Elvis Presley Almost Had a Totally Different Last Name
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Practically everyone in the world knows the name Elvis Presley. But the King of Rock ’n’ Roll could just as easily have been named Elvis Wallace.
Elvis shared his famous last name with his father, Vernon Presley, and grandfather Jessie Presley, but his great-grandfather wasn’t a Presley at all. That surname instead came from Elvis’ great-grandmother Rosella Presley. A fiercely independent 19th century woman, Rosella never married but gave birth to several children from different fathers. And she gave all her kids her own last name.
Rosella never publicly revealed who Jessie’s father was, so for years the name of Elvis’ great-grandfather was unknown. But it was eventually revealed to be John Henry Wallace, a married man with a family of his own who had an affair with Rosella.
That means if Elvis had received his last name from his paternal great-grandfather, as is customary, then the household name we would all know today would be Elvis Wallace, not Elvis Presley. Meet the woman who’s responsible for one of the most well-known names in music history.
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Elvis Presley’s Heritage
Elvis, born in 1935, was the son of Vernon Presley and Gladys Love Smith. Before his son rose to fame, Vernon worked a series of odd jobs—including milkman, sharecropper, carpenter, and day laborer—and demonstrated little career ambition, according to Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick.
After Elvis became a successful musician, Vernon helped handle some of his son’s business affairs, along with Elvis’ infamous manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Vernon died in Memphis in 1979, just two years after his son’s untimely death.
Vernon was the son of Jessie McDowell Presley, Elvis’ grandfather. Born in Fulton, Mississippi, in 1896, Jessie was an employee of Pepsi-Co Bottling Co. and recorded a few songs, himself, for a music company in Louisville, Kentucky, though none of his records ever reached the market.
Jessie, who died in 1973 at age 76, was one of at least nine children born to Rosella Elizabeth Presley, Elvis’ great-grandmother. If tradition had been followed, Jessie would have received his father’s surname. But Rosella never had much regard for tradition.
An Independent Woman
Rosella was born in 1861, also in Fulton. Her father, Dunnan Presley, deserted her at an early age. He had four separate wives and never bothered to divorce any before abandoning them. Dunnan enlisted in the Confederate Army twice during the Civil War and deserted twice, each time collecting a substantial bounty from the government, according to Elvis Presley: A Southern Life by Joel Williamson and Donald Lewis Shaw.
Due in part to this upraising, Rosella was a fiercely independent woman and one who seemed to care little for the institution of marriage. She never married, nor did she publicly identify the fathers of any of her children, according to Williamson and Shaw. By some accounts, she had as many as 10 kids by at least two men.
“This was a pioneer woman with a mind of her own and as much a taste for polyandry as her father for polygamy,” Elaine Dundy wrote in the book Elvis and Gladys.
Rosella gave all of her children her own surname: Presley. She raised her family from the profits of a series of small share-cropping farms for which she worked, according to Williamson and Shaw. Although she received very little education, she insisted all of her children go to school.
“She was a strict disciplinarian but a loving mother,” said her son Joseph Presley, one of Elvis’ great-uncles, according to Elvis and Gladys. “Despite the hardships, she always managed to give each of us a little present at Christmas, even if it was only a piece of candy or a secondhand pair of shoes.”
Elvis’ Great Grandfather Revealed
Because Rosella never revealed the fathers of her children, the name of Jessie’s father—and Elvis’ great-grandfather—was unknown for years. Jessie’s middle name was McDowell, so some people speculated that could have been the surname of his birth father, according to We Remember Elvis by Azalia S. Moore.
In 2004, the genetic genealogy company DNA Consultants tested Elvis’ DNA samples from bed sheets he had slept on in 1977. The company found Elvis’ Y chromosome type, which is passed down from the male line, matched no Presleys in available databases, but it exactly matched several males of the surname Wallace from Itawamba County, Mississippi, according to the book Old World Roots of the Cherokee by Donald Yates.
Five years later, members of Elvis’ extended family confirmed the truth: Jessie was the son of John Henry Wallace, a farmer, fiddle player, and Elvis’ great-grandfather who was born in Tilden, Mississippi, in 1853.
Wallace was married to another woman named Almira Jane McFadden, and the two had at least nine children together, according to U.S. Census records from 1900 and 1910. But Wallace developed an infatuation with Rosella Presley, who lived nearby, and their affair ultimately produced Elvis’ grandfather, Jessie, according to Images of America: Itawamba County by Mona Robinson Mills.
According to Mills, Jessie had confirmed the truth of his parentage to family members before his death. If Jessie and his male descendants had received his father’s surname, then Elvis Presley would have been born Elvis Wallace. A solid name to be sure, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
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