Even if you were never a fan of Elvis Presley’s music, there’s no doubting that he transformed the world of music forever. The Southerner has a certain suaveness that women adored and men desired, all while remaining humble in front of his audiences. His plain approach may appear to contrast with his opulent lifestyle and a gleaming customized Cadillac limousine with a gold-plated TV and a refreshment bar.
His fixation with money and gold, however, was largely driven by the poverty in which he grew up.In January 1935, Elvis Presley was born as the sole survivor of twin brothers in Tupelo, Tennessee. Vernon and Gladys, his parents, were living in a two-room shotgun house at the time. For many years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, shotgun homes were a popular style of architecture in the South.
The term comes from the fact that you can see directly through the home from front door to back door, much like a shotgun barrel. These compact, rectangular dwellings were usually only one story and were built rapidly to provide economical housing for folks who could not afford to buy majestic brick homes with numerous rooms.
While there are many different types of shotgun houses, Elvis’ birthplace simply had two rooms: a kitchen/main room and a bedroom. The house was built by Elvis’ family members and has a small front porch and few windows. There is no corridor, as is common in shotgun houses, and one room flows into the next.The items within the house are not the originals that belonged to Elvis’ family; they have been lost to time and were most likely sold when the family relocated.
The furnishings inside the house, on the other hand, are symbolic of what families in the neighborhood would have used at the time. Pieces like the zinc-lined pie safe, wooden ironing board, and mismatched table and chairs were popular in the days when every home had the modern conveniences we have today. Whatever the house’s shortcomings, you have to like the 1930s fruit wallpaper in the kitchen and the lace curtains in the bedroom.
The Presleys, like many other families at the time, utilized a shared outhouse and had no bathroom in their home. Guy Harris, a neighbor who grew up with Elvis, claimed that people used a Sears magazine as toilet paper because “there was no such thing as Charmin” in their neighborhood. The outhouse was used not only by locals, but also by members of the Assembly of God church, which was relocated closer to the shotgun house.
This is the same church where Elvis began his musical career.Elvis Presley only stayed in the residence for a few years before his parents had to relocate due to financial constraints. The destitute family stayed in Tupelo until the future star was 13 years old, having moved several times owing to poverty throughout that time. The family moved to Memphis, where Elvis’ musical tastes were heavily impacted by the city’s country music and blues sectors.
The shotgun house where he was born is now the Elvis Presley Birthplace Museum, where visitors can explore the house and grounds at their leisure. There’s also an automobile that looks exactly like Vernon Presley’s, a teal-green 1930s Plymouth sedan.Considering all of the places he saw, the celebrities he met, and the glitz and glam of his bejeweled jumpsuits, Elvis Presley’s birthplace is a harsh reminder of how most poor people lived at the time.