A huckster. A Svengali. A bully. The public perception of Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker has long positioned him as a byword for duplicitous artist representation, where profitability trumps art and the artist always loses out on the lion’s share.
You can see why. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, even the name Colonel Tom Parker was a confection and an invention. Therefore, the presumption runs, so was he. But in The Colonel and the King, a new biography of Parker, Peter Guralnick dispels many of these presumptions to present a far more nuanced portrait of a highly moral operator.
