10 Things You Didn’t Know About… Elvis Presley

To celebrate the release of If I Can Dream, a new album which sees 14 of Elvis’s classics songs reworked with help from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (you can preview and purchase it on the right-hand side of the page), we thought we’d have some fun and dig out some of the best facts about The King, so here are 10 things you didn’t know about Elvis Presley…

 

He was a twin…

Sorry to start out on a sad note, but Elvis was actually born the second of two twins. Born in his parents’ two-room house in East Tupelo, Mississippi, the singer came 35 minutes after his older brother Jesse, who sadly was a stillborn. Elvis spoke about his twin throughout his life.

 

He got his first guitar because his parents couldn’t afford a bicycle…

Depending on what you read Elvis either wanted a rifle or a bicycle for his 11th birthday, but his parents couldn’t afford either and gave him a guitar instead. Little did they know what they’d be unleashing…

 

He flunked his first big audition…

Back in 1954 the singer auditioned for an amateur gospel quartet called the Songfellows, but they turned him down. Imagine being those guys now...

 

That hair took some work…

Amazingly Elvis was actually a natural blonde until his late teens and even after when his hair began to go darker it wasn’t naturally the shade we all know so well. It was usually dyed a shade of brown known as ‘Mink Brown’, but once when the King himself tried to do it, he opted to use black shoe polish. Fortunately it was only the once...

 

He hated fish…

He loved a good burger, but hated fish, every kind of our water-dwelling friends were banned from Graceland.

 

He was a black belt in karate…

During his spell in the military in 1958 Elvis decided to take up karate and in fact got so good that he was awarded a black belt before he returned to the United States in 1960.

 

He recorded an awful lot of songs…

Over the course of his career Presley recorded over 600 songs, but he never wrote anything. Not a single song.

 

Plenty of them had ‘Blue’ in the title…

15 to be exact. That’s an awful lot of blue…

 

He only played overseas five times…

And by overseas we mean Canada, he never played live in Europe or in Asia or anywhere other than North America. A tour was apparently being planned at the time of his death, but sadly never materialised…

 

Graceland is the second most-visited house in the United States...

It lags behind one other residence, The White House...

 

If I Can Dream is out now.