Word: guralnick
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...Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown). The author, a music critic, follows the self-created rock hero as he is borne to platinum paradise on a great celebrity updraft -- this despite Miss Marmann, his eighth-grade music teacher, who told him he couldn't sing worth a lick and gave him a C. Guralnick writes evocatively and sympathetically of Presley's first wild fame -- That's All Right, Mama, his first recording, made him a millionaire -- and tracks the star through the shattering death of his mother Gladys and his entry into...
...With music, he was fierce, always. With music, Elvis Aron Presley gave no quarter.In the eighth grade at Humes High in Memphis, Tennessee, 10 blocks from the public-assistance housing project where he lived with his mother and father, Presley pulled a C in music. He objected. As Peter Guralnick writes in his supple and altogether splendid new biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown; 560 pages; $24.95), for a boy who was "wary, watchful, shy almost to the point of reclusiveness," such a challenge to a teacher was a radical move, like...
...making of the history and the beginning of the myth in a firm, simple and compassionate focus, concentrating on the four years from Elvis' first success to his entrance into the Army in 1958. (A planned second volume will chronicle the years, many of them melancholy, that followed.) Guralnick, an excellent music critic, concentrates on narrative here, and writes evocatively, empathetically, of Elvis' roots and dreams...
...could be that the cocoon of family that the Presleys drew around themselves was impermeable. "Though we had friends and relatives, including my parents," Presley's father Vernon recalled, "the three of us formed our own private world." Guralnick paints this world with perspective, respect and great decency; it is one of the book's triumphs. "Poor we were," the elder Presley says, "but trash we weren't. We never had any prejudice." Presley may have been easygoing, but when the country performer Ira Louvin called him "a white nigger," Presley stood...
...including My Happiness and That's When Your Heartaches Begin, the two tunes he cut that day back in 1953, as well as 14 performances never before released -- is available in this hefty, have-to- have-it compilation, which features a scrupulous discography, an excellent essay by critic Peter Guralnick and, in a nod to recent postal madness, a "limited edition" stamp sheet made up of Elvis record covers from the '50s. These stamps are suitable for framing or pasting but not posting, which suits just fine: it's the music that carries the message anyhow...