Читать реферат по истории: "Elvis Presley" Страница 2

(Назад) (Cкачать работу)

In 1941 Presley started school at the East Tupelo Consolidated. There he seems to have been an outsider. His few friends relate that he was separate from any crowd and did not belong to any "gang", but, according to his teachers, he was a sweet and average student, and he loved comic books. In 1943 Vernon moved to Memphis, where he found work and stayed throughout the war, coming home only on weekends.

In January 1945 Gladys took Elvis shopping for a birthday present at Tupelo hardware. And she bought him his first guitar, in lieu of a bike and rifle, for $12.75.

In 1946 Presley started at a new school, Milam, which went from grades 5 through 9, but in 1948 the family left Tupelo, moving 110 miles northwest to Memphis, Tennessee. Here too, the thirteen-year-old lived in the city's poorer section of town and attended a Pentecostal church. At this time, he was very much influenced by the Memphis blues music and the gospel sung at his church.

Presley entered Humes High School in Memphis taking up work at the school library and after school at Loew's State Theatre. In 1951 he enrolled in the school's ROTC unit, tried unsuccessfully to qualify for the high school football team (supposedly cut from the team by the coach for not trimming his sideburns and ducktail), spending his spare time around the African-American section of Memphis, especially on Beale Street. In 1953 he graduated from Humes, majoring in History, English, and Shop.

After graduation Presley worked first at Parker Machinists Shop, and then for the Precision Tool Company with his father, finally working for the Crown Electric Company driving a truck, where he began wearing his hair the trademarked pompadour style.

Elvis was very influenced by gospel acts, as well as acts such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry. The common story that the Presleys formed a popular gospel trio who sang in church and travelled about to various revival meetings is probably not true.[14] However, in 1945 Presley, just ten years old, entered a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Decked out in a cowboy outfit, he had to stand on a chair to reach the microphone singing Red Foley's "Old Shep." He won second place, a $5 prize and a free ticket to all the rides. On his birthday in January 1946 he received a guitar purchased from Tupelo Hardware Store. In his seventh-grade year at Milam he seems to have taken this guitar to school every day. Many of the other children denigrated him as a "trashy" kind of boy playing trashy "hillbilly" music. Over the next year, Vernon's brother Johnny Smith and Assembly of God pastor Frank Smith gave him basic guitar lessons.

Some years later, in Memphis, Tennessee, the young Presley "spent much of his spare time hanging around the black section of town, especially on Beale Street, where bluesmen like Furry Lewis and B.B. King performed".[15] B.B. King says that he "knew Elvis before he was popular. He used to come around and be around us a lot. There was a place we used to go and hang out on Beale Street".[16] Beale Street in Memphis was notorious for its bars, prostitutes and gambling establishments. Music producer Jim Dickinson called it "the center of all evil in the known universe".[17] But it was a place where young Presley could hear black music. In an interview with Ev Grimes, composer Philip Glass says, "Elvis Presley was really the guy that took black music and made it—well, popular is really the best word."[18] In similar terms, Elijah Wald writes that Presley has "listened carefully to Negro blues men and sanctified singers, swallowed all of that music and combined it with hillbilly sound."[19]

The opening chapter of Peter Guralnick's book Last Train To Memphis [8] deals with musical influence coming from birth exclusively through his family's attendance at the Assembly of God, a Pentecostal Holiness church. Rolling Stone magazine wrote that: "Gospel pervaded Elvis' character and was a defining and enduring influence all of his days."[20] The United States government mandatory personal examination of Presley as part of the approval process to make his Graceland home a National Historic Landmark wrote that Presley "clearly embraced African American music and culture and did so at a pivotal point of cultural change in American history" but that " Gospel music was his primary musical influence." The U.S. government historian stated that "In the early years of the twentieth century, the evangelical Pentecostal movement with its "vibrant worship style" became extremely popular with working-class Christians, black and white." The church services in which the Presley family participated was where people "jumped, shouted, danced, and fell out for Jesus, because, in a word, they acted "crazy, " they became a national laughingstock, the Holy Rollers of fable and cliché." According to the study, the family's move to Memphis expanded his musical horizons when he began to attend Sunday services at the East Trigg Baptist Church.[21]

Elvis Presley was a baritone whose voice had an extraordinary compass — the so-called register — and a very wide range of vocal color.[22] It covered two octaves and a third, from the baritone low-G to the tenor high B, with an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D flat. Presley's best octave was in the middle, D-flat to D-flat. In ballads and country songs he was able to belt out full-voiced high Gs and As, showing a remarkable ability to

Похожие работы