MEMPHIS — An hour earlier than a gospel choir kicked off the funeral for Lisa Marie Presley on the broad garden of Graceland, Kathy Chandler, the proprietor of a restaurant in Pilot Level, Texas, was ambling down Elvis Presley Boulevard with a heavy coronary heart. She was clutching a crimson rose.
“Oh my God,” she stated. “That is just like the final of Elvis to me.”
Ms. Chandler, 58, was amongst greater than a thousand followers who flocked to Graceland on Sunday morning and stood within the bitter chilly to pay their respects to Ms. Presley, a singer-songwriter, scandal-scarred tabloid fixture, and a lady who occupied a singular place in standard tradition. She was, as the previous Memphis mayor A C Wharton put it, “the one little one born to the world’s most well-known father.”
The demise of Ms. Presley this month, at age 54, clipped quick a poignant and sometimes painful chapter within the story of the enduring Twentieth-century singer and his household, who had been way back elevated to one thing like royalty standing by Mr. Presley’s worldwide throngs of adoring followers. And on Sunday, her memorial service confirmed how this extra democratized idea of royalty, arguably perfected by Individuals, has moved ever nearer to the extra conventional variety: Not solely did Mr. Presley turn out to be a king by taking part in rock ’n’ roll. He additionally handed down his royal standing via his bloodline.
It was a service match for a princess — delivering a well-recognized Presleyan mixture of media circus, down-home movie star worship session and all-star musical revue. It additionally demonstrated the continued international attain of the Presley model, 68 years after its patriarch lower his first skilled session in Memphis’s Solar Studio. The trail to the Graceland “meditation backyard” the place Ms. Presley and her father at the moment are each buried was lined with ornate floral preparations from Elvis fan golf equipment from Finland, Denmark and Japan.
Among the many mourner-performers had been Alanis Morissette, Axl Rose of the band Weapons N’ Roses and Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins. Atop a riser, a TV correspondent supplied commentary in rapid-fire German. Ms. Presley’s buddy Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, delivered transient remarks.
Like all kids of noble lineage, Ms. Presley didn’t select the life. It was there ready for her when she was born in Memphis on Feb. 1, 1968. And like another royal progeny, she was typically uncomfortable carrying the crown.
Her life was, in impact, a princess blues, burdened by monetary mismanagement of her inheritance, a number of failed marriages to difficult well-known males — together with the pop star Michael Jackson and the actor Nicolas Cage — and the devastating 2020 suicide of her son, Benjamin Keough.
To the general public, a minimum of, she appeared to personify the darkish streak that runs via Mr. Presley’s strongest music, from “Thriller Practice” to “Suspicious Minds.” She held grudges, and wrote about them utilizing language extra demotic than regal: “You’re an fool and I hate your guts,” she sang on her tune “Fool,” from 2005. “I assume I’m about as completely satisfied for you as I might be a cockroach in my meals.”
However Ms. Presley didn’t run from her connection to her father. She embraced it, and so did her memorial service. Picks from Mr. Presley’s gospel recordings poured out of a sound system on the Graceland garden on Sunday morning as the gang shivered beneath a grey sky. Her voice mingled together with her father’s on one of many alternatives, “The place No One Stands Alone,” a posthumous duet. One other Elvis tune, “He Is My Every little thing,” appeared to blur the sacred and the secular in a manner that spoke on to Ms. Presley’s connection to him:
He’s my cause for residing,
Oh He’s the king of all kings
I lengthy to be His possession,
Oh, He’s my all the pieces.
There was an overt echo of the funeral providers for Mr. Presley, who died in 1977 of cardiac arrest at age 42. An estimated 18,000 mourners lined the streets to ship him off as his physique moved down Presley Boulevard in a white Cadillac hearse. At Ms. Presley’s service, the ocean of mourners was cordoned off to the facet of the Graceland garden. Individuals had been reverentially silent. On quite a few events a wave of cellphones went up in unison to seize footage of the family and friends who gathered for the service beneath a tent in entrance of the mansion.
They included Ms. Presley’s mom, Priscilla Presley, who divorced Mr. Presley 4 years earlier than his demise, and the movie director Baz Luhrmann, who scored a success final 12 months with “Elvis.” That frenetic biopic made a case for Elvis’s enduring cultural influence whereas wrestling together with his appropriation of Southern Black music, an act of affection and theft that crashed the obstacles of a segregated nation like a rock via a plate-glass window.
After an African American ensemble, Jason Clark and the Tennessee Mass Choir, delivered an ecstatic tackle “Wonderful Grace,” Mr. Wharton, the previous mayor, spoke, reminding the gang that Ms. Presley’s start was an essential brilliant spot for Memphis in 1968, the identical 12 months the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated within the metropolis.
“A lot of you right here keep in mind that interval, really one of the crucial attempting instances within the historical past of our nation. God is aware of it was laborious,” he stated. “It was a tough 12 months for Memphis. However 54 years in the past there was a star shining proper right here at Graceland, with the start of this treasured angel.”
Mr. Corgan, taking part in acoustic guitar, delivered a delicate model of the Smashing Pumpkins tune “To Sheila.” The Duchess of York stated that she and Ms. Presley used to name one another “Sissy,” and directed phrases of comfort to Ms. Presley’s surviving kids: the actress Riley Keough and the twins Harper and Finley Lockwood. Ms. Morissette carried out a brooding, spiky, piano-driven tune, “Relaxation,” singing: “Can we lower this girl slack? Let her lie down.”
Jerry Schilling, a member of Mr. Presley’s “Memphis Mafia” interior circle who managed Ms. Presley, recalled that she was the one particular person he had ever met who managed to intimidate Jerry Lee Lewis. Mr. Rose sang his band’s 1992 hit “November Rain,” and stated that with the suicide of Ms. Presley’s son, her life “took a flip down a tough highway,” forcing her to hunt assist in coping with grief, and prompting her to assist others affected by it.
Ms. Keough, who has appeared in movies by Lars von Trier and Steven Soderbergh, didn’t communicate. However her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, learn one thing she had written in honor of her mom. It was addressed to her immediately: “I hope I can love my daughter the best way you really liked me.”
Quickly after, Individuals journal on-line discerned a morsel of movie star information embedded in that line: “Riley Keough is a mother,” a pair of Individuals reporters posted on the journal’s web site, including, “A rep for Keough confirmed to Those that the couple welcomed a child lady in 2022.”
The bloodline continues, unbroken.
Grayson Haver Currin contributed reporting.
