Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley first sang over the air at nine, on Tupelo's WELO from the Mississippi-Alabama Fair in 1944. At home he listened to the same station's country star Mississippi Slim, his first celebrity model. After the Presleys moved to Memphis in 1948 the radio dial taught him more: Black-appeal WDIA and Dewey Phillips's eclectic WHBQ gave him rhythm and blues, country, pop and gospel. Early Wright later hosted him on Clarksdale's WROX. For Presley, radio was a classroom, and Tupelo's WELO started it.

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