Elvis Presley is one of the most photographed figures in music history. But in the nearly 37 years since his death, every significant picture of rock’s swivel-hipped pioneer has been widely seen. Or has it?

Wade Jones, 50, a lifelong Elvis fan from Mount Holly, North Carolina, has been “constantly looking at photos” since 1977, when he smuggled a tape recorder into one of Presley’s last concerts. And so in 2005, when the late Janelle McComb—a Presley family friend from Tupelo, Mississippi—sent Jones a childhood picture of the future king of rock ’n’ roll, Jones was dumbstruck.

“I had never seen that image in my life,” says Jones, who looked at the photo of a young teenager leaning on his bike—his head tilted back, his hooded eyes nearly closed in the Tupelo sun—and realized it was the first shot placing Presley (who would have been 13 that year, 1948) on the streets of his hometown. “Just his pose, and the fact that he was in a candid situation, surrounded by normal people, was kind of eerie.”

The image also appealed to a European fan, who paid $361.68 when Jones, partially obscuring the image to keep it from being copied, listed a print on eBay last August. The auction started an Internet buzz on Elvis-fan message boards. Graceland—Presley’s homestead—contacted Jones about acquiring the original. Media requests poured in. Some believed they’d pinpointed the exact location in the picture—West Main Street, near the Tupelo Hardware store where Gladys Presley bought her son his first guitar. Others denounced the photo as a fake; after all, Jones was the same guy who had once auctioned water from a Styrofoam cup that Elvis had used on stage in Charlotte, and later sent the cup “on tour.” Yes, admits the digital-sensor salesman, but that was all in good fun.

So, is the photo—published here, for the first time, uncropped—really Elvis? In the full-frame version, someone has written “Elvis” in script near the right border. But who? Janelle McComb, who died two months after mailing it, told Jones in a phone call that the woman who took the snapshot was on her way to the drugstore to drop off some film to be developed. She had one more exposure on the roll, and just asked Elvis, whom she knew, to pose. But Jones didn’t catch her name.

Billy Smith, Elvis’s first cousin, confirms that the boy in the photo is indeed his relative. Moreover, when approached by Vanity Fair, several Elvis experts attested to its seeming authenticity. British collector Tony Stuchbury, for one, said: “The body language matches. He put his head back like that in later years. I’ve seen pictures from vacations in ’69/’70 where he looks just like that. I’m convinced the photo is real.”