By Frank Lockwood
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The simple wood chapel 110 miles southeast of Memphis is no Crystal Cathedral. But the East Tupelo (Miss.) First Assembly of God building had a greater impact on 20th-century music than any of America’s gilded megachurches.

Inside its walls, Elvis Aron Presley discovered God and gospel music, learning to strum a guitar and sing.

Closed to the public for more than a half-century, the building was restored this year by the Elvis Presley Memorial Foundation. On Aug. 9, after a brief ceremony and prayer, the historic Pentecostal church will again open its doors to the world.

Foundation director Dick Guyton says the church will open in time for Elvis Week 2008, which marks the 31st anniversary of Presley’s death.

The chapel seats roughly 48 people and has no frills, Guyton said.

“It’s very plain and simple,” Guyton says. “Country churches back in the 1920s and 1930s were not real fancy.”

No steeple crowns its rooftop. No stained-glass windows line its walls.

Typical church
In many ways, it was a typical Assembly of God church from that era, says Darrin Rodgers, director of the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center in Springfield, Mo.

“Early Pentecostals were concerned with spreading the gospel and sending missionaries out and telling people about Jesus. … They were practical rather than concerned about leaving an architectural legacy,” Rodgers said.

When the church opens Saturday, it will look a lot like it did on Jan. 8, 1935, the day Elvis Presley entered the world.

The church, which Elvis attended for 13 years, was within walking distance of Presley’s home, said gospel music historian Jim Goff.

Elvis’ parents, Vernon and Gladys, were members.

“I don’t think they were Christmas and Easter attenders. They would’ve attended fairly regularly and they knew the preacher fairly well,” said Goff, a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.

Taught Elvis to play
Indeed, Pastor Frank Smith, who died last year at the age of 80, is credited with teaching Presley to play a few basic chords on a guitar.

Records indicate that Vernon Presley even served, briefly, as the church secretary, according to Pastor David Lann of East Heights Assembly of God in Tupelo — the church that replaced First Assembly.

Lann says there aren’t many traces of Elvis in the congregation’s files. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a photo of him” attending the church, he said. The memories have also faded.

“The people that used to be around, most of them have passed on.”

The congregation had a lifelong impact on young Elvis. “In many ways, I think his musical tastes and his understanding of religion and worship, those things had already been formed at the Assembly of God Church in Tupelo” before he set off for Memphis and worldwide fame, Goff said.
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