Overview

Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America. In Being Elvis, veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world's most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way. The creator of an American sound that resonates today, Elvis remains frozen in time, an enduring American icon who could capture an inner emotion, perhaps of eternal yearning, to which all of us can still relate.

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9781665283687

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Reviews

Connolly carefully and sympathetically paints the many faces of Presley, faces eventually shrouded in despair.-- ""Kirkus""

Connolly carefully and sympathetically paints the many faces of Presley, faces eventually shrouded in despair.-- Kirkus

Author Information

Ray Connolly is a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. While working for the London Evening Standard, he interviewed, among others, many rock stars and cultural icons of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Beatles and Elvis Presley. He contributes regularly to the Daily Mail and has also written for the Sunday Times, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph. He lives in London. Jonathan Yen was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he's carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. His ""versatile baritone"" and ""distinct and perceptive role-playing"" make for ""a striking marriage of performance and storytelling."" From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie's true adventures in the Amazon, Jonathan loves to tell a good story.

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