ABSTRACT
Several decades after his death and almost fifty years after his period of his greatest creativity and significance, Elvis Presley is considered by many to be the king of rock and roll. Elvis is indeed a cultural icon of the highest order, and he continues to attract adulation and fanatic devotion throughout the world. A cultural studies approach reads a phenomenon like Elvis Presley in terms of his emergence, reception and effects in a specific culture in a particular historical period. Cultural studies is oriented toward a contextualizing mode of inquiry that reads texts and cultural phenomena in terms of their matrix of production and reception, and that uses texts in turn to illuminate their historical situation. In addition to live musical performance, other cultural spaces were central to the emerging rock youth culture, including the expansion of radio broadcasting and widespread circulation of radios in the home and other sites of youth culture.
