Probably most everyone over a certain age knows who Parker was, but what I did NOT appreciate until this piece over at Talking Points Memo is his backstory. My title here is deliberately inflammatory, but apparently Parker was born in the Netherlands as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, and jumped ship in New York as a young man well before the War. And here he stayed. And until about 1981, nobody even knew his background (beyond, perhaps, Elvis himself).

This part is fascinating:

So how is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona? He had a Dutch accent, albeit a relatively mild one. One side note here: as far as we know, Parker never left the United States during the entire time he represented Elvis, from 1955 to 1977. He couldn’t. He didn’t have a passport and couldn’t get one. And it’s often suggested that this is why Elvis, despite being one of the most famous people in the world, basically never toured abroad. Because Parker couldn’t accompany him.

Marshall continues:

But back to our story: how did Parker pull this off? I had to figure this out. So over the weekend I chased this mystery down a true rabbit hole. The answer, to me at least, was as fascinating as the mystery. He kind of didn’t hide it. He had a reasonably good accent. And what he did have was affect and he got people to think that he had a bit of a lisp or speech impediment. This also seem to be the reason he came with a fraudulent backstory about being born in West Virginia, despite the fact that his professional life was all around Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee. First, West Virginia is fairly far from those states in the Lower Mississippi Valley and second, there are all sort of odd-sounding (to us) Appalachian regional sub-dialects. So if anyone ever thought or said, “Well, Colonel Tom speaks a bit funny, don’t he?” The answer would just be, “Well, he has some kind of upcountry hillbilly twang from somewhere in West Virginia where he’s from and also he’s got a lisp. So just let it go.” And they did. So basically that’s how he hid his accent: he didn’t.

This is some Don Draper shit, and I love it.