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the “out” group, which was poor. The girls considered him crazy because he flirted with nearly all of them, particularly Carolyn Brewer, whom he nominated for the “Most Beautiful” contest. Elvis was such a pest in that regard that some of the girls starting leaving home early for school to try to avoid seeing him on the street, and pleaded with their sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Camp, to make him behave. “Anyone wishing to provoke a little girl to tears of rage had only to chalk ‘Elvis loves—’ and then the girl’s name on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room,” Elaine Dundy wrote. “The very idea that this goof, this clodhopper, would single you out for his affection was intolerable.”

Yet again, Elvis stood out for his passion for music, whether it was hymns or hillbilly tunes. Maude Dean Christian remembered that the teachers closed the door and all the windows when he sang, even during the hot months, so the other kids wouldn’t hear him playing guitar and want to come and listen. He trotted out “Old Shep,” of course, and performed it so often that it got to be something of a joke. When he’d take his place in front of the group for the morning prayer program, several of his classmates would yell out, “Oh, no! Not another round of ‘Old Shep’ today!” Still, he persisted. At recess, classmate Shirley Lumpkin noticed, he would go out to the bicycle shed and sit and pick the guitar, almost always by himself. Elvis knew he was powerful only when he sang, and that he would have to win over tough audiences in the future if he was really going to be a singer.

The family was experiencing a number of changes, and few of them good. By 1942 Elvis’s grandfather, J. D. Presley, had deserted his wife, the flinty Minnie Mae, going first to Mobile, Alabama, and then settling in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, four years later, he filed for divorce, claiming Minnie Mae had deserted him in the fall of 1942, and that he’d begged her to join him in Louisville, where he worked primarily as a carpenter.

Minnie Mae refused to take it lying down and answered the divorce petition with a letter written in longhand.

Dear Sirs:

I am writing to you about the letter I received from you last week concerning a divorce. I didn’t desert my husband. As a matter of fact, he deserted me, and has been living with another woman and he hasn’t sent me any money in over a year, and I am not able to make a living. We have five children and they are all married and have families of their own, and I have to depend on them for a living. I want you to send me the Papers to fill out and if you want my husband’s record, you can write to the Chief of Police Elsie Carr of Tupelo, Miss.

Sincerely yours,

Mrs. Jessie Presley

Two months later, their daughter, Delta Mae Biggs, took exception with Jessie’s petition in equity, and wrote a letter of her own in scrawled penmanship.

Dear Sir:

I am writing in behalf of Mrs. Minnie Mae Pressely [sic], which is also my mother. Tell Pressley [sic] he can have a divorce if he will give Mama $200 cash. She won’t ask for alimony. If he doesn’t want to do that she will not give him a divorce. He told a falsehood about several matters to you. He has (5) children not (3). He also deserted Mama.

Thanks,

Delta Mae Biggs

When the divorce became final in 1948, Jessie seemed to reform. He stopped drinking, became active in his Baptist church, building the pulpit there, and married a retired schoolteacher, Vera Kinnard Leftwich, with whom he’d live the rest of his days. His stepgranddaughter, Iris Sermon Leftwich, considered them a good match. “They used to play little tricks on each other, and had a lot of fun. They each brought out the youth in the other.” Jessie and Minnie Mae stayed at loggerheads—she never called him by name, only “that son of a bitch”—but he mended his relationship with Vernon, who kept in touch by phone and letter, and visited with him on numerous occasions, especially during Jessie’s illnesses.

Once Elvis’s career took off, he, too, resumed relations with J.D., and the two exchanged birthday