York Daily Mirror, and it is still the plainest description of Elvis anybody ever gave. She was not trying to defend him or make a headline. She just said it.
“He was raised well. He never lies. He doesn’t swear. I never heard him call anyone anything except ‘Mister’ and ‘Sir.'”
Interviews Vernon & Gladys Presley (Sep 26, 1956) | Elvis History
Then she added the line that explains how the family actually lived. “And we taught him if he can’t help a man out of a ditch, the least he can do is say a prayer for him, and the Lord will never let him fall.”
That sentence came from real hardship. Vernon and Gladys raised Elvis in a two-room house in Tupelo, Mississippi. When Elvis was three, Vernon was sent to prison, and the family lost that house. There were years when they relied on neighbors and their church to get by. They had nothing to give him except how to behave — so that is what they gave him.
Their church was the Assembly of God, where the gospel music moved Elvis more than anything else he ever heard. It stayed his favorite music his whole life. The only three Grammys he ever won were all for gospel.
Elvis – How Great Thou Art (1972)
And the manners did not disappear with the money. Staff at Graceland remembered him thanking them by name. People who met him — fans, nurses, other stars — kept describing the same thing. Mary Tyler Moore said he called her “ma’am” even though she was younger than him.
The world saw the jumpsuits. The people who met him kept talking about how polite he was.
Gladys died two years after that interview. The boy she described never really went away.