Little Lisa Marie would do just about anything to make her daddy smile. And her daddy happened to be Elvis Presley.
In her memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown,” Lisa Marie looked back on those years at home with him. The book was finished by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie passed away, which makes her words feel even more precious.
One thing comes through on every page. She loved him, and she wanted to please him.
“I would do anything he wanted,” she wrote. “I would sing. I would dance. He always wanted me to sing. I didn’t love it, but I knew it made him happy, so I did it.”
Think about that. The girl who grew up to be a singer admitted she didn’t really enjoy it as a child. She just did it because her father lit up when she sang.
Riley read that very passage out loud on NPR’s Fresh Air, and hearing a granddaughter speak her mother’s memories about Elvis is something special.
Riley Keough reads her mother’s words about Elvis on the radio
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5148873
Give it a listen and you’ll catch the warmth in her voice.
Elvis didn’t just want her to sing whatever was on the radio. He asked her to sit down at the piano and learn one particular old song. It’s a gentle, centuries-old English tune that people still find beautiful today.
The song was “Greensleeves.”
“He wanted me to learn ‘Greensleeves’ on the piano, so I did,” Lisa Marie remembered.
If you’ve never really heard it, or you can’t quite place the melody, here’s the tune Elvis loved enough to ask his little girl to master.
The old English melody Elvis asked Lisa Marie to learn on piano
Imagine a small child picking out those soft notes while the most famous man in the world listens from across the room.
There’s more. In an earlier television interview Lisa Marie remembered how her dad’s love of music spilled right into the middle of the night. “He’d always wake me up to sing in the middle of the night, get on the table and sing,” she said, and she called him “a very exciting dad.”
She spent her whole life as Elvis’s daughter, and later became a singer in her own right. But some of her sweetest memories were the simple ones. A father who couldn’t get enough of hearing his little girl’s voice, and one old song he asked her to learn just for him.
Press play on both clips and let yourself travel back to those nights at home.