Blelvis, in his earlier days

Speaking of WAMU, DCist ran into Blelvis last night, and he was telling us that he went on one of the local public radio station’s programs last Friday, for a segment timed to coincide with the 32nd anniversary of Elvis’s death. Sure enough, reporter Sam Greenspan filed a piece for Metro Connection on August 14 about his summer-long search for D.C.’s own Black Elvis, eventually catching up with him in Mt. Pleasant. You can download the segment here. Missing from the WAMU story is that Blelvis may have been hard to find recently because he spent an extended period of time in Austin, TX earlier this year (at least, that’s what he’s told some people — the timeline of how long he was gone and exactly when is a little fuzzy). It isn’t the first time he’s left Washington, either. A friend told me he recalled Blelvis moving to South Carolina for at least a year, around 2006, only to return sporting a much less-Elvisy look. Last night, Blelvis hardly looked like Elvis at all, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, with short-cropped hair and no sideburns or facial hair to speak of, a far cry from his earliest days of local fame. He’s still offering to sing you any one of the 1,112 Elvis songs he has memorized, though, for a small donation to the Blelvis cause.