The King is dead and there will be no replacement. Elvis Presley, the founder, the greatest exponent, and the most passionate figure in rock and roll, died last night in the emergency ward of Memphis Baptist Hospital of "acute respiratory distress."

A hospital spokesman said Presley was found unconscious at his home by his road manager, Joe Esposito who called the fire department ambulance. Ambulance personnel tried to resuscitate the singer as he was being rushed to hospital but Presley' s personal physician, Dr George Nichopoulos, pronounced him dead.

Thus ended at the age of 42 the career of the man who recorded more than 400 songs, who sold more than 260 million records and who will always embody not only rock and roll but the sudden explosion of young white affluence which created it...

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935 in East Tupelo, Mississippi. His twin brother Jesse died at birth and his parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley raised him in the kind of loving and religious poor white home which was the very essence of the deep south.

After winning several talent competitions as a child, workings as a cinema usher and a truck driver, the job he always said he liked best, Elvis Presley met his first inspiration, Mr Sam Phillips, the owner of the Sun Record Company.

It was the early recordings of songs by black musicians that attracted the attention of Colonel Tom Parker, who was to become Presley's Svengali, guiding his career and personal life with the object of making as much money as possible. Within year of Col. Parker becoming his manager in November 1955, the young Presley had won his first six gold discs and an international reputation as the most dangerous thing to hit civilisation since the atom bomb.

US churchmen ,politicians and Senate leaders railed against "Elvis the Pelvis," whose bucking hips and passionate rhythms on stage were sending shudders of sexual excitement through a whole continent of American girlhood via the new medium of television...

He married Priscllla Beaulieu, the daughter of a US Air Force colonel, in 1967 after meeting her in West Germany while he was doing his military service. They had one daughter, Lisa Marie born in February, 1968, but were divorced in 1973.