Graceland

Graceland is a house, and it helps to know what kind. The Toof family farmed this land and named it for Grace Toof, and in 1939 her niece Ruth Moore and her husband, Thomas, built the two-story limestone Colonial Revival mansion on a fourteen-acre remnant of the farm. Elvis Presley bought it on March 19, 1957, for $102,500, when he was twenty-two, and moved his parents in. He lived here until his death in 1977.

The rooms show how he lived. One scholar's summary is that Graceland is how a poor boy lives rich: thick carpet, bold color, big furniture, redecorated again and again. The house opened to the public in June 1982, after Priscilla Presley turned it into a business to keep the estate from being sold. Elvis, his parents, his grandmother, his daughter Lisa Marie and his grandson Benjamin Keough are buried in the Meditation Garden.

Know what the visit is. It is a ticketed tour of the house and garden, run from a commercial campus of shops, exhibits, a car museum with his pink Cadillac and two airplanes, all operated by Elvis Presley Enterprises. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the first honored for its place in rock music. The sound itself came out of Sun Studio and the Black music of Beale Street. Graceland is where the money lived.