James Long, a seminarian with a fine baritone voice, was asked to sing “Amazing Grace” at a mass last year, and he made it through the first couple of lines just fine.
Then, without his willing it, “saved a wretch like me” started sliding and bending, coming out more like, “saved uh-uh ruh-etch laaack maay.”
“I was doing my best to sing it straight,” Long remembers, “but everybody was almost in tears of laughter, because it was suddenly Elvis’ `Amazing Grace.’ “
The Roman Catholic Church, like most other denominations in the United States, has found in recent years that a larger and larger portion of its clergy are called to serve the church as a second career.
So maybe it was inevitable that the priesthood would one day include a former Elvis impersonator.
And Long, 27, was no middling Elvis in his day.
After graduation from high school in Louisville, his budding musical career quickly shot from the realm of “Any Day Now” to “Rock-a-Hula, Baby!”
Long played stadiums. He had an entourage of 35 musicians, technicians and managers. He had a 250-member fan club. He had 19 Elvis suits, worth up to $5,000 each.
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(For the record, those were Las Vegas-style jumpsuits, circa 1972-1973. Long loved the rich depth of the later Elvis’ voice, plus the costumes fit him better.)
In 1996 Long became the king of would-be Kings, winning the Elvis impersonator national championships in Memphis.
“It’s big. When you win the national championship, it means a lot more money. The guys (in the band) really wanted it,” he says. “But I had no desire to win.”
Years before his mom gave Long his first Elvis suit–in fact, when he was only 5 years old–Long had already decided he wanted to be a priest.
And even as he rode the Mystery Train of life as an Elvis impersonator, that belief in his vocation to the priesthood kept tugging at him.
Getting dressed before a show, the full-length mirror would reflect rhinestones and glitter, leather and sideburns. But all Long could see was a man of the cloth.
He had his own Chrysler Fifth Avenue. He bought jewelry whenever he got bored. In an Elvis sense, he had it all, but it never seemed quite enough.
“The more I ignored it, the louder it became. I couldn’t run away,” he remembers.
He finally went to visit some seminarians in his hometown, and the experience changed him. During a show shortly after that, Long was performing “Kentucky Rain” when he simply stopped singing, his mind back in the seminary.
The performance gaffe didn’t leave him crying in the chapel, but he was all shook up.
“I knew then that it was time to go,” he said.
He agreed to go on to the Elvis championship for the sake of the band. He won, he is convinced, because he simply had fun while other competitors worked themselves into a nervous frenzy backstage, biting their nails and listening to old tracks over and over.
Then Long gave it all up–the money and the screaming women and the security of being Elvis.
He entered St. Meinrad’s Seminary in Louisville. When that institution closed, he transferred to St. Joseph Seminary College on the campus of Loyola University in Chicago. Next year, he will go to the major seminary in Mundelein.
Long says he has never been happier. Elvis has left the picture, although the seminarian does draw on his life experience where it might serve the church.
His homilies, he promises, “will shake, rattle and roll.” And he’s not above donning the jumpsuit for a good cause.
At 7 p.m. Sunday, Long will present “A Tribute to Elvis,” a dinner show at Loyola’s Centennial Forum to raise money for St. Joseph’s.
“The greater the gift, the greater the responsibility to share it. The Elvis thing may be a gift from God,” he says.
Perhaps Long’s greater gift is a healthy sense of humor, about Elvis and about himself. If people giggle the first time they hear his story, if they shake and go crimson when they hear him sing “Amazing Grace,” that’s fine with him.
“Ya betcha, we gonna get it going, bring some Jesus to the people,” says Elvis, momentarily taking over the clean-cut, blond seminarian.
And if his former colleagues and competitors see an example in Long, better still. With about 7,500 working Elvis impersonators still out there, the priest shortage would be a thing of the past.
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