It was August 14th, 1958, and Gladys Love Presley had died just hours earlier at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, at only 46 years old. And the 23-year-old young man who sat with that fact was not Elvis Presley the performer or Elvis Presley the star, but simply a son whose world had just come apart at its foundation.
Gladys was not simply his mother in the conventional sense of that word. She was the person who had known him and believed in him and championed him before the rest of the world had any idea he existed. When the family had nothing, when they were struggling and poor in Tupelo and the future offered no particular promises, Gladys would tell Elvis that he was special and that he was going to do something remarkable with his life.
She was the first person who ever heard him sing. She was the one who pushed him gently forward when his natural shyness made him want to pull back from performing. She had been present for every moment that mattered in his life, and now she was gone at 46 years old, and nothing about that made any sense to him.
The funeral was held at Graceland on August 16th, the mansion that Elvis had bought in part so that his mother could finally have the home she had always deserved and never had, the home she had lived in for less than a year before she died. Her casket sat in the music room surrounded by flowers, with 200 people filling the house, family members, close friends, the musicians and crew who worked with Elvis, people who had loved Gladys and who now came to say goodbye.
Outside the gates of Graceland, thousands more fans had gathered to pay their respects in whatever way they could from a distance. And photographers lined the street with cameras ready, waiting to capture whatever happened. Elvis had not been able to hold himself together since the moment he got the news. He had been crying almost constantly, barely sleeping, not eating.
His father Vernon was doing his best to be present for his son, but was drowning in his own grief because Gladys had been the center of everything for both of them, the person the family had orbited around, and without her both men were completely adrift. On the morning of the funeral, Elvis told Vernon he intended to sing at the service.
Vernon said gently that he did not think that was a good idea, that Elvis was not in any condition to do it. Elvis said he had to, that his mother had loved gospel music her whole life and she would want him to sing for her. His grandmother Minnie Mae Presley, who had come to Graceland to help with the arrangements, heard the exchange and came in and took Elvis’s hand and told him that nobody expected him to sing, that he was grieving and did not need to be strong right now, that it was all right to simply sit and mourn. Elvis told her he was going to sing and that it was the last thing he would ever be able to do for his mother, and his voice when he said it made it clear the conversation was finished. The service began at 2:00 in the afternoon, led by Reverend James Hamill, who had known the Presley family for many years. He spoke about Gladys, about her kindness and her unshakable devotion to her family and her quiet and genuine faith. Elvis sat in the front row between his father and his grandmother, staring at his mother’s casket with a pale face and red swollen eyes and hands that could not stop shaking. Several gospel singers
performed hymns that Gladys had loved during her life, and their voices filled the music room with something that felt like comfort and Elvis sat through all of it with tears running down his face and his hand occasionally rising to wipe them away. When Reverend Hamill announced that Elvis had asked to sing his mother’s favorite song for her, a low murmur moved through the room.
People exchanged worried glances. They had all seen how completely undone Elvis was, and many of them seriously doubted he was going to be able to get through a song. Vernon leaned close and whispered to his son one more time that he did not have to do this. Elvis stood up without answering him.
He walked slowly to the front of the room, to the place beside his mother’s casket, and stood there for a long moment with one hand resting on the polished wood and his eyes looking down at the closed lid. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. He said it was his mama’s favorite song, that she used to sing it to him when he was small, and that he wanted to sing it for her now.
200 people sat without making a sound, barely breathing, watching this young man try to gather himself. He closed his eyes and began to sing Precious Lord, Take My Hand. The voice that had sold millions of records and commanded enormous crowds and made him one of the most recognizable people in America was thin and fragile in that room, but it was holding.
He sang the opening words, Precious Lord, Take My Hand, Lead Me On, Let Me Stand, and they came out quiet and clear, and the people in that room began to cry just from hearing it because there was nothing performed about what they were hearing. This was not Elvis the entertainer. This was a son singing to his mother for the last time.
He continued into the first verse, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn, and his voice trembled on the last word, but he pushed through it, and for a moment it seemed as though he was going to be able to do this, that he was actually going to make it through the whole song. Then he moved into the second verse, Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light, and his voice was still holding.
But then he reached the next line, Take My Hand, Precious Lord, and he paused and drew a breath and sang Lead Me, and that was the moment his voice did not simply crack or waver, but shattered completely. What came out was part word and part sob, and it was painful to hear. Elvis stopped. He stood there with his mouth still open and tried to continue, and nothing came.
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He pulled himself together, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and tried again. Lead Me Home. His voice broke even harder the second time, and this time the tears came without any possibility of stopping them, fast and hard and accompanied by shaking that moved through his whole body. But he was not willing to give up.
He wiped his eyes and took several slow breaths and tried a third time. Take my He could not even finish those two words before his voice cracked again, and he bent forward over the casket with one hand still resting on the wood, crying with such force that he could barely keep his footing. Reverend Hamill started to move toward him, and Elvis raised his other hand to stop him. He was going to try again.
He opened his mouth for the fourth time and attempted to sing the word mother, as in Lead Me Home to My Mother, and that single word was the thing that broke him completely beyond any possibility of holding on. He could not even attempt to sing it. He simply said it in a broken and desperate voice, Mother, and then Elvis Presley collapsed against his mother’s casket with his arms wrapped around it and his whole body shaking and the sound of his grief filling every corner of that room, deep and agonized and coming from somewhere so far inside him that every person who heard it felt it somewhere in their own chest. Vernon was on his feet immediately and had his arms around his son, trying to support him and trying to guide him away from the casket so he could sit down, but Elvis would not move. He held on to that casket and through his sobbing people could hear him saying Mama, please, and Mama, I’m sorry, and Mama, don’t leave me, and please don’t leave me. And Vernon was crying too now, holding his son while his own grief mixed completely with Elvis’s until there was no way to separate where one ended and the other began. Minnie Mae
came forward and took Elvis’s other arm, and together she and Vernon worked to guide him back to his seat, and at first he resisted because he did not want to leave his mother, but eventually his legs simply gave out beneath him and he had no choice, and they half carried him back to the front row where he folded into the chair with his face in his hands and his shoulders still heaving.
Every single person in that room was crying by this point, not the restrained and dignified kind of tears people try to keep quiet at funerals, but real crying, open and audible. The gospel singers who had performed earlier were sobbing. Musicians who had watched Elvis command stages all across America were wiping their faces.
Even the pallbearers, large, strong men who had been chosen specifically to carry the casket, were openly weeping. Reverend Hamill tried to continue the service with his own voice thick with emotion and had to stop several times before he could push forward. And finally he simply said, Let us pray, and the service moved toward its conclusion.
When the pallbearers prepared to carry Gladys’s casket to the hearse, Elvis tried to stand so he could follow them out, and his legs would not hold him. Vernon and two of Elvis’s cousins had to take hold of him and support him as he walked out of the house. Outside, the thousands of fans who had gathered and who had always seen Elvis as this almost larger-than-life figure watched him emerge barely able to walk and being held up by his father and family members on either side. And in that moment something shifted in the way they saw him, because what they were looking at was not a star or a performer, but a young man of 23 who had just lost his mother and did not have anything left to stand on. At Forest Hill Cemetery, Elvis tried once more managing to stand and listen. But when the casket was lowered into the ground, he broke down again and lunged forward trying to stop it, crying out for them to wait, saying he was not ready. His father and cousins caught him and held him back, held him up as his mother disappeared into the earth. And Elvis reached toward the grave as though he could somehow stop what was happening before the last of his strength gave out and he fell
into the arms of the people around him. The cemetery workers, who had witnessed grief many times over in their work, were visibly shaken by the intensity of what they were seeing and paused for a brief moment. But the ceremony had to continue, and as the casket settled into its place, Elvis’s cries moved across the cemetery and reached people mourning at nearby graves who stopped and listened and were moved by the sound of a son’s raw anguish.
After the burial, Elvis returned to Graceland, and for 3 days he did not leave his room. He lay on his bed looking at the ceiling or sat by the window looking out at the grounds his mother had loved and tended and walked through during the brief time she had lived there. He would not eat. He would not sleep for more than a few minutes at a stretch.
He barely spoke to anyone, and when he did speak, it was often to his mother as though she were still somewhere in the room listening, saying Mama, I’m sorry, and I should have been here more, and I should have taken better care of you. On the third day, Minnie Mae managed to get him downstairs and into the kitchen, the kitchen where Gladys had cooked for her son so many times over so many years, and Elvis sat there and finally talked about what had happened at the funeral.
He said all he had wanted was to sing for her, one song, her favorite song, and he could not do it. Minnie Mae told him gently that he had sung for her, that he had gotten through the first verse. Elvis said he could not finish it, that he had tried four times and fallen apart every time, and he asked in a voice that carried real pain, What kind of son could not even sing a single song at his own mother’s funeral? Minnie Mae told him the kind of son who loved his mother so completely that his heart was simply breaking and that every person in that room had understood exactly what they were witnessing and not one of them had thought any less of him for it. Elvis said that she had been everything to him, that everything good in him had come from her and that he did not know how to be in a world that did not have her in it. The people who knew Elvis before and after Gladys’ death and who were honest about what they saw said he was fundamentally changed by losing her. The young man who had carried a natural playfulness and hopefulness into everything he did became more serious, more withdrawn, more likely to fall into dark and isolated places. The success
and the fame continued to grow in the years after 1958, even reached heights it had not reached before, but something in the joy of it was gone and did not come back. In 1977, almost 20 years after his mother’s death, Elvis was in an interview when the subject of Gladys came up.
The interviewer did not fully understand how much ground they were walking into and asked about his mother. Elvis was quiet for a long moment before he answered. He said he had tried to sing at her funeral and could not do it, that he had broken down and that it was the only time in his entire life that he had tried to sing and been unable to.
He said it was also the most important performance he had ever been asked to give, the one that mattered more than any other and that he had failed her. The interviewer said softly that he had not failed her. Elvis said he could not even finish her song and his voice as he said it broke the same way it had broken in that music room at Graceland nearly 20 years before as though the time between had not changed the wound at all.
He said she had sung to him his entire childhood, thousands of times, when she was exhausted, when the family had nothing, when everything was hard, she always sang. And when it was finally his turn to sing for her, he had fallen completely apart. The interview ended not long after that, but the footage of that moment of Elvis in 1977 still visibly destroyed by the memory of his mother’s funeral became one of the most powerful pieces of recorded film that existed of him.
It showed that beneath every sold out show and every record and every sequin jumpsuit and every screaming crowd he was still that same 23-year-old boy who had lost his mother and had never found his way all the way back from it. People close to Elvis said he visited Gladys’ grave regularly for the rest of his life, going at night when no one else was around so he could talk to her in private and that sometimes he would try to sing to her there and that usually he could not finish the songs.
Red West, one of the people who had been closest to Elvis throughout his life, said that he had seen Elvis perform for presidents and for royalty and had watched him hold stadiums full of tens of thousands of people completely in his hands, but that nothing he ever witnessed from Elvis was as powerful as watching him try to sing for his mother and break down trying.
He said that was the moment he truly understood the difference between Elvis the performer and Elvis the human being because the performer was someone who seemed invincible on a stage, but the human being was just a son who had lost his mama and all the fame in the world and all the talent in the world could not give him any protection from that pain or help him carry it.
