Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself was published by Peachtree Publishers in 1984, and it represents Grizzard’s most sustained and ambitious piece of writing — not a collection of columns but a coherent memoir-essay that traces the cultural history of the Baby Boom generation through the lens of a Southern boy who grew up in Moreland, Georgia (population 300).
The book uses generational touchstones — Elvis, the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, disco — as chapter markers, tracing how each cultural earthquake shook the foundations of Grizzard’s small-town Southern world. Elvis’s death in 1977 becomes the terminal event: the moment when the culture that produced both Elvis and Lewis Grizzard (poor white Southern, saturated in gospel music and Saturday night hell-raising, capable of profound sentiment and profound vulgarity simultaneously) was officially over.
Grizzard writes about growing up in a world where “colored” water fountains were normal, where his father’s Korean War PTSD was called “nerves,” where church was compulsory and rock and roll was the devil’s music — and he refuses either to condemn this world (the liberal expectation) or to defend it (the conservative one). Instead he mourns it — not its injustices but its coherence, its certainties, its community, the sense of belonging to a place and a people that subsequent decades would fracture beyond repair.
The book is Grizzard’s most honest engagement with race — he acknowledges that the world he mourns was built on oppression, but he cannot stop mourning it.
Collecting Elvis Is Dead
First edition (Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta, 1984): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $25–$60