Elvis

When Bobbie Ann Mason first heard Elvis singing on the radio, she recognised immediately that ‘he was ours…a country person who spoke our language’. Born to a poor family clinging to the edge of respectability, Elvis was catapulted into a stratosphere of wealth and fame he could never have imagined. His music, blending black and white influences and drawing on his powerful sexual allure, exploded across 1950s America as the sound of liberation. But as Mason shows with great understanding, nothing in Elvis’s life had prepared him for his mythic status. Locked into a sharecropper-like contract with his manager, Colonel Parker, he was forced to keep churning out mediocre movies and albums, while turning to drugs and spending sprees to cope with his isolation. Even his triumphant comeback in Las Vegas couldn’t banish the demons that eventually cost him his life. Elvis is a book that only Bobbie Ann Mason could have written, and the Elvis she portrays is unforgettable.