Of all the stories and legends born as a result of Elvis Presley’s death 45 years agoperhaps none portrays with such vividness and cruelty the degree of necrophiliac cult and scoundrel exploitation that surrounded the battered corpse of the King like that of Orion the masked singer. It is a story that seems as unlikely as all those that spoke of ‘post-mortem’ appearances of the idol in gas stations and burger joints, but this one is real. And it has a tragic ending.
The villain of the story is called (was called; died in 2009) Shelby Singleton and he was a record executive specializing in country music whose dictionary page containing the word “scruple” had disappeared. In 1969, Singleton, who had left the vice presidency of Mercury Records to found an independent company, acquired the glorious catalog of Sun Records in an operation that excluded the recordings that Elvis Presley had made for the legendary Memphis label, whose rights belonged to RCA. Shortly after the purchase, a tape recorded by an unknown singer from Pascagoula, Mississippi, with a vocal timbre very similar to that of Elvis, arrived at his offices. and singleton began to plot a most murky plan.
a question mark
The voice on the tape belonged to Jimmy Hodges Hollis, a guy who had made his first steps as an artist performing Elvis’s repertoire in clubs in Georgia and Alabama and who, after seeing how his first ‘single’ disappeared without causing the slightest impact, made a living training horses. Singleton convinced him to record two songs, ‘That’s all right’ and ‘Blue moon of Kentucky’ (precisely, the first two numbers that Elvis had recorded in Sun), and published them in a ‘single’ in which the singer’s name was replaced by a large question mark.
The crude fraud barely piqued anyone’s interest (beyond RCA, which threatened a lawsuit) and a second single, featuring the original song ‘Changing’, fared no better. Jimmy Ellis broke with Sun and in the following years released several albums under his name on Boblo Records, a small label in Macon, Georgia. His latest ‘single’ for Boblo was titled ‘I’m not trying to be like Elvis’ (I don’t pretend to be like Elvis).
And then, in August of 1977, Elvis died.
The star who faked his death
As chance would have it, a few months after the King’s death, Shelby Singleton came across the manuscript of a novel written by Gail Brewer Giorgio and titled ‘Orion: The living superstar of song’ in which the ups and downs of a very popular obese and drug-addicted singer who lives secluded in a mansion -Dixieland- and who simulates his own death to escape from the obligations of fame and the tyranny of an ultra-controlling manager are recounted. Singleton saw it clearly: history had to be recreated with a flesh and blood Orion. And he re-recruited Jimmy Ellis.
The first phase of the operation consisted of publishing an album of alleged duets (‘Duets’, it was called) in which Ellis’s voice was superimposed on some old recordings of Jerry Lee Lewis. In the titles, the mysterious singer was credited only as “Friend & rdquor; (friend), but the species was spread that it was actually Elvis. This time, there were many who took the bait (the disc exceeded one million copies sold), until the record company came out to deny the rumors and announce, in all seriousness, that the man accompanying Jerry Lee in the studio was… Orion.
the reborn
It was then that Orion’s first LP was released, titled ‘Reborn’ (Reborn), a gold colored vinyl stamped with Sun Records and wrapped in a cover of questionable taste in which a masked singer much like Presley was getting out of a coffin. The almost simultaneous publication of Gail Brewer’s novel Giorgio and the eagerness of the tabloids to feed the myth that Elvis was still alive boosted the career of the ghostly ‘impersonator’ with a galactic name, who between 1978 and 1982 recorded no less than 11 albums and he swelled to tour the southern states (he even opened for Kiss).
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The only problem was that Jimmy Ellis hated being Orion. Forced by contract to always appear in public dressed as the King and with the mask on (even when he went out to eat at a restaurant), the Pascagoula singer felt nullified as an artist and as a person and began to suffer from mental disorders (He clung to the delusional conviction that his biological father, whom he never met, was actually Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father.) On December 31, 1983, at the end of a performance at an agricultural fair in West Springfield, Massachusetts, Ellis tore off his mask and, before an audience of 5,000, proclaimed his true identity. Outraged, Shelby Singleton terminated all contracts linking Jimmy Ellis to Sun Records and canceled the Orion run.
At this point, you don’t need a master’s degree in Great American Tragedies to sense that the story is going to end badly. The singer tried to support himself by performing under different names (and, interestingly, often masked), but income dwindled so much that he was forced to open several businesses to survive. In one of them, Jimmy’s Pawn Shop, in Orrville, Alabama, was surprised on December 12, 1998 by a visit from an armed robber. Jimmy Hodges Ellis, the man who summoned the spirit of Elvis disguised as Orion, has been shot to death at the age of 53. His extraordinary adventure was reconstructed in 2015 by filmmaker Jeanie Finlay in the documentary ‘Orion. The man who would be king’. As the English say, stranger than fiction.
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Orion: the tragic story of the singer who posed as the ghost of Elvis