When the announcement of Elvis Presley’s death at home thousands of mourning fans descended on his Graceland Mansion in Memphis Tennessee in an expression of grief,
shock and stunned disbelief.
One year later, on the first anniversary of Elvis’s death a group of fans gathered at the gates to light candles and spend the evening together reminiscing.
The following year there were more fans,Each successive year more people came,
Graceland was opened to the public in 1982, fans suggested to management that the gates be opened during their candlelight tribute,
to allow them to walk in single file up the driveway to Elvis’s final resting place and back again.
This solemn procession has been the culmination of every Elvis Week since then
Elvis Week usually runs from about 9 -17 August in Memphis.
During Elvis Week, the King's life is reenacted and dissected again and again. In a parking lot across the street from Graceland, Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs),
perform, free of charge.
A typical 16 August on Memphis looks something like this: Night falls, but the heat of the day still hangs heavy in the southern air.
A crowd of between six and thirty thousand people fill the four-lane road in front of Graceland, which police have barricaded off.
Some people have been standing for hours in a snaking line. They want to be ready when the gates to Graceland open at 9 p.m.
Patient veterans of the vigil sit in fold-up chairs, fanning themselves with souvenir Elvis Week brochures and drinking cold drinks from coolers,
content to wait until the middle of the night when the crowds fade and they can get a turn to softly walk up the drive,
past all rows of wreaths and lay a flower or teddy bear or a card where the King is at rest in the family plot.
Some cry softly, others hold hands, many are dressed in Elvis-outfits or Elvis T-shirts; plenty of bald and grey heads to be seen
but also many too young to even have been born when “Suspicious Minds†was the song on everyone’s lips.
It is a journey back to a time when things were more innocent, sweeter, slower, less complicated. Maybe that’s why the Elvis phenomenon
is still going strong 30-something years after that fateful day on 16 August 1977 in Memphis, Tennessee when Graceland lost its King.
To pass through the gates of Graceland, especially on the night of the annual vigil, is to make a pilgrimage unlike any other.
It was March 3rd, 1960 when Elvis Presley stepped of the plane at Prestwick Airport in Scotland.Elvis
was finishing his American army national service.and stopped in Ayrshire,for only two hours. In those days, Prestwick was home for the 1631 USAF unit