Tupelo, Mississippi

Tupelo, Mississippi is only a few hours from where we are staying in Alabama. We made the drive a few days ago so we could all see where Elvis Presley was born and lived for a little bit of time.

The city is a lot larger than I expected, I pictured this little town that only survived as "the birthplace of Elvis Presley", turns out the place is just a normal city with a little bit of a claim to fame. We went to the museum there, you can see Elvis' old church and the home he was born in. To enter either structure you have to purchase museum tickets, we didn't want to do that so we just walked around the grounds and saw what you can see for free.

Elvis' front porch

his house was really small

outhouse

The church the Presley family attended

wAfter the museum area we went to the old fairgrounds. The site is now a park but it was where Elvis performed twice, once as a boy and then several years later he came back to perform for his hometown. The park has a small playground now and has a statue of Elvis. The statue is modeled after a famous photo of Elvis reaching down to all the screaming girls below. According to what we read, the statue was made this way so that people could recreate the photo. The girls loved this!

Tupelo City Hall building

An important Native American

Original photo that the statue replicates (photo courtesy of ElvisPresleyMusic.com)

She wanted her picture taken so badly

it started out fun but ended badly. LA and AG both fell off!

Elvis got his first guitar here

We also drove by the hardware store where he got his first guitar, when he was 11. And, we stopped at Johnny's Drive-in, which is supposed to be where Elvis loved to eat. The girls sat in his booth and we ordered hamburgers and hotdogs. They were disappointing but maybe we just have high expectations. Eating there just really made me miss California and a Double Double from In-N-Out.

My sad, flat burger from Johnny's :(

And, they call this a hotdog???

We were only in Tupelo for a few hours but it was fun to learn a little more about Elvis. The girls were very proud that they knew more about Elvis than the two older men that were at the museum.


Here's an interesting little movie about Tupelo and Elvis. I think the girl is a little annoying in this video, but that's just me!

This video has clips of when Elvis performed in Tupelo