1.FUTURE KING: Elvis, pictured in 1937, spent his modest childhood in rural Mississippi. Elvis Presley's mother knew he would be great one day, because his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. "When one twin dies, the one who lives gets the strength of both," she told her son, LIFE magazine noted in 1995. Born Elvis Aaron Presley on January 8, 1935, the future King's beginnings in East Tupelo, Miss., were poor -- so much so that his parents couldn't afford to pay the doctor who delivered him. He received his first guitar for his 11th birthday (it was less expensive than what he really wanted: a bicycle), got in with a community of musicians when the family moved to Memphis in 1949 and recorded his first single (which he paid for himself) in 1953. He was a star from the beginning: As LIFE noted in 1995, when the receptionist at the recording studio asked whom he sounded like, Elvis replied, "I don't sound like nobody."