The Greatest Oldies Music

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From above, Elvis Presley’s funeral procession on August 18, 1977 looked less like ordinary Memphis traffic and more like the city had surrendered one of its streets to memory. Cars stretched along the route, police managed enormous crowds, and people filled the edges of Elvis Presley Boulevard near Graceland. Only two days earlier, many of those same people had been going to work, buying groceries, listening to the radio. Now they were standing beneath the August heat waiting for a hearse to pass.

From above, Elvis Presley’s funeral procession on August 18, 1977 looked less like ordinary Memphis traffic and more like the city had surrendered one of its streets to memory. Cars stretched along the route, police managed enormous crowds, and people filled the edges of Elvis Presley Boulevard near Graceland. Only two days earlier, many of those same people had been going to work, buying groceries, listening to the radio. Now they were standing beneath the August heat waiting for a hearse to pass.
What is striking is how little most of them could actually see. Some had traveled for hours only to catch a few seconds of the procession. There would be no conversation with Elvis, no final song, not even necessarily a clear view of his coffin. Still, they came. A woman might be holding an old photograph against her chest. Someone farther down the road carried flowers. Parents brought children who were too young to understand why the adults around them were crying. Being there was their final act as an Elvis audience, except this time there would be no applause when he arrived.
The procession eventually carried Elvis to Forest Hill Cemetery, where he was initially buried beside his mother, Gladys. That detail gave the day an especially painful symmetry. The son who had been devastated by her death in 1958 was now being placed near her nineteen years later. His father Vernon was still alive. Lisa Marie was only nine. Behind the enormous public spectacle was therefore a much smaller family story: a father burying his son and a little girl losing her father at only 42.
Photographs taken from above cannot capture those individual stories, but perhaps that is precisely what makes them so powerful. Thousands of people become tiny figures, almost indistinguishable from one another, and suddenly the scale of Elvis’s reach becomes visible. They had different ages, backgrounds and reasons for loving him. Some remembered the scandalous young singer of the 1950s. Others knew the Hollywood Elvis or the man in the white jumpsuit. On that road, all those different versions of him converged for the first and last time.
Eventually the vehicles moved on, the crowds went home, and Memphis traffic returned to the street. Elvis’s remains would later be moved to Graceland, where he rests today. But the aerial photographs preserved something that statistics about record sales never could. They show what happens when millions of private memories suddenly lose the person attached to them. From the sky it was an extraordinary crowd. Down on the pavement, it was thousands of people realizing that there would never again be a new Elvis Presley performance to wait for.

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By the final years of Elvis Presley’s life, the problem was no longer one illness that could be neatly identified and treated. His health had become a complicated web. He experienced chronic constipation and gastrointestinal problems, glaucoma, hypertension, sleep difficulties and other medical issues while maintaining a demanding performance schedule. Different symptoms brought different medications, and those medications could create problems of their own. What began as treatment gradually became part of the danger.

There is an uncomfortable unfairness in the way Elvis Presley’s final hours have sometimes been remembered. A life containing thousands of performances, recordings and extraordinary experiences can suddenly be reduced to one location inside Graceland. Yes, Elvis was found unresponsive in his bathroom on August 16, 1977. But concentrating on that detail alone turns a serious medical tragedy into trivia. The more important question is not where Elvis died, but what was happening to his body before he entered that room.

Perhaps the most disturbing part of Elvis Presley’s final morning is how ordinary it initially seemed. In the early hours of August 16, 1977, Graceland was not preparing for tragedy. Elvis had been awake through the night, played racquetball, spent time at the piano, and later went upstairs with Ginger Alden. He was expected to leave Memphis that evening to begin another tour. At some point, he went into his bathroom to read, something those around him knew he sometimes did for long periods. Nobody downstairs realized that the normal rhythm of the house had already been broken forever.

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