The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

p. 65

The author visits Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Presley’s birthplace, and the museum there.  Its executive director, Dick Guyton, illuminates Elvis’s stage presence: His “theory is that Elvis’s church experience, oddly enough, inspired his semi-obscene stage style, those signature bumps and grinds.  ‘The preacher in the church he attended as a boy—that preacher played the guitar, he moved around on the platform, he made some moves, too, and Elvis picked that up from the preacher, thinking that if the preacher did it, it must be okay.’”