Elvis Aron Presley

The schoolboy comes before the star. After the family reached Memphis in November 1948, Presley enrolled at L. C. Humes High School, where he earned a C in eighth-grade music. A neighbor, Lee Denson, coached him on guitar. As a junior he would head down to Beale Street to admire the clothes at Lansky Brothers, and by senior year he was wearing them. At Humes's 1953 Minstrel Show he sang, and by his own account classmates who had barely noticed him suddenly did, a year before Sun Records signed him.

What the plaque says

Elvis Aron Presley Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, the son of Vernon and Gladys Presley. He moved to Memphis in 1948. Soon after signing a contract with Sun Records in 1954 he achieved tremendous popularity. His musical and acting career in records, movies, television, and concerts made him one of the most successful and outstanding entertainers in the world. He died on August 16, 1977, and is buried here at his Memphis home, Graceland.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Graceland — steps away
  Elvis Presley's 1939 limestone house in Whitehaven, bought in 1957 and opened as a ticketed museum in 1982, with his grave in the Meditation Garden and a commercial visitor campus around it.
• Stax Museum of American Soul Music — 4.8 mi
  A rebuilt Stax studio on the site of the old Capitol Theatre, with a replica of the sloped-floor Studio A, Isaac Hayes's Cadillac and the story of an integrated soul label.
• Elmwood Cemetery — 5.4 mi
  Memphis's oldest active cemetery, a rural garden cemetery of about 1,500 trees opened in 1852, with Black civic leaders, yellow fever victims and the city's whole history in its lots.
• C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa — 6.0 mi
  A National Historic Landmark Mississippian mound town on a bluff over the Mississippi, with a university museum, a replica house and a nature trail inside T. O. Fuller State Park.

More markers nearby

• Wooten Fallout Shelter — 2.3 mi
• Wedding of the Waters — 2.7 mi
• Ernest C. Withers House — 3.3 mi
• Zion Cemetery — 4.4 mi