Word: presleys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Michael Jackson. Who could have predicted that the world-famous man-child would someday renounce his bachelorhood? While still under investigation for allegedly molesting a 13-year-old boy, the self-designated King of Pop married Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King, in what many perceived as an attempt to cleanse his tarnished image. However, only a few months after the newlyweds kissed steamily at the MTV Video Music Awards, gossip columnists buzzed that the marriage would soon be nullified, a rumor the Jacksons deny...
...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...
...Presley was funky and unbridled, passionate and rebellious, respectful of the maverick traditions his music sprang from but proudly, defiantly new. His singing tapped and trapped that mysterious, wondrous thing at the heart of American popular music. Sam Phillips, who recorded all Elvis' early sides for his seminal Sun Records, called that elusive core the place "where the soul of man never dies." Presley would never have put it in such high-flown terms. When That's All Right, Mama became a hit, he simply let himself be borne heavenward in the great celebrity updraft. hurry home, he wired...
...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...
...close were the Presleys that the singer may never have recovered from the death of his mother Gladys, who died of liver problems in 1958, just after Presley had gone into the service. Presley was more than bereft; he was cleaved. The open coffin finally had to be covered with glass because he still wanted to kiss and hug his mother, pleading with her to come back. It was a different Presley who went back to the Army, and then to serve in Germany. He seemed to be haunted ever after by her, as we, still and likely always, will...