Riley Keough is Elvis Presley’s granddaughter. Her mom was Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis and Priscilla’s only child, so Riley grew up carrying one of the most famous last names in all of music.
When Riley had a baby girl in 2022, she reached back into that family history for the name. She called her daughter Tupelo, after the small Mississippi town where Elvis was born in a little two-room house. It was a sweet tip of the hat to her grandfather, and to the place where his whole story began.
For a while Riley kept her daughter mostly out of view. Then in 2023 she sat for a Vanity Fair cover interview and opened up a bit about life as a new mom.
She shared that she and her husband, Australian stuntman and filmmaker Ben Smith-Petersen, had picked the name Tupelo before the big 2022 “Elvis” movie ever came out. Ben is someone Riley met on a film set. So the name wasn’t about the movie at all. It was about the family.
Then came the question every family asks about a new baby.
When a child arrives in the Presley line, people expect to catch a glimpse of Elvis in her face. Or maybe Lisa Marie. Or Priscilla. That’s a lot of famous faces to live up to. So who does little Tupelo favor?
None of them, as it turns out.
Riley told Vanity Fair her daughter doesn’t take after the Presley side at all. The baby is the spitting image of her dad, Ben. In Riley’s own words, “She’s literally like someone shrunk my husband and that’s our baby.”
Most fans assumed the answer would be Elvis or Lisa Marie, so the real one caught a lot of people off guard. Any parent who has looked down at their newborn and seen their partner looking right back will grin at it.
Riley spoke warmly about her own mother too, calling Lisa Marie “a fierce woman, and a really wonderful mother.” You can hear her wanting to pass that same kind of love down to her own little girl.
She was honest about how hard the job really is. “I don’t think you ever can be a perfect parent,” she said, “but I would like to be the best mom for her that I can be.”
So the little girl got her name from Elvis’s hometown and her face from the other side of the family. Riley clearly wouldn’t have it any other way.
