A review of Peter Guralnick's "The Colonel And The King"

[elvis4life]

https://www.memphisflyer.com/of-colonels-kings-and-kin

Of Colonels, Kings, and Kin
Elvis Week features author Peter Guralnick and his new biography of Colonel Tom Parker.

“Colonel” and Elvis Presley on the set of Roustabout, 1964 (Photo: Courtesy Graceland Archives)

Alex Greene
4:00 a.m. Aug. 6, 2025

Elvis Week is upon us, and we’re already seeing throngs of pilgrims checking in at hotels, asking for directions, and strolling on Beale. And while they may flock to any of the Presley-centric events listed at graceland.com, starting with a bus tour to Tupelo and the first of many Ultimate Elvis Tribute Artist events on Friday, August 8th, this year also brings a less typical celebration. Or perhaps excavation is the better word, in the historical sense, because it’s centered on a figure more often vilified than fêted.

That would be Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager for all but the earliest months of his career. He’s now the subject of a comprehensive new biography by Peter Guralnick, who’s previously chronicled the lives of both Presley and Sun Records’ Sam Phillips to great acclaim. True to Guralnick’s nose for nuanced character portraits and “the ironies of history” (to borrow a phrase from Isaac Deutscher), his latest work, The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership that Rocked the World, delves into Parker’s life in such detail that any previous biographies of the man suddenly seem obsolete.

Yet some readers may be loath to discard their preconceptions about “Colonel,” the sobriquet Parker adopted, not without some humor, after receiving the honorary title from the governor of Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, in 1948. In conventional rock histories, the holder of that title was a money-obsessed huckster who had no regard for Presley’s deeper artistry. Take Baz Luhrmann’s blockbuster film Elvis, in which “Luhrmann’s Colonel is straight out of Faust, dripping with the evil of Mephistopheles,” as Vanity Fair puts it.

That view of Parker is so ingrained in the popular imagination that even Guralnick himself admits he had to unlearn his earlier habits of thought. “I encountered a good many challenges to my own preconceptions, and plenty of surprises along the way,” he writes in the prologue, “but what would be the point of writing a book, of writing anything, just to end up where you’d planned on going all along?”

In fact, Guralnick had originally planned on writing very little himself, as the book he first envisioned would have been a much simpler collection of Parker’s letters, accumulated nigh-obsessively over Parker’s many decades of management and promotion. There were “tens of thousands” of them, Guralnick notes, along with receipts, contracts, itineraries, and scrapbooks, “all stored in the original dented file cabinets and battered black cube-shaped steamer trunks” in which Parker had kept them. Graceland having purchased everything in Parker’s Madison, Tennessee, home, Guralnick was invited to view the materials in the Elvis Archives in Memphis nearly 30 years ago. Soon he was imagining a book that allowed those letters to speak for themselves, albeit with a bit of context added.

But then he met Parker’s widow, Loanne Miller Parker. Speaking from his home in Massachusetts, Guralnick says that was a turning point. “The letters were like a bolt from the blue,” he says, “but Loanne was a trigger for [writing the book] because I realized that the letters were a window into what was going on behind the scenes, but what Loanne offered to me was a much more intimate, personal look at Colonel. And then when I started doing interviews for the book, and immersing myself, things that I had thought I understood changed.”

As Guralnick puts it, “an emotional vulnerability and sensitivity” emerged from his deeper dive into Parker’s life, which, taken in full, “tells a much deeper story. Those are things that I simply didn’t recognize and wasn’t aware of before writing this book.”

One revelation is the tumult of Parker’s early life, which reads like a blend of Horatio Alger and Flannery O’Connor. Propelled by poverty, an unhappy home life, and some still-unknown trauma in his native Holland, a teenaged Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, already enamored of the circus, stowed away to America (twice), hoboed across the country, and ended up with a family named Parker in West Virginia after many misadventures. Briefly returning to Holland, he then sailed to America once more, ultimately enlisting in the U.S. Army under the Parker family’s name. First stationed in Hawaii, then Florida, he was perpetually drawn to the carnivals and circuses that overwintered in Tampa, eventually going AWOL just to work in one of them. Once (honorably) discharged, he stuck with that work for years, which he parlayed into managing crooner Gene Austin by 1939, and country singer Eddy Arnold after that.

Through these pre-Elvis years, it’s clear that he’s welcomed as family into many households he encounters, proving himself to be a hard worker, a reliably honest fellow, and an empathetic caregiver for all animals, even managing the Humane Society in Tampa for a time. Never becoming a U.S. citizen, he was a testament to the best that immigrants bring to the table. Through all these stages, his genius for promotion shone through, as did his distinctly personable style of doing business. For, though he evolved into a shrewd businessman and a ruthless negotiator, Parker was absolutely devoted to the families and friends allowed into his inner circle, living by a strict moral code.

“He was extraordinarily open with those families,” says Guralnick. “But he was also extraordinarily open with Elvis and opened up his heart to Elvis. It was more than sentimental.”

Indeed, Parker’s devotion to Presley as an artist belies the misconception that he ran roughshod over the singer’s vision. “From the start, from the time that Colonel first saw him at the Louisiana Hayride in January 1955, Colonel placed his full faith and confidence not so much in the boy’s talent as in the boy himself,” Guralnick writes in The Colonel and the King. And this fierce loyalty led Parker to insist on absolute artistic freedom for the singer when negotiating his contract with RCA. “So far as recordings went, he stuck to the same intractable mantra: his artist, and his artist alone, would call the shots as to what, when, and where he recorded, he would be the sole arbiter of song selection and its manner of delivery.” This was unheard-of for would-be teen idols in the 1950s.

It’s a more heartfelt story than we’ve been taught, and the affection cut both ways. “I love you like a father,” Presley wrote to Parker after his RCA deal had been inked, to which Parker replied, “I know that you understand me better than anyone for you have a very careful eye. I am a great deal like you, very sensitive, but only people I love can hurt me.”

In the end, as Guralnick writes, “It was a bond that would never be broken.”

Peter Guralnick will appear at the “Conversations on Elvis” event at the Graceland Soundstage on Friday, August 15th, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and will sign copies of his new book at the gift shop from 2 to 4 p.m.

[Living Stereo]

I wonder if the book mentions the ad litum report.