Elvis Country

Elvis's country story begins with a contest. On October 3, 1945, at ten, he sang Old Shep at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, his first public performance; he recalled placing fifth. A few months later he got his first guitar for his birthday. The trail credits him with more than 50 appearances on the country charts and ten country number ones, among them A Fool Such as I and Always on My Mind, and with induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998, twenty-one years after his death.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Elvis Presley Birthplace — steps away
  The two-room house in East Tupelo where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, with a museum and the church building the family attended, set near the vanished Black neighborhoods where he first heard the blues.
• Tupelo National Battlefield — 3.3 mi
  A one-acre park on Main Street marking the July 1864 battle of Tupelo, a Union victory that kept Nathan Bedford Forrest away from Sherman's supply line, with Black soldiers among the defenders.
• Chickasaw Village Site — 3.6 mi
  A Chickasaw village on a remnant of the Black Belt Prairie beside the Natchez Trace Parkway, with house outlines marked on the ground and signs that speak in Chickasaw voices.
• Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor Center — 5.1 mi
  The parkway's headquarters and official visitor center near Tupelo, with a film, a small museum of the Old Trace and the surviving New Deal houses of the Tupelo Homesteads.

More markers nearby

• Elvis Presley — steps away
• Shake Rag — 1.1 mi
• John E. Rankin — 1.7 mi
• Battle of Ackia — 2.6 mi