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Elvis Presley’s rise to stardom turned Memphis into everything from a tourist destination to what some believe is the home of the generation gap and, to some, the mecca of a quasi-religious movement.

It’s part of a complex legacy for a city that has been known for cotton, for the blues, for the rhythm and blues of Stax Records, for the rockabilly and rock of Sun Records, for barbecue and Federal Express Corp.

While each of those has staked its claim on a share of Memphis history, no individual is more identified with the city or, for that matter, better known in the world, according to a sampling of music and cultural experts including Elvis Presley Enterprises CEO Jack Soden.

Soden, the man most responsible for nurturing the Elvis image and legacy since Presley’s death 20 years ago, says Mickey Mouse is the only modern character who may be as well known as Elvis throughout the world.

Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and other icons were too narrowly defined to be on the same level as Elvis, says music producer Jim Dickinson. “Elvis is the most recognizable human being of the 20th Century, and I don’t think anything short of aliens landing would be any more interesting than Elvis Presley in the 20th Century. He’s our equivalent of Shakespearean tragedy.”

Dickinson thinks Elvis, if he were alive, might not be entirely happy with the legacy. One aspect of his death is what he calls the “tourism curse.” Even when alive, Elvis didn’t attract the crowds that he does in death. “Nobody ever came here before Elvis died. Not to be flip about it, because I love it here, but there was no reason to come here.”

Then the city suddenly became one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country. Soden says 9 million have visited Graceland since Elvis died.

To Soden, those visits are “vacations,” but to Dickinson there’s “the leap to religion. Look at the picture you’ve got. We are mecca. People come here on a pilgrimage. They suffer - in the heat of the summer. And, now, they go down to Beale Street (and the new Elvis Presley Memphis club) and eat the body of the dead king of rock and roll.”

That leap to religion is the province of a very few, says Soden.

Yet John Bakke, political consultant and communications professor, sees similar parallels. Like Jesus, Elvis left his hometown for a larger place where he staked out territory and “revealed his magic. The Bible says, `Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ I’d say (for the parallel), `Can anything good come out of Tupelo?’ ”

Bakke, who teaches at the University of Memphis, put together the first Elvis conference for a scholarly look at the rock king in 1979, and he is putting together another this year. With several conferences in between, Bakke concludes Elvis is not going to fade away. “That’s the same question people were asking in 1955 and ‘56. Everybody expected it to fade away, and it hasn’t, though the why, I guess, is as much a mystery as it ever has been.”

That mystery is the one constant in the Elvis legacy. “You can’t find a box to put him in. There isn’t one frame of reference for what he did,” says Bakke. Soden calls it “a big portion of the intrigue. There are so many elements that you can’t come to a conclusion about him.”

To David Evans, University of Memphis music professor and historian, that idea translates to Elvis as “all things to all people. Everybody has their own intrepretation of Elvis, and they’re all valid. Elvis the rocker, the punk crooner, the blues singer, the gospel singer. What is he? Elvis the drug addict, the saint, the family man, the ladies man. A lot of people seem to intrepret him as they need him. You could say that about a god or a major saint, and there is a kind of cult about him.”

Evans says an important aspect of the Elvis legacy is that his music launched “a period of success in Memphis music for about 20 years . . . His success played a great role in opening doors for others that followed.”

At the Center for Southern Folklore, director Judy Peiser says Elvis’s success as a tourism magnet has meant much of the world has discovered the incredible diversity of music that came out of the region and merged in Memphis. “There’s this entire Pandora’s box of music and musicians that are a part of this region’s past and present.”

David Less, a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s rock and soul music exhibit and president of Gibson Entertainment, says, “Thanks to Graceland and its marketing efforts and Elvis’s own humility and country-boy stature, he’s really become a defining icon for the city of Memphis.”

While some would argue that part of the Elvis legacy is a penchant for velvet trappings and questionable tastes, Dickinson says Elvis isn’t necessarily to blame for that. “It’s not like he had bad taste. His girlfriends did,” he says, blaming them for odd color combinations and choices of furniture styles now associated with Graceland and Elvis.

But it was Elvis himself and his musical tastes that made him controversial, says Bakke. “Everything about him has always been controversial - whether to have an Elvis stamp, what kind to have, whether he’s dead or not . . . Elvis was the first argument we had in the 1950s, the first argument of the silent generation and the opening of the generation gap. Elvis was the trigger.”

Soden says the legacy will only grow stronger. For him as promoter of Elvis and the Elvis image, it began like a brand name that had already been established. “A brand name can take tens of millions of dollars to establish. His was in place the day we opened Graceland. He did that. It was just there.”

Since then, the world has multiplied Elvis’s legions of fans with the opening of Eastern Europe, especially Russia, and China to U.S. culture and trade. “So the world of potential fans of our music is vastly larger than it was 15 years ago.”

The one question and element of the legacy that sometimes makes Soden wonder is a what-if question. If his manager, Col. Tom Parker, had been different or if Elvis had a different manager or if the people surrounding Elvis had been different, would it have changed his career? “A number of circumstances caused Elvis to be kind of caught in his trap,” says Soden.

“But if things had been different, what different direction would his career have taken with the talent he had?”

To reach reporter Michael Lollar call 529-2793 or E-mail lollar@gomemphis.com