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In Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, one of the most admired Southern historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society - indeed, American society - in the second half of the 20th century.
Author of The Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and Southern History, Joel Williamson is a renowned historian known for his inimitable and compelling narrative style. In this tour de force biography, he captures the drama of Presley's career set against the popular culture of the post-World War II South.
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley was a contradiction, flamboyant in pegged black pants with pink stripes, yet soft-spoken, respectfully courting a decent girl from church. Then he wandered into Sun Records, and everything changed. "I was scared stiff," Elvis recalled about his first time performing on stage. "Everyone was hollering and I didn't know what they were hollering at." Girls did the hollering - at his snarl and swagger. Williamson calls it "the revolution of the Elvis girls." His fans lived in an intense moment, this generation raised by their mothers while their fathers were away at war, whose lives were transformed by an exodus from the countryside to Southern cities, a postwar culture of consumption, and a striving for upward mobility. They came of age in the era of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, which turned high schools into battlegrounds of race. Explosively, white girls went wild for a white man inspired by and singing black music while "wiggling" erotically. Elvis, Williamson argues, gave his female fans an opportunity to break free from straitlaced Southern society and express themselves sexually, if only for a few hours at a time.
- Sales Rank: #30526 in Audible
- Published on: 2015-01-21
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 834 minutes
Most helpful customer reviews
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Great Story Untold
By Elisa 20
I wish I could write a more favorable review. I can tell a lot of research went into this book and the writer, Joel Williamson, does a good job with organization and transitions (with one exception, below). The Vine copy is without any photos, not even on the cover--and no space where they would be placed--so it is hard to gauge the effect of photos when combined with text. That said, to paraphrase Don Rumsfeld, you review the book you have, not the book you wish you had.
It's too bad this book is good in some things but misses so much that I wish it had. There seems so little about Elvis Presley in it, who he really was, what he wanted, what he felt, his feelings and ideas about the music. It seems so disproportionately about him getting female audiences worked up on stage and then going to bed with a lot of women off-stage, but it's just not that interesting to read about. I didn't see any original research or even much from others who were important to him (women, roadies, musicians, Sam Phillips, Colonel Parker...anyone).
And I wish this book told me much more about the music and how Elvis brought something new into it all. Somewhere, too, (not just an occasional glimpse) would be the corrosive influence of Colonel Parker, his manager, who epitomized the bad side of the American Dream--the greed--and shaped Elvis to be a cash cow first, an artist...somewhere much further down the line. Williamson says that "Elvis didn't record anything good after 1958" but he doesn't really go into why that was the case, or how his manager didn't care at all about promoting his talent, just about getting his share of the easy money. That was such a tragedy.
I liked the observation that Elvis' Mississippi area had given America its "greatest entertainer (Presley), greatest playwright (Tennessee Williams) and greatest writer (William Faulkner)." And Williamson's emphasis on the influence of the South on Elvis is interesting, too, particularly for those of us unfamiliar with it, especially in the turbulent times of the 1950s and 1960s. But there's not enough about musical influences and styles, about playing and performing as a group and then as a solo artist. And there's too much, for me, even in the early years about all the audiences and their sexual desires and all the women that Elvis was bedding. I'm sure it could be written about interestingly, but I just found it to be too much and not interestingly written about at all. More to the point, the writing in general seems very textbook-ish in style, without bringing in a lot of facts or insights. There aren't a lot of quotes and there's not a lot of dialogue. Those things help liven up a biography. Here, I didn't really have a sense of anyone as a real person.
For a biography, that leaves a stilted feeling and one that was compounded (for me, at least) by not getting a feeling of what ELVIS felt and thought throughout his life. There's a narrative of events (including an odd chronological jump for several chapters, mid-story back to Elvis' childhood. One minute you're reading about him going into the Army in the late 1950s and the next, his father is talking about the war--but it's WWII and we're reading about Elvis' childhood. (Again, not much idea what he was thinking and feeling throughout it.)
Also, not to be unkind, but the Foreword (by the reader at the publishing house, Oxford University Press) does Williamson no favors in my opinion. This introduction dwells extensively on the idea of Presley's sexual appeal to his female audiences, far more than I think the book itself did, although that is a recurrent theme. That is certainly here, but there's more to Williamson's narrative than that, or than the well-known problems with drugs, weight and a group of hangers-on that didn't have his interests at heart.
I've always felt Presley was such a talent, not only his singing but the acting talent was there, too. Here, it was so sad how--just like Marilyn Monroe, another underrated actor with sex appeal--he kept trying to fight for good acting roles. (Unfortunately, once again, Colonel Parker gets away without the blame for destroying Presley's career that I think he should get. He was greedy and whatever could make him money--like Elvis starring in another cheesy beach musical--was what he cared about. If he had been interested in music--that great jazzy-bluesy-rockabilly music that Elvis started with and could have kept going into his "rock" and "gospel" years--"Elvis the Musician" wouldn't have done most of his best work by 1958. Similarly, if Tom Parker hadn't been motivated by personal gain, and had fought for good roles for him and shunned the cheap money-makers, Elvis might have been known as a great singer-actor, like Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby of a different generation. He clearly had talent far beyond his peers in movies (Fabian, Pat Boone, Ricky Nelson, et. al). Unlike them, Elvis could really act.
I suspect the photographs will help (there should be a lot of them since their absence cuts the book's length by 50 pages), but without seeing them, I have no way to know. Judging on the text alone, which is what I have, I'd say this is well-researched and organized but pretty dry stuff with lots of mention about women he slept with, and not nearly enough about his personality, feelings, and most of all, his music.
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
Title ought to be "Elvis P***ed On My Wheaties"
By Suzanne Davenport
The book is very well-written, meticulously researched, and definitely benefits from Williamson’s knowledge of how Southerners lived and thought during Elvis’s lifetime. The first half takes an objective, careful and thoughtful look at Elvis’s background, upbringing and early career. Williamson provides very interesting insights on why Elvis was considered vulgar, why the girls screamed and cried when he stepped on stage, and the intensity of their love for him, in terms of Southern culture.
Then it takes a turn, and the author loses his objectivity. Apparently, around the time Elvis makes his first television appearances, something about him turns Williamson off in a really big way and he never gets over it. I don’t question his facts, but he finds fault with just about everything Elvis does; even good things have a sinister motive.
In this book, Elvis is a talented singer who deserves his fame from 1955 to 1958, but rides that early fame for the rest of his useless life to a well-deserved early grave of his own making. He’s self-centered, insecure, cruel, thoughtless, ridiculous with money, inconsiderate with women, self-indulgent, a bad dresser, a terrible husband, a distant father, and not too bright.
No question, Elvis Presley was at least some, if not all, of those things, but I truly wish the author had stayed on track with his original theme – how the Southern culture influenced his behavior, actions, and decisions, even the bad stuff – rather than spend the last half of the book Elvis-bashing. That would have been worth reading.
32 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
"...He's Just a Great Big Beautiful Hunk of Forbidden Fruit ..."
By delicateflower152
If you number yourself among the legion of Elvis fans and remember "The King" in his heyday, "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" may shatter your image of that man. If you remember Elvis Presley in his later years and harbor feelings of repulsion and disgust, Joel Williamson's biography of that legendary entertainer may help explain Elvis' actions and may evoke your sympathy for the man.
"Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" provides a perspective on his life and times that is not a common one. In this more scholarly work, Williamson integrates Elvis' responses and actions with the cultural mores and attitudes of the South and the social changes occurring in the post World War II United States to give readers a more balanced view of Presley's rise and fall. The influence of African-American musicians and Presley's own impoverished upbringing are explored, as are the backgrounds and influence of his parents. Joel Williamson does not gloss over the more seamy aspects of Elvis' early life, nor does Williamson attempt to glorify or denigrate Presley's later actions. Williamson does delineate the importance of Elvis Presley's music and attitudes with respect to the changing of attitudes toward race. He writes "...Elvis brought blacks and whites together as if there were no race line in America. He also significantly melted the lines that might divide generations and genders, and religions and classes in the nation ..."
Through the years and as Joel Williamson follows the progression of Elvis' life and career, the reader of "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" begins to see a deterioration in both Elvis' morals, his music, and the type of individuals comprising the entourage with which he surrounded himself. Elvis exuded a sexual magnetism and energy, Ed Sullivan may have been prescient with his initial comments about and impression of Elvis. Further, in the time before social media, fans that elevated Elvis to "star" status were unaware of - what would be termed today - his sexual addiction and pedophilia. In "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life", Joel Williamson does not shy away from Elvis' darker propensities. Yet Williamson relates this information in a manner that is nonjudgmental and dispassionate.
The advanced reader's copy of "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" had no photographs included on its pages. However, since it contains 333 pages and the publisher's edition 384, the difference is likely the addition of photographs. These should enhance the text markedly and add to the reader's appreciation of the scholarship that producing this work required.
"Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" is a work of which Joel Williamson can be proud. Readers who remember the youthful Elvis Presley and his music may find the pages of this book reveal facts and information that is distasteful and harsh. Readers who remember only the older, declining Elvis and his glitzy Vegas shows may find "Elvis Presley: A Southern Life" affirms their negative view of "The King". Regardless of the view to which you ascribe, you will find Joel Williamson's discerning biography of Elvis Presley well-written and one that handles some difficult subjects with skill and discretion. The combination of biography with the social, sociological, and cultural influences of the time, clearly showing their impact on the subject and his life, elevates this book above most biographies about Presley.
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