Since the mid-19th century, a beloved carol about the Three Wise Men has celebrated a "King forever, ceasing never/over us all to reign."
That might not be exactly the way plenty of otherwise-normal human beings still feel about Elvis Aron Presley 33 years after his death, but it's within shouting distance.
Especially at the time of year the singer known as the King of Rock loved most.
"Elvis was a big Christmas freak," says Jed Duvall, a Presley impersonator who will share a Glen Burnie stage with two fellow professionals this weekend in a show titled, whimsically enough, "The 3 Kings of Christmas."
"He had a big heart, and he always spent money on gifts like there was no tomorrow, sometimes to an extent that upset his family," Duvall says. "This time of year gave him an excuse."
Duvall, Chris Presley and Will Debley, three of the 15 or so serious Elvis tribute artists who live within 20 miles of Baltimore, will rock the audience at the 450-seat Whispers Lounge on Sunday with two hours of the King's top hits, laced with a sampling of the many Christmas-themed numbers Presley recorded during his legendary 25-year career.
"Elvis is definitely a big part of Christmas for lots of people," says Whispers manager Helen Acosta, who grew up listening to the King with her eight siblings. "Around my house, we love his 'White Christmas' and [the holiday ballad] 'Mama Liked the Roses.' "
She got the idea for a faux Elvis Christmas spectacular, Acosta says, sometime after Aug. 29, when eight Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs, in industry jargon) assembled from around the country to do a benefit at Whispers for cancer research.
It went over so well that she later asked one of the local participants, Duvall, to round up some other Elvi from the area to bring good rockin' to the holidays. The details came together this month.
If historic album sales are any indication, music lovers around the world still powerfully associate this time of year with Presley, who would have turned 76 next month.
His first holiday LP, "Elvis' Christmas Album," came out in 1957 and included a reverent "Silent Night" and the weeper he'd turn into his signature holiday number, "Blue Christmas." The LP sold 12 million copies in two incarnations, making it the biggest-selling American Christmas album of all time, a title it still holds.
A second venture, "Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas" (1971), fared well, too, selling more than 3.4 million units over the years.
The three impersonators are usually happy just to stay consistently booked most weekends, as Chris Presley has been at more Christmas parties than he can remember.
"I've done Elvis dressed as Santa, throwing gifts to the crowd from my bag," he says. "I've sung ' Santa Claus Is Back in Town'; I've shown up with some pretty sexy elves. [Elvis'] Christmas music does have an effect on people."
From Croom to Tokyo
Just as Presley was many things to many people — a perceived threat to America's teens, a patriotic Army private, a lounge lizard megastar — the 40,000 or so people said to impersonate him professionally in the U.S. come to their work via different paths.
Take the three who will alternate at Whispers. The King brought each a new birth, if in a different way.
Just two years after Presley's death in 1977, James "Jed" Duvall was a high school junior in the town of Croom in Southern Maryland and, as he recalls it, something less than an idol with the ladies.
Then a Presley impersonator came to school and performed a concert that left the girls all shook up. "One jumped onstage and tried to get his belt," recalls Duvall, 48, still sounding more than a little amazed.
Duvall worked up an act of his own, dyed his light brown hair a Presley sable and impersonated the King at a talent show the next year.
He finished 11 out of 12, but still won pretty big. "The captain of the cheerleading team had never spoken to me, but she talked to me on Monday. … We're still friends on Facebook," says Duvall, who has been doing the Presley gig off and on ever since. ( Johnny Cash and Paul McCartney are also in his repertoire.)
Debley got started the youngest, at age 6. A mere two months after Presley's death, his parents were watching a PBS retrospective on the King, and little Will couldn't take his eyes off the show. After that, he snuck downstairs in the middle of the night several times to see it again on tape — and practice some hip-swiveling Elvis moves.
His dad caught him, but rather than giving Will a lecture, he ended up buying him a custom-made jumpsuit. A year later, Debley did his first show, at an Anne Arundel retirement home.
As Debley, now 33, grew older (and closer in appearance to the King), he worked harder on his three-octave voice, eventually winning a national Elvis competition, appearances on PBS and Fox Morning News and, most recently, designation as the official ETA of the Smithsonian Institution.
"It's a thrill helping people remember the good times they had when they were younger, and introducing the music to kids, too," says Debley, a Mount Airy resident who does Elvis as a full-time job.
And if Christmas is a time of new birth, how's this for a biography? Seventeen years ago, Fells Point native Chris Presley — and yes, he says, that's his real surname — had just finished a tour of duty with the Navy when he found himself jobless, homeless and living on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu.
He had long strummed country music on the guitar — never for money — when he got the idea of picking a few tunes for the tourists. He tried Sinatra standards, Ricky Nelson numbers and more.
Only Elvis wowed the crowds. Cranking out "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Jailhouse Rock" earned Presley up to $200 a day — and a new identity. "You're like a young Elvis," a Japanese tourist told him one day. He ended traveling to Elvis-mad Tokyo, where he performed as the King every night for a month.
Presley, 37, eventually returned to Maryland, where he now lives in Ellicott City, spending 90 percent of his work life impersonating Elvis (he has done the act in all 50 states), and 10 percent fronting his rockabilly band, the Blue Moon Boys.
Any time of year is good for, well, living like the King. "I love rockabilly, but I'd have to do 10 shows to make what I make doing Elvis," Presley says.
Roughing up a classic
ETAs are notoriously fanatical about their work, some to the extent that they barely listen to other forms of music.
"A lot of time when you enter competitions, and they're putting the show program together, they'll ask you to name your non-Elvis musical influences. Some people write NOBODY," Duvall says, laughing. "That's kind of extreme for my taste."
Still, like most impersonators, Duvall makes a personal study of the King, devouring all the books, articles and biopics he can get his hands on.
To him, it's clear that Presley's early life fed his well-known love of Christmas. The legend's impoverished boyhood, including the shame he felt at having grown up in public housing, left Presley a surprisingly insecure person, Duvall says, one who perhaps felt he could buy affection through giving gifts.
"Even when he was a boy, and his family was poor and had to scrimp and save for his presents, Elvis had a habit of giving them away to other kids," says Duvall, a Glen Burnie resident whose day jobs are photography and computer graphics.
Presley was known to shower random strangers with gifts like Cadillacs and checks worth thousands of dollars, but he was especially generous come Christmastime, handing friends and family everything from poodles and horses to diamond-encrusted jewelry and cars.
Presley also decorated Graceland, his famed Memphis home, lavishly every holiday season, installing a white vinyl tree in the living room and thousands of blue lights along the driveway. The mansion still observes those traditions, to the delight of fans like Debley, who visited one year.
"The lights are awesome," he says. "It looks like 'Blue Christmas.'"
The King was momentously selfless on Christmas; he gave more than $50,000 a year to Memphis, Tenn., charities most years, and one year stopped by police headquarters to thank the officers on duty for working on the holiday. But his love of yuletide tunes stirred controversy, at least early in his career.
At the time Presley released "Elvis' Christmas Album" in 1957, much of America still saw him as little more than a gyrating threat to public decency.
The famed bandleader Sammy Kaye said Elvis' new Christmas album "borders on the sacrilegious," according to Time magazine. A Calgary radio station manager called his carols "degrading," and the Elvis historian Alan Hanson notes on his website, Elvis-History-Blog.com, that a writer for the Ohio Penitentiary News described the Irving Berlin classic "White Christmas" as a "beloved [song] until this creature recorded his barnyard version of it."
That version — modeled on a doo-wop take by The Drifters that had been a hit on black radio stations in 1954 — might sound tame today, but it so outraged Berlin that the famed composer called radio stations across North America to demand a boycott. Many complied.
In time, as Debley points out, Presley gained fame and admiration for his many releases of sincerely felt gospel music. His only Grammy Awards for LPs came for the inspirational "How Great Thou Art" (1967) and "He Touched Me" (1972).
That was only natural, as was his love for Christmas, in Debley's view. "Elvis read feverishly on the topic of religion," he says. "He wanted to learn why he, of all people, was given these incredible gifts. I don't know if he ever figured it out, but spirituality was definitely the central part of his life."
Home for Christmas
At Duvall's home, where Elvis ornaments and Elvis Christmas cards from friends around the world are a major part of the decor, Presley always plays a central role. The 1957 holiday album — with its secular songs on Side A, its religious-themed ones on Side B — ranks high in the family's 50-CD rotation, behind only the Harry Simeone Chorale's classic "The Little Drummer Boy" and his wife Kim's favorite, "Christmas with the Beach Boys."
He thinks less of the 1971 Christmas album, which Duvall says lacks the energy of its predecessor. "He was so famous by then, there wasn't nearly as much edge," he says. "It sounds like a producer came up to Elvis one day and said, 'You know, we could make some money if you did some more Christmas songs.'"
Then again, as every ETA knows, you can't really reference Presley's music without specifying which major era you're talking about. Many shows by impersonators focus on either the bump-and-grind 1950s and early 1960s (the Rockabilly Period), the mid-to-late 1960s (the Leather Jacket Years, also known as the "'68 Special Era") or the more sedate 1970s (the Vegas Years or "the Jumpsuit Era").
Sunday's show will incorporate several periods. With a soundtrack backdrop, it will feature Chris Presley doing 40 minutes as the Rockabilly Elvis, Debley taking 40 more as the 1960s King, and the veteran Duvall donning his $1,000 white jumpsuit to handle the Vegas period.
Set lists aren't final yet, but Presley says he plans at least to perform "Santa, Bring My Baby Back to Me," a number from the 1957 record. Debley will take on "Blue Christmas" and the salacious blues number, "Santa Claus Is Back in Town."
Duvall says one of his most salient memories was the time he shocked his conservative Christian mother with a hip-swinging version of that number, but on Sunday, he'll sing a gentler one.
While he was stationed in Texas with the Army, Duvall says, the holidays meant being separated from loved ones at home, much as Pvt. Elvis Presley was during his tour in Germany in the late 1950s.
"I'll be doing 'I'll Be Home on Christmas Day,' " Duvall says.
The King's forever
No one is likely to mistake these three "kings" for the wise men who are said to have followed a star to the manger of the baby Jesus. But to many Elvis fans, the star's musical gifts might as well have been gold, frankincense and myrrh.
"I know people who still believe Elvis was the Second Coming," says Chris Presley. "And let's face it: If aliens were to land on Earth tomorrow, they might find more pictures of Elvis than they'd find of Jesus. He's no longer just a singer."
Still, Presley is more comfortable seeing his idol in an earthly perspective.
Many artists have recorded "Blue Christmas," he says, from Ernest Tubb in 1949 to the Beach Boys in 1964 and Andrea Bocelli last year, but to most music lovers, that holiday tune brings to mind one artist and one alone.
"He was like no one else," Presley says. "When Elvis came along and put his stamp on something, it was his forever."
If you go
What: The 3 Kings of Christmas: A Holiday Celebration of the Music of the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley
Where: Whispers Lounge, 7954 Baltimore Annapolis Blvd., Glen Burnie
When: 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 19. (Dinner starts at 3 p.m., music at 4 p.m.)
Tickets: $35 (includes buffet dinner)
Information: 410-768-3900
FYI: Audience members are encouraged, in the spirit of Elvis, to take an unwrapped toy to donate to Toys for Tots.