Book: Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself

Overview
Lewis Grizzard’s 1984 book Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself gathers a run of his newspaper-honed comic essays into a single, fast-talking portrait of a South sliding from the comfort of yesterday into the bafflements of the present. The title is the punch line and the thesis: the death of Elvis Presley stands as a cultural mile marker, the day when old certainties, music on the AM dial, manners at the supper table, heroes you could hum along with, gave way to cable television, new etiquette, and a world that could make even a born storyteller feel slightly out of tune. Grizzard uses that feeling to power an affectionate, exasperated, deeply human tour of modern American life as seen from a Southern porch swing.

Structure and Voice
The book reads like an evening with a quick-witted friend who never runs out of stories. Short, column-length pieces roll one into the next, each set in the cadences of a courthouse square or a press box and driven by Grizzard’s two great gifts: a knack for the sideways observation and a fearless commitment to the bit. He blends memoir, social commentary, and stand-up timing, drawing on small-town childhood memories, big-city newsroom scrapes, and the road miles between, with stops at diners, barbershops, church suppers, and ball games. The voice is plainspoken and sly, tender one paragraph and needling the next, with self-deprecation as the reliable aftertaste.

Themes
Change is the constant antagonist. Grizzard wrestles with modernity, gadgets that complicate simple things, shifting gender expectations, evolving manners, and the ways it unsettles people raised to say yes ma’am, mind their elders, and keep a straight face until the punch line. He salutes community and ritual, from football Saturdays to funeral food, and treats nostalgia as both cure and trap: comforting in its familiar rhythms, dangerous when it blinds you to the present’s possibilities. Elvis, in his telling, becomes less a celebrity than a symbol of a shared soundtrack, and losing him marks the moment when a generation realized time was not just passing but moving on without asking permission.

Humor and Sensibility
The jokes land because they are anchored in particulars: the smell of good barbecue, the soft tyranny of summer humidity, the way a small town can know everything about you except the truth. Grizzard skewers pretension in all directions, smirks at Yankee-Southerner misunderstandings, and turns his sharpest barbs inward, admitting his own stubbornness, romantic misadventures, and middle-aged aches. Some riffs are very of their era and can read dated or prickly, but the prevailing sensibility favors empathy over scorn. Even when he gripes, he is really testifying to what he loves.

Notable Vignettes
Recurring set pieces juxtapose old and new: a barbershop chorus of storytellers confronted with a world that prefers headphones; a road trip scored by country radio, interrupted by the realization that the stations and the towns have changed while the landscape looks the same; the spectacle of Elvis impersonators and souvenir culture as a mirror for American longing. He returns often to food, family, and football as the three pillars that still hold up the porch roof, and to journalism as a calling that taught him to listen for the angle no one else heard.

Legacy
Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself helped cement Grizzard as a national voice of Southern humor, conversational, argumentative, and unapologetically local even as it speaks to universal anxieties about aging and change. It captures a moment when the South, and America, felt between stations, and it gives that static a rhythm you can smile to. The result is a book that reads like a wake and a hootenanny at once, a celebration of the stories people tell when the lights go out and the radio still plays in memory.