In Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, one of the most admired Southern
historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of
all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set
against the rich backdrop of Southern society--indeed, American
society--in the second half of the 20th century.
Author of The Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and Southern
History, Joel Williamson is a renowned historian known for his
inimitable and compelling narrative style. In this tour de force
biography, he captures the drama of Presley's career set against the
popular culture of the post-World War II South.
Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley was a contradiction, flamboyant in
pegged black pants with pink stripes, yet soft-spoken, respectfully
courting a decent girl from church. Then he wandered into Sun Records,
and everything changed. "I was scared stiff," Elvis recalled about his
first time performing on stage. "Everyone was hollering and I didn't
know what they were hollering at." Girls did the hollering--at his snarl
and swagger. Williamson calls it "the revolution of the Elvis girls."
His fans lived in an intense moment, this generation raised by their
mothers while their fathers were away at war, whose lives were
transformed by an exodus from the countryside to Southern cities, a
postwar culture of consumption, and a striving for upward mobility. They
came of age in the era of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling,
which turned high schools into battlegrounds of race. Explosively, white
girls went wild for a white man inspired by and singing black music
while "wiggling" erotically. Elvis, Williamson argues, gave his female
fans an opportunity to break free from straitlaced Southern society and
express themselves sexually, if only for a few hours at a time.
