A confession to begin with.
Although I am as big a fan of Elvis as the next man (or woman), visiting his home at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, has never been on my bucket list. I am not dazzled by celebrity and their personal lives.
But when in Memphis, you ignore it at your peril.
We had booked a mansion and planes package the day before. We took the hire car, which we planned to drop off back at the house before venturing downtown for the evening. As we approached the front desk to collect our tickets, we were greeted by the photograph below.
Aside from his peerless voice, he wasn’t a bad looking lad either, was he?
Our first impression was that of a theme park – we could have been in Universal Studios or Disney’s Magic Kingdom. In fact, the mansion itself, less ostentatious than we had expected, occupied a relatively small part of the 13.8 acre complex.
We took the iPad tour and boarded a shuttle bus from the entrance to the mansion itself. After a ten minute wait in line, we were stepping through the portico into the house. itself.
Graceland, the second most visited house in the U.S. with over 650,000 visitors a year, was a gift from Elvis to his parents, Vernon and Gladys, in 1957. It is a two story, five bay residence with 23 rooms, including eight bedrooms and bathrooms. Although he was on the road a lot, Elvis could not wait to get back to Graceland, and spent as much time there as his personal and musical commitments would allow.
The Mansion Tour includes the living room, his parent’s bedroom, the kitchen, TV room, the Jungle Room, his father’s office, the Trophy Building, the Racquetball Building and Meditation Garden.
The following photographs provide, I hope, a flavour of the style of the principal rooms.
The Meditation Garden was used by Elvis to reflect on any problems or issues that arose during his life. It is also where he, his parents, and grandmother, Minnie Mae Hood Presley, are buried.
I had been warned by friends who had visited in the past to expect a lot of hysterical weeping at his graveside, but there was more a respectful and reverential tranquility about the spot when we were there.
Before continuing the tour, we had lunch at Gladys’ Diner, one of four dining options (another very Disney-fied touch).
One of Elvis’s passions was his car collection. Many of his favourite models can be found at Graceland. Pride of place goes to the 1955 Pink Cadillac Fleetwood, the second he bought after the first had been burned.
Amongst the collection too is the 1956 Cadillac Eldorado, originally white, but repainted purple after he had smashed some grapes on the hood, and a white 1966 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III.
The Elvis the Entertainer Career Museum contains hundreds of artefacts, including gold and platinum records, jumpsuits, movie memorabilia and much more.
We were planning to revisit Beale Street for a while during the evening, so we proceeded quickly to the plane exhibits.
Elvis bought a 1958 Convair 880, which he named the Lisa Marie after his daughter, in 1975. Visitors are permitted to walk through the cabin, though not sit on the seats or fiddle with the dials in the cockpit (naturally!).
As planned, we returned to the house to freshen up and rest for a couple of hours, before calling an Uber to take us back downtown.
Before hitting Beale Street for the last time, we sought out a highly recommended restaurant on Main Street, Aldo’s Pizza Pies. As always, the service was outstanding, and the server and owner were both astounded by our road trip exploits.
And the pizzas?
The Trippy Truffle: mushroom cream, button, enoki, portobello, & oyster, mozzarella, fontina, arugula salad with truffle oil dressing, and the Vodka Pie: vodka cream and house made mozzarella.
Divine.
Beale Street was buzzing as we called in for one last drink in Club 152, one of the more highly rated live music bars.
A short, and characteristically agreeable, Uber ride returned us to the house for our final night in Memphis (the photograph below is NOT our vehicle).
We had thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of our stay in Memphis: the lovely, spacious suburban house, the music tours and the vibe downtown in the evenings.
But we were now heading for the city that we had both looking forward to the most – Nashville.
Yee-haw!
Tony Quarrington 