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“Gregg Chadwick takes the opposite stance in the oil-on-linen 'Elvis Presley (Suspicion).' Here, a familiar depiction of the singer is rendered in blurry, shadowy lines, as if his memory is slowly fading and becoming the stuff of rumor and legend tending toward oblivion.”- Fredric Koeppel, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tennessee
Since my artwork was included in a series of Elvis themed exhibitions at the L. Ross Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee, I have been reading and re-reading Ray Connolly’s book Being Elvis: A Lonely Life which deftly examines Elvis’ life through the lens of Memphis in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Childhood poverty and class aspirations spurred Elvis on in a way that left no room for error in his art but left his life dangerously open to misfortune and eventual tragedy.At the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo, Mississippi on September 26, 1956, Elvis played a powerful, homecoming show in the town where he was born in a two-room shack 21 years before on January 8, 1935. Elvis had left Tupelo when he was thirteen. In the interim, Elvis had become Tupelo’s most famous person. As Ray Connolly recounts in Being Elvis: A Lonely Life : “Elvis put on a special show that day…It was staged outside the fairgrounds in front of a large tent, and, as he sang in the afternoon show, he could see over in the background, a long freight train rolling past.” Starting on that day, as the concert closed, Elvis and the band slipped off stage through a trapdoor. No encores that day nor in the future. Instead an announcer would express over the PA system that “Elvis has left the building.”
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