LIFE With Elvis: Early Photos of the King

It often surprises people who know even a little bit about LIFE to learn that the magazine didn’t cover Elvis Presley all that much. One might think that a publication so devoted to keeping its millions of weekly readers in the know would frequently feature, celebrate, analyze and dissect a phenomenon as stirring as the career of The King.

And yet . . . LIFE didn’t.

It’s not that the magazine completely ignored the man who quickly became — and, in some very fundamental ways, has remained — the biggest rock and roll star of the 20th century; but one gets the sense that the magazine was sometimes more fascinated by what might be called the ancillary impact of Elvis, rather than by the performer, or by his music. Little kids getting Elvis haircuts? Teens trying to dance like their idol? That sort of thing can be found in the pages of the magazine — while Elvis himself appears somewhat rarely.

In 1956, though, LIFE did publish a feature on the young Mississippi native whose voice, looks and live performances were causing girls to scream and swoon; armies of boys to pick up guitars of their own; and legions of commentators, guardians of public morals and pop-culture critics to predict the end of civilization as they knew it if Elvis’ ungodly onstage gyrations were allowed to continue unchecked.

For its part, LIFE reported rather drily on the uproar, choosing to remain above the fray — perhaps in hopes that Elvis would, eventually, just go away:

Here, LIFE.com presents photos of Elvis — several of which never ran in LIFE magazine — when he was a young, reckless, charming, thrilling and, for some, downright frightening rocker.

We all know his gruesome, terribly sad fate: dead on a bathroom floor at the age of 42: utterly alone, yet surrounded by sycophants; addicted to drugs; a bloated caricature of his early self. That is how one American legend came to a close. Here, we choose to remember how the legend itself began. . . .