Elvis Presley was born in 1935. I would like to talk about why I think Elvis Presley is such a great guy and such a great role model. Like many of these people, you have to go back and you have to look at what the real contribution was to the 20th century. And somebody like Elvis Presley is guy who really went out and he was the first White men who took what had previously been known as Black music and brandish the White masses. I mean, the way that he shook his hips at the time was honestly considered sacrilegious.
And it’s a little bit crazy because Elves Presley, despite the fact that he was branded a bit as rebel was really a down home guy who had a lot of very strict values. If you see interviews even today with Priscilla Presley who is obviously his wife, with her parents and her parents are very conservative even in interviews dated 2005, they refer to as Mr. and Mrs. Beaulieu, they still have no first names, you know, I mean these people are really relics of an older time. But even they will say to you, even after he divorced Priscilla, he was devoted man and a devoted father to Lisa Marie and he was always very respectful to us. And it’s the type of thing that you don’t expect to hear about Elvis especially, you know, from his former in-laws who could potentially hate him for having divorce their daughter. But everyone seems to agree that despite the fact that Elvis had problems and he certainly has substance abuse problems in his later life, he was a really, really wonderful guy.
Something else that’s really interesting about Elvis Presley that a lot of people don’t know is that after he finally hit it big and really was in a place where he wanted to be in his career, and he had started making moves, he dropped it all and he enlisted in the army. A lot of people forget about this, but Elvis Presley decided to go serve his country in World Ward II because he thought it was the thing to do. He dropped his career and quite frankly when he came back, he was not again in the same plum roles that he was before, and not that I would say that any particularly plum by today’s standards, but I mean we’re talking about Elvis Presley wearing Hawaiian shirts singing bad songs, you know. And it’s unfortunate that we tend to associate Elvis, you know, again with this and with his later kind of like drunken fat zinger Las Vegas act.
And we need to remember is that Elvis Presley is a man who pioneered rock and roll in country. He is a man who opened up the doors and who said, “Hey, anybody can play this type of music. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black, White or purple. You can play this type of music, and you know what, I'm going to try to gyrate my hip, but that doesn’t make me a bad person.” Interesting tidbit about Elvis Presley is that when he first appeared on television, they would only feel him from the way stop, because it was just too controversial, the way he was shaking his hips. And that is a a man with mojo.
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