Does This Picture Reveal A 13-Year Old Elvis?

Vanity Fair recently published a photograph that could depict the King of Rock and Roll at 13 years old pushing his bike along a Tupelo street.

Lifelong Elvis fan, Wade Jones, was sent the picture in 2005 by Janelle McComb—a Presley family friend. She claimed the woman who took the snapshot was on her way to the drugstore to drop off some film to be developed. She had one more exposure on the roll and asked Elvis to pose. Jones didn’t catch the woman's name.

Several Elvis experts weighed in and attested to it's authenticity. British collector Tony Stuchbury said: “The body language matches. He put his head back like that in later years. I’ve seen pictures from vacations in ’69/’70 where he looks just like that. I’m convinced the photo is real.”

The photograph reveals additional clues as to the young man's identity. The boy in the frame stands at the intersection of North Spring and Jefferson, the epicenter of black and white Tupelo. Lee County Courthouse is just opposite of Jefferson street, where Elvis would attend WELO’s live radio shows.

One of Elvis' close friends and neighbors from Tupelo, 78-year-old Sam Bell said, “Yeah, I know that’s him.That’s the way he’d be looking. That’s the way he’d be dressed. And the bike too, that’s what we rode, those type of bikes.”

After partially obscuring the image, Wade Jones listed the image on Ebay last August and speculation about the young man's identity lit up Elvis message boards. Some believed they'd determined the exact location of the photograph—West Main Street, near the Tupelo Hardware store where Gladys Presley bought her son his first guitar. Others denounced it as a fake.

The photograph eventually sold for $361.68 to a European fan but speculation continues.

Tupelo historian, Roy Turner, says, “What makes the photo exceptional s that it’s the only pictorial reference to Elvis’s years in North Tupelo, living in the historically black community. Presley long talked about it, and biographers labor to document it. “Now,” he says, “we can see his story.”