It is no accident that Elvis Presley's rise to fame in the 1950s was in tandem with the rise of rock 'n' roll, for the man and the music are indelibly linked. Though not the first rock 'n' roll star, Presley was the most prominent prophet of the pioneering musical form. Moreover, with his daringly unique style, delivery, and sound, he symbolized the cultural shakeup that rumbled throughout the era. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and social historian David Halberstam proclaimed, "In cultural terms, [Elvis's] coming was nothing less than the start of a revolution."

Presley himself was as complex and as conflicted as the decade he has come to represent. Though shy and beguilingly sweet offstage, his early onstage persona was swaggering, even leering, with performances marked by frenzied bumping and grinding and seemingly gravity-defying bolts, leaps, and slides. To the sexually repressed...