Elvis Presley Birthplace

Elvis Aron Presley was born on 8 January 1935 in a two-room house in East Tupelo that his father Vernon, his grandfather and an uncle had built. His identical twin, Jessie Garon, was stillborn. The house still stands on a small campus with a museum and the Assembly of God church building the family attended, moved to the site. A minister there, Brother Frank Smith, taught the boy his first guitar chords.

The family was poor. Vernon was a sharecropper whose farming failed, and they lost the house for lack of payment when Elvis was a small child. They moved several times around Tupelo before leaving for Memphis in 1948, and they lived beside Shake Rag, one of the city's historic Black neighborhoods. Blues and jazz came out of its cafes and house parties, and gospel from its churches. A Mississippi Blues Trail marker names Lonnie Williams and a guitarist called Tee-Toc as players the young Elvis may have heard.

Shake Rag no longer exists. Urban renewal leveled it and relocated its residents in the late 1960s. Many of Elvis's first Sun recordings in Memphis were covers of blues by Black artists, beginning in 1954 with Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right." The visit is short; allow time for the museum and the church.