John Shelton Reed

John Shelton Reed explains how Elvis Presley's childhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, shaped the singer and his music. Reed maintains that Presley had an exceptionally ordinary upbringing and that his parents worked in the jobs typical of 1930s Tupelo. Although Tupelo was better off than much of the rest of Mississippi, it had its share of economic troubles. Reed explains that Elvis spent his childhood in a city that was centered around religion and segregation, but that when he burst onto the music scene as a nineteen—year—old, he did so by covering a rhythmand— blues song, thus symbolizing the end of segregation in the South. Reed is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the former director of the Institute for...