Abstract
Immediately after the sudden death of the rock star Elvis Presley in August 1977 grieving fans converged on Graceland, his home in Memphis, Tennessee, to mourn and pay tribute to him. Ever since, Graceland has received thousands of visitors a year who come to visit Presley’s home and grave. For many the visit is a pilgrimage they feel driven to make: often, too, they leave their mark on the site to testify to this need, and graffiti with comments such as ‘I had to make a pilgrimage to Graceland’ can be found in the area around Presley’s former home. In the eyes of the popular media, whose fascination with Presley has not been diminished by the years, the word invariably used to describe such visits is ‘pilgrimage’.1
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© 1993 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Reader, I. (1993). Introduction. In: Reader, I., Walter, T. (eds) Pilgrimage in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12637-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12637-8_1
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