Graceland: Going Home with Elvis

He didn't write music or lyrics and wasn't too articulate on the subject of himself, but when he created his dream house Elvis Presley spoke volumes about who he was. From the musical notes that dance across the gates to the columns of the neo-Southern manse, from the glittering stairwells to the jungle rec room to the plush-lined bathroom suite where he died, the colours and textures and shapes of Graceland speak for the boy from Tupelo who became the King of Rock 'n' Roll. What the mansion says of Elvis, and what it says to - and of - the millions of fans who make the journey there each year, is what "Graceland: Going Homd with Elvis" is about. What made Elvis a visual icon was his concern for style. Karal Ann Marling interprets the places and the look of Elvis's life - from shotgun shack to mansion, through byways lined with luxury hotels, Hollywood studios, old churches, housing projects, motels and malls - as a dialogue he conducted with himself, his family and his fans. This conversation is what tourism is about, and so "Graceland" speaks of tourism as well - of the author's forays into an alien South, its rhythms, its history, and of Elvis as the ultimate tourist, the musician on the road, ever in transit betwen home and the one-night stand. Reconstructing the changing interior of Graceland during its owner's lifetime, the book describes the cultural geography of Elvisness - his self-created material world - and of American mobility in the postwar era. In Marling's book we have a portrait of the materialist ideal of "home", created in the commercial decadence of post-World War II America and fed by rock 'n' roll.

Karal Ann Marling, a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota, examines Elvis Presley, the cultural phenomenon, through the places he lived. From his place of birth, the two-room "shot-gun house" in Tupelo, to the fabled hilltop mansion, Graceland, Marling shows that despite international acclaim he never lost his Mississippi roots. Elvis often shared Graceland with "the guys"--an entourage of relatives, assistants and school pals--"like a teenager whose parents weren't home" and was not above putting a bullet through the television when he saw something he didn't like. Marling argues that through conspicuous consumption, compulsive refurnishing of rooms and garish decor, Presley knew he was thumbing his nose at good taste and consciously cultivating his own legend.