Today is the Birthday of the "King" - Elvis Presley in 1935

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):

January 8 is the birthday of Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). He learned to play the guitar when he was 12 but never really learned to read music. He just knew how to mimic what he heard. He loved all kinds of music, and his friends said that he could reproduce perfectly almost anything he heard on the radio.
He had no clear ambition to become a professional musician. After high school, he got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company and he began studying to become an electrician. His career as a recording artist only came about because of his love for his mother.
At the time, the Sun Record Company had a special recording studio where anyone could come in and pay a small fee to record personal records for themselves. In the summer of 1953, Elvis scraped together $4 to record two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin," as a present for his mother. When the woman at the front desk asked him what kind of a singer he was, he said, "I sing all kinds." She asked him whom he sounded like, and he said, "I don't sound like nobody."
The recording engineer that day liked Elvis's voice and somehow those recordings made their way into the hands of producer Sam Phillips who specialized in recording "hillbilly music." Phillips called Elvis back into the studio to see if he might have some real talent. Elvis sang a few slow ballads, which were his favorite songs to sing, and Sam Phillips wasn't too impressed. And then, in between takes, Elvis and the other musicians started fooling around and singing a blues tune called "That's All Right, Mama." Sam Phillips asked them to start over from the beginning and recorded the song. He then rushed the record to the biggest DJ in Memphis.
When Elvis found out that the song, which he considered a joke, would be on the radio, he was so embarrassed that he hid in a local movie theater until his parents made him come home. That night the DJ in Memphis played Elvis's new song on the radio for the first time, and he received 47 phone calls and 17 telegrams asking to play the song again. In the following week, Memphis stores sold some 6,000 copies of the record. A few weeks later, Elvis sang the song at a local music show at an outdoor park. He was extremely nervous while singing the song and started shaking his leg in rhythm to the music. The girls in the audience went crazy.
Elvis went on to record 149 songs that made the top 100 in the Billboard's pop charts, including "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Jailhouse Rock," and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"
He said: "Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. Ain't nowhere else in the world where you can go from driving a truck to a Cadillac overnight."