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The only Memphian legally buried in his own backyard in the latter half of the 20th Century is one of the few musicians who didn’t break into the business with constant reminders to “keep your day job.”

The description could be a crossword puzzle clue, and it’s one that much of the world could easily answer. Elvis Presley. King of rock and roll. The performer credited with shaping everything from a musical form to the generation gap that swept the country in the 1950s.

Like few before, Elvis, from 1956 on, embodied the American dream. Poor boy rips through every social and cultural barrier to rise from poverty and become a legend in his own time. His almost unimaginable success is a story to which millions still cling with his final plummet forgiven in annual waves of nostalgia.

At the 20th anniversary of Presley’s death in 1997, Jack Soden, CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises, said the only modern character who may be as well known as Elvis throughout the world is Mickey Mouse. Princess Diana seemed to run both Elvis and Mickey a close race in the realm of fame at her death in 1997. But, 20 years from now, there will be no movies starring Diana, no platinum records sung by her nor rags-to-riches stories to continually refresh the memory of her.

Musician and music producer Jim Dickinson’s take on Elvis is one in which the rock star transcends mere fame and the exploits of everyone from sports superstars to space heroes to fellow entertainment icons. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Marlon Brando and other icons are too narrowly defined to be on the same level as Elvis, says 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.”

Once Elvis turned to music, there was no stopping him, says original Elvis guitarist Scotty Moore, now of Nashville. Most musicians spend years “paying their dues” in relative obscurity, then quickly fade after one or two hits.

Moore and bass guitarist Bill Black were hooked up with Elvis in the summer of 1954 when Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips asked them to “see if they could come up with something worthwhile.”

That same summer, July 5, they recorded a speeded-up version of Arthur `Big Boy’ Crudup’s That’s All Right with Blue Moon of Kentucky as the flip side.

“We spent two years paying our dues from July ‘54 to when we cut that thing (Heartbreak Hotel) with RCA in January ‘56. Things increased very gradual, but, fortunately, they did increase from day one,” says Moore.

The guitarist says he, Black and Elvis never felt their music was unappreciated nor worried that they would wind up as a low-rent lounge act. “Things kept looking a little better all the time. Bill and I felt he (Elvis) would be big. The bigness just came faster than we thought it would.”

With Heartbreak Hotel quickly rising to No. 1 on Billboard’s pop singles chart (also No. 1 on the country charts and No. 5 on the R&B charts), Elvis was already becoming a household word when he began appearing on a series of nationwide TV variety shows. The shows (including Milton Berle, Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan) created a furor over the now-famous Elvis bump-and-grind.

At the University of Memphis, communications professor John Bakke, who staged the first scholarly conference on Elvis in 1979, says the Elvis-the-pelvis stage act was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to Elvis controversy. “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.”

How it came to that is the now-familiar rags-to-riches tale. Born in a two-room shotgun shack in Tupelo on Jan. 8, 1935, Elvis was a twin. His brother, Jessie Garon, was stillborn, leaving Elvis to grow up an only child.

The Presley family was descended from a long line of men known for their wanderlust. The family history and genealogy were researched by Donald W. Presley, manager of the aviation weather station at Little Rock National Airport. When he began, Donald Presley says, he “just always assumed he was Scotch-Irish.” Instead, he quickly learned he was descended from Germans whose original name was Pressler and was later changed to Preslar before becoming Presley. Elvis was a distant cousin, he found. The research, reviewed by the New England Historical and Genealogical Society and by a Stanford University researcher, says the family came from German wine country and from a line descended from vineyard worker Valentine Pressler, who migrated to America in 1709. From New York, he moved to Pennsylvania, Maryland and Appalachia. His sons continued the migratory tradition, moving from South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Mississippi.

“They worked hard, but in fact, the family existed in poverty, lacked any idea of how to implement a plan to achieve success and had no idea of how they had come to be in that situation,” says Donald Presley.

His research says Vernon was born 18 miles east of Tupelo, dropped out of school after the eighth grade and worked as a farmer, truck driver, painter and, briefly, in the shipyards of Pascagoula, Miss., before returning to farm country in the Tupelo area.

Elvis attended the Assembly of God Church with his family, absorbing the music of the church along with that of black bluesmen in the neighborhood and the country music radio programs enjoyed by his family.

In 1945, at age 10, he won a $5 second prize for singing Old Shep in a youth talent contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show in Tupelo. The following year, when Elvis asked for a bicycle, his mother, Gladys, talked him into the cheaper alternative of a $12.95 guitar. In 1948, he played the guitar and sang Leaf on a Tree as farewell to his junior high classmates when the Presley family strapped their belongings atop a 1939 Plymouth and moved to Memphis.

They lived in public housing and low-rent North Memphis neighborhoods with Vernon, Gladys and Elvis holding various jobs to support the family. Elvis wore long slicked-back hair with sideburns and bought clothes on Beale Street, where he absorbed the street’s black blues and gospel music.

He graduated from Humes High in 1953 and that summer recorded a demo acetate at Sun Studio as a birthday present to his mother. In the fall, he was working as a truck driver and studying in night school to be an electrician. That winter he recorded another demo at Sun Studio, and by the next summer teamed with Scotty Moore and Bill Black. One of their few disappointments in the time they paid their dues was in the summer of 1954 when a Grand Ole Opry official suggested Elvis “go back to driving a truck.”

Instead, they appeared on Louisiana Hayride, the biggest Opry competitor. There he met Col. Tom Parker, manager of Hank Snow and former manager of Eddy Arnold. By the summer of 1955, Elvis was causing near riots wherever he appeared and began to get national attention. He signed a management contract with Hank Snow Attractions, owned equally by Col. Parker and Snow. Parker became his manager.

Parker negotiated the sale of Elvis’s Sun Records contract to RCA for $40,000 with a $5,000 bonus for Elvis, and on Jan. 10, 1956, at age 20, Elvis recorded Heartbreak Hotel. It sold more than 300,000 copies in its first three weeks and soon became the first of Elvis’s million-seller records.

Among Elvis’s friends was Jerry Schilling, who had played football with Presley, Red West and other friends at the Dave Wells Community Center. Schilling, now head of the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission, says he was 12 when Elvis was 18 or 19. It was a time when Marlon Brando and James Dean were the rebellious teen idols.

Schilling says he met Elvis the same week that his Sun Records hit That’s All Right (Mama) began playing on the radio. “He personified the things our generation was looking for. He was dangerous. He had this kind of wild look about him. He was like a lovable rebel. He had that James Dean look about him, yet he could smile at you and you knew everything was cool.”

And Elvis was his own person, says Schilling, who became a member of the so-called “Memphis Mafia,” a close-knit entourage of friends, bodyguards and fellow musicians. “Elvis was not the type of artist who liked to hang out with other artists. He would prefer all of us to be together. He was always this strange dichotomy of personalities, like wanting to be with friends for months, then going in his room and not coming out for three weeks.

“He was a reader and a thinker. I learned more about life in 11 years of late-night discussions than I’d ever learned before,” says Schilling.

After his first No. 1 hit, things moved quickly. A screen test for Paramount Studios in Hollywood. His first album. More hit songs: Hound Dog, Don’t Be Cruel, Love Me Tender, All Shook Up, Jailhouse Rock. The songs helped changed the course of music history and set the standard for rock and roll.

Elvis would star in 33 movies, formulaic romantic romps that made tons of money but did not satisfy his artistic nature. Schilling says typecasting as a romantic B-movie heartthrob likely contributed to Elvis’s reliance on prescription drugs.

Other Elvis intimates, including bodyguard Red West, say Elvis already had been frustrated by studio technicians, Col. Parker and others over changes made to his music in the mixing process. But the biggest disappointment of his career was when Col. Parker “axed” his chance to star with Barbra Streisand in a remake of A Star Is Born, says West. “By then Elvis just didn’t give a damn anymore,” he says.

Death came Aug. 16, 1977. Former Shelby County Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry Francisco announced the death was due to “hypertensive cardiac disease associated with coronary disease.” In other words, a heart attack.

An investigation by The Commercial Appeal that year uncovered evidence of a history of drug abuse and the presence of a wide variety of prescription drugs in his system at the time of death. In 1991, Dr. Eric Muirhead, retired pathology chief who helped perform the autopsy at Baptist Memorial Hospital, said he and seven other doctors present were convinced Elvis’s death was due to “polypharmacy” or drug interaction.

Muirhead said Francisco agreed with the rest of the team, then, suddenly, held a press conference announcing “heart disease” as the cause of death.

Francisco responded in 1991 that he honestly believed Elvis died of heart disease and that he made no effort on the death certificate to protect Elvis as a hometown hero. The doctor de-clined to discuss it when he retired earlier last year. “I’m retired. It’s behind me,” he said.

In death, Elvis has become even bigger than in life. Like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, his death at a relatively young age left behind legions of loyal fans.

Many of them watched or took part in October when Elvis Presley Enterprises held the first-ever auction of items from its own archives, including some of Elvis’s costumes, cars, a personal Bible, his first piano and other items likely to be sold again in the next millennium.

Among the biggest prices during the three-day auction at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas: $250,000 for Elvis’s 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II; $95,000 for his personal handgun, a German silver-barreled Walther with his TCB emblem on the wooden handgrip; $85,000 for a calf-length cape designed for Elvis’s Aloha From Hawaii concert; $90,000 for Elvis’s first piano, a used upright; $80,000 for a 1970 Mercedes limousine owned by Elvis; $65,000 for Elvis’s contract with RCA Records, which bought out his Sun Studio contract (the buyout is considered by some to be the Holy Grail of rock and roll); $65,000 for a black jumpsuit with green leather trim worn in Las Vegas in 1971; $43,000 for Army fatigues with the “Presley” patch over the pocket; $37,500 for an Elvis-owned Ford Ranchero; $35,000 for a red “Burning Love” cape worn in 1972; $32,500 for Elvis’s prescription TCB sunglasses.

Auction prices were just one indication of the seeming immortality of a man dead for more than 20 years. An average of more than 700,000 fans a year now visit Graceland. Fifty-two percent of visitors are 35 or younger, with a third of them born after Elvis died.