Senses of an ending: Danish reactions to the death of Elvis Presley in 1977

ABSTRACT

The death of Elvis Presley in August 1977 unveiled a field of contested interpretative and emotional positions regarding his public persona and its wider cultural implications. Closely studying the particular repercussions of such contestations in Denmark, using the totality of available source material, this article analyses a historically specific complex of temporal sediments and contested cultural norms and emotional expressions in connection with international celebrities and their fans and detractors. In more general terms, this study can contribute to the ongoing endeavours to historicise approaches to celebrities and the webs of significance surrounding their deaths.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity deaths
• social mourning
• fandom
• Elvis Presley

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Drafts of this article were presented at the research seminar ‘Redefining Celebrity and Fandom in the 1970s’, Aarhus University 19 December 2019; and at the regular paper seminar of the research programme in History at Aarhus University 16 May 2019. While assuming full responsibility of all remaining weaknesses of this text, the author is grateful to the participants for constructive comments, and to Mikkel Thelle, Silke Holmqvist and Mathias Haeussler and the anonymous peer reviewers for additional comments.

2. This includes all local and national Danish newspapers (now digitised in various forms, most on mediestream.dk, a few others on the websites of the individual newspapers); all popular magazines with general news content (studied in print); radio and television (partially available through the public media site dr.dk and the Danish research database larm.fm); and the small fan club newsletter Elvis Presley, providing rare insight into the particular emotional repercussions and internal dynamics among the most dedicated Elvis fans of the late 1970s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bertel Nygaard

Bertel Nygaard is an associate professor in modern European history at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University. He has worked broadly within the field of modern intellectual, cultural and social history.