When Elvis died, and why 1967 matters
Elvis Presley died on 16 August 1977, a decade after the year this site covers, not in 1967. He was 42, and he died at Graceland, his home in Memphis, Tennessee. This article describes the death and the response to it and then returns to 1967, when he was in the middle of a quieter stretch of his career that few people now associate with the legend.
The death at Graceland
The image of Elvis Presley at Graceland in his last years is one of a private man in a large house, and it was there that he was found unresponsive on the afternoon of 16 August 1977 and was taken to a Memphis hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The immediate cause was given as a heart condition, and the circumstances have been discussed ever since. His use of prescription medication in his later years has been widely reported, and there are differing accounts of how large a part it played. The cause is best described as disputed in its details, not settled in them.
News spread quickly, and fans began to gather outside the gates of Graceland. His funeral took place on 18 August, and thousands of people lined the streets or waited near the house in the heat. He was first buried in a Memphis cemetery and later moved to the grounds of Graceland after a reported attempt to steal the body. Graceland itself was opened to visitors in 1982 and has since become one of the best-known music landmarks in the United States.
What the death meant
By 1977 Presley was an overweight and unwell performer who spent much of the year touring, but his place in music was already secure. He had risen to fame in the mid-1950s, had a long career in film and television, and had made a successful return to live performance at the end of the 1960s. His death was widely described as the end of an era in popular music, and tributes often noted that he had helped to bring rock and roll to a mass audience. The size of the reaction also showed how deeply he had marked the memories of listeners who grew up with him.
Elvis in 1967
Looking back from 1977, 1967 was an in-between year. The Beatles and a new generation of rock acts were dominating the headlines, and Presley’s career was dominated by film contracts that produced a steady series of musicals.
The most personal event of his year was his marriage. On 1 May 1967 he married Priscilla Beaulieu in a short ceremony at a hotel in Las Vegas. They had met in West Germany when he was serving in the US Army and she was a teenager, and she had lived at Graceland for some years. Their daughter, Lisa Marie, was born on 1 February 1968, in the year after the wedding.
His 1967 film work included Clambake, a light comedy musical in which he played the son of a wealthy man who swaps places with a working man. It was not among his better-reviewed pictures, and by the late 1960s his films were receiving weaker reviews and returns than earlier ones. Fans and critics alike felt that the soundtracks and scripts were not doing justice to his talent.
His most admired record of the year was a gospel album, How Great Thou Art, released in 1967. Gospel was music he had loved since childhood, and the album was a serious effort. It earned him a prize at the Grammy Awards, reportedly his first win, for sacred performance, in 1968. It showed a side of him that the film soundtracks did not.
From 1967 to the comeback
The next chapter began in December 1968 with a television special on NBC, often called the comeback special. It returned him to live performance and led to concerts in Las Vegas and tours in the 1970s. For many commentators, 1967 is the low point that makes the revival more impressive, though it is more accurate to say it was a year of uneven work from which he later recovered.
Elvis had met the Beatles in 1965, when they visited him at his home in Bel Air, California, and they were great admirers of his early recordings. By 1967 the new British acts had changed the sound of the charts, a shift visible in Top 40 radio and in the British Invasion. He did not follow that path, and the contrast is sometimes taken to mean that he had been left behind, though he found a new audience soon after.
Remembering him
Fans continue to gather at Graceland every August on the anniversary of his death for an event often called Elvis Week. The mixture of mourning, celebration and tourism there reflects how his image has outlived the man. In 1967 he was a busy film star who had married and had made a fine gospel record; in 1977 he was a global symbol. Both years belong to the same career, and the second cannot be understood without the first.