Elvis has left the building — and turned up on the Alabama Gulf Coast, where you can book him for a surprise ride-along. His name is Jason Braly, he lives in Fairhope, and his career is one of the more delightfully improbable stories in the coastal arts community: painter, sculptor, actor, voice-over specialist, and, on occasion, the King himself.
Athens, Alabama, and a first stage
Braly grew up in Athens, Alabama, and the artistic streak showed early. His mother noticed that his childhood drawings were more detailed than most kids his age and decided he was destined to be an artist. School plays followed, though he never had formal training — until a high school field trip to Montgomery to see a Shakespeare play changed something. It was the first time the thought arrived: “I can do this.”
He didn’t take acting seriously yet. He played sports — “I wasn’t very good,” he admits — but a few friends talked him into auditioning for the senior class play, and he landed the lead. “I got lots of laughs in the play and found something I was good at,” he has said. “I found a place where I shined.”
At the University of North Alabama in Florence, he majored in art, and the theater kept pulling him back. During his sophomore year, fraternity brothers suggested auditioning for “Grease”; Braly won the role of Kenickie and sang “Greased Lightning” to great acclaim. That was the hook that convinced him acting would be a major part of his life — and he doubled down, adding theater as a second major alongside art.
Graceland, by way of Booneville
The Elvis chapter began, improbably, with a boring weekend. Braly had met Michelle in art class, and the two were visiting her hometown of Booneville, Mississippi — a small town near Memphis where entertainment options were thin. When Michelle asked her mother what they should do for fun, the answer was Graceland. There, in the recording booth, Braly sang “Don’t Be Cruel,” and everyone who heard it was amazed. “I knew I was on to something,” he says.
Not long after, his fraternity staged a 1950s show and asked him to sing Elvis. He agreed, performed “Blue Suede Shoes,” and the crowd loved it. Days later, a woman who had heard him called and asked him to sing Elvis for her mother’s 86th birthday. “And that’s when my Elvis character began,” he says — a character he has kept in his back pocket ever since.
Los Angeles, and a break wearing sideburns
After graduation, Braly and a friend headed to Los Angeles to try acting for real. He had left Michelle behind in Alabama; thirty days after arriving in California, he asked her to marry him. She said yes and moved out to join him.
Four years of pursuit produced one genuine break: he was cast as an understudy in a production of Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Braly learned four roles and ended up playing three — Freddy the bartender, Picasso, and Elvis. The Elvis part, in particular, opened industry doors: “Elvis got me into all the acting unions,” he says, including the Screen Actors Guild, the theater union, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. During those years he even landed the part of Elvis in an interactive video game called “Fox Hunt,” and worked with an Elvis agent, performing at receptions and birthday parties — mostly with background tracks, which he notes have improved enormously since.
The seeds of the “Elvis Gram” were planted in that era too. In Palm Springs, a wealthy client hired Braly to impersonate Elvis while they rode through the city in a car, stopping at bars to sing — an experience he describes as “really fun.” The city later hosted an all-day tribute to Elvis and Colonel Parker, non-stop impersonators, and Braly came away with the feeling that still drives him: “It’s electrifying when you are behind a character. You don’t feel like yourself. I like being behind a microphone. It’s magical and so much fun.”
Teacher, artist, sculptor
Hollywood burnout came eventually, and the Bralys moved to Nashville, where Jason earned a master’s in education and began teaching elementary art. Three years later they moved back to Athens, where he taught elementary school and college courses at Athens State University. In 2012, after 15 years in classrooms, he retired from teaching to focus on his art, and he and Michelle moved to the Fairhope area.
His art practice took shape in two forms: mixed-media collages and welded sculptures built from reclaimed metal. In 2017, the Eastern Shore Art Center awarded him Best in Show for one of his sculptures — a signal honor in one of Alabama’s most active art communities. The move to Fairhope placed him at the center of a coastal arts scene with real depth: the Eastern Shore Art Center anchors the town’s gallery life, Theatre 98 keeps community theater alive down the road in Fairhope, and the region’s festivals and art walks give working artists a steady circuit. For a man who had taught in classrooms for 15 years, trading lesson plans for a welder and a home studio was less a retirement than a homecoming — a return to the two loves, art and performance, that had been threaded through his whole life since the attic drawings in Athens.
The elementary-teacher years also left a permanent mark on his skill set. “Having an ear for voices has been good for my career,” he says. He recently built a voice-over studio at his home, chasing a craft that has been transformed by technology: the old path required expensive equipment and travel to a recording studio; now a well-treated room and a good microphone open the door. He is pursuing audiobooks and other voice work — and finds, amusingly, that the standard American accent is the hardest voice of all for him to master.
The stage again — and the Elvis Gram
The acting bug returned by way of a Facebook ad Michelle spotted for the play “Four Old Broads” at Theatre 98. Braly auditioned and won the role of a retired, fifty-something Elvis impersonator — a part that did not exactly require a research trip. “I hadn’t performed in a play in 23 years,” he said. “I had to do it.” Playing the aging Elvis man on stage made him think it was time to bring the character out of retirement in real life. “After I sang Elvis for the birthday mom in North Alabama years ago, I’ve gotten calls ever since.”
The most charming of those calls produced the “Elvis Gram.” Michelle operates Driving Daisies, a driving service for seniors in the coastal area, and when a client wanted to welcome a visiting friend with a big surprise, the plan wrote itself: Michelle in the front seat, Elvis in the back. They picked up the friend, and the King leaned forward: “Hey baby, do you want a ride?” “I sure do!” After a few requests, he crooned “I Can’t Help Falling in Love” just as the car pulled up at the Wash House for dinner. Both women were crying. “We had to get the tissues out,” Braly recalls. “It was a treat for them and a treat for us!”
The formula scales to any occasion — birthdays, anniversaries, welcome homes — and books through Driving Daisies. Between rides, Braly continues his studio work and has teamed with Allan Walls for real estate marketing videos, with both represented by agent Swann Burrus III in Nashville.
There is a tidy irony in the whole arc: a kid from Athens who couldn’t quite make the team found his place on stage, followed art through three states and a dozen careers, and ended up in one of Alabama’s most artistically ambitious small towns — where, every so often, the King rides again through the streets of the Eastern Shore, singing to surprised passengers who cannot believe their luck. Elvis, it turns out, never really left the building. He just moved to Fairhope.