Warkworth History Society 6th November 2023

Elvis Lives! The Life and Afterlives of Elvis Presley. Professor Brian Ward, Professor of American Studies at Northumbria University.

He began with the known facts surrounding Elvis’s death in 1977 at the age of 42, when a mixture of codeine and barbiturates was found in his system. But the cause of death was given as congenital heart disease, no doubt exacerbated by overweight and a generally unhealthy lifestyle.
Rumours began almost immediately that he was not actually dead and there was a wave of supposed ‘sightings’. In the film ‘Love Me Tender’ he dies at the end but returns as a ghost, and in ‘Flaming Star’ his character announces, ‘I’ve been killed already but I’m just stubborn about dying.’ Perhaps these fictitious events were behind a refusal by some to accept what had happened in real life. Some others believed he had faked his own death to escape the pressures of fame. In a spoof film called ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ he is shown switching lives with an Elvis impersonator who then himself dies, leaving the real Elvis to end his days in the obscurity of a private nursing home, along with President Kennedy and other famous figures who have had the same idea!
As years went by a whole cult of Elvis emerged. Devotees went on ‘pilgrimage’ to his Memphis home, Graceland. Elvis memorabilia abounded, and the Professor admitted to owning a few himself. Some of these incorporated religious imagery. There was even a so-called ‘First Presleytarian Church of Presley the Divine’ which claimed (with tongue firmly in cheek) to believe in his ‘Resurrection’.
This was all highly amusing. But Professor Ward then put forward some interesting, more serious ideas regarding the proliferation of conspiracy theories in America during the 1960s and 70s. The Vietnam war which dragged on from the 1950s to the 1970s had created a mood of distrust for the government’s official accounts and motives. The Watergate scandal of the early 70s added fuel to this unease. The death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and that of President Kennedy the following year both threw up their own conspiracy theories. Perhaps, then, a similar reaction to Elvis’s death was only to be expected.
So whilst Professor Ward’s talk was both entertaining and often amusing, it was also ultimately quite thought provoking in the present era of deep fake technology and misinformation. Is seeing really believing after all?
Kathryn MacLachlan