Graceland gets described as a palace. It isn't. It's a 17,000-square-foot Colonial Revival on a busy road, bought for $102,500 in 1957 by a young man whose main design brief was that his mother should never have to work again.
The den everyone calls the Jungle Room was a den first: Polynesian furniture, a stone wall, an indoor waterfall, shag carpet running up the walls. In 1976 a mobile recording truck backed onto the lawn and the room became a studio, because the man who owned it didn't want to leave the house.
Every family has a room like this — the one that got redecorated by whoever loved it most, and then quietly became the room where everything actually happened.
Memories attached to this place
“The gates were the first thing built for the crowds. Fans wrote their names on the stone all summer and nobody scrubbed it off.”
“You could feel the bass in the driveway when they recorded in the den. The whole block knew he was home.”
“He bought it for his mama. That's the part people from here always tell first.”
Timeline
- 1939House built for Ruth Brown Moore, named for her aunt Grace.
- 1957Bought at twenty-two, largely so his parents could stop working.
- 1965Den remodeled with the Polynesian furniture it's now known for.
- 1976Final sessions recorded in the den using a mobile truck outside.
- 1982Opened to the public; more than 20 million visitors since.
The most famous house in Tennessee is, at bottom, a son buying his mother a kitchen she liked.
