The sheer mass of evidence seems to have suffocated the narrative, leaving the reader to supply the dynamic. Nevertheless, a single glimpse of Elvis caught by a girlfriend watching porn movies with his Memphis pals is virtually the only explicit indication of seriously unbuttoned behaviour. We are in the room with Presley for most of these 480-odd pages, seeing and hearing things as he experienced them, aware of the world's gathering interest only as something beyond the footlights or outside the mansion gates.

A decent, scrupulous man, he seems to have decided to tell the story from a standpoint as intimate as possible without resorting to prurient inquiry or speculation. Using - as 50 pages of footnotes dutifully attest - a range of newly acquired testimony as well as all the available material, Guralnick has chosen to narrow the focus. In which case, it is probably worth a closer look. Beyond its singular qualities, his career can be seen as the mechanism through which black culture began to colonise the world's sub-conscious, a complex and still emerging process of payback for slavery. Only Elvis Presley incarnates the perfect union of blues and country, of the black experience and the white, which is at the heart of Southern music and which, it must be said, lit the fuse of the entire pop culture phenomenon. His portraits of Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Charlie Rich were no more than trailers for the main event. But for the author of several highly regarded books of essays on the blues and country musicians of the Southern states, it is an attempt to tell the biggest story of all. In some quarters, this may be thought excessively diligent. In other words, having dealt with Presley's childhood and adolescence in 88 pages, Peter Guralnick spends the next 400 taking us from 'That's All Right, Mama' to King Creole, a matter of a mere four years. The first of two volumes of what is clearly intended to be a definitive biography, it stops on 22 September 1958, with the 23-year-old Presley - as yet unspoilt by Hollywood and Las Vegas - waving to thousands of weeping fans from the deck of the USS General Randall before setting sail for Germany and service with the Second Armored Division.

FOR THOSE who go along with John Lennon's remark, on being told of the demise of Elvis Presley, that the greatest of all rock 'n' roll singers had 'died the day he went into the army', this is the book.

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