In the summer of ’57, a reporter named Louie Robinson went looking for the truth about Elvis Presley.
As told by Presley biographer Peter Guralnick in Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, Robinson was chasing down a rumor about the hip-swiveling, crooning wonder. There were scores to choose from (one yarn had it that Presley once bit a female interviewer; in fact, he had only nibbled playfully at her fingers).
The story that interested Robinson, a correspondent for Jet magazine, was that Presley, a Southerner who sang jumped-up white hillbilly music fused with black rhythm & blues, had spat on the culture to which he owed at least half his sound.
“The only thing Negroes can do for me,” went the statement widely attributed to him, “is buy my records and shine my shoes.”
Robinson found Presley in Hollywood, on the set of his second movie, Jailhouse Rock. Confronted with the infamous remark, Presley was appalled.
“I never said anything like that,” he told Jet in an article published Aug. 1, 1957, “and people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it.”
Robinson found several black sources to back Presley, and Jet knocked down the rumor: “To Elvis, people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”
End of story? To paraphrase Elvis, Uh-uh.
Presley’s relationship to the black culture that helped give his music so much power, and his career such a boost, was _ like everything about race in America _ more complicated. Not even a nod from an influential black magazine would neatly untangle the connections between the performer and his mixed musical roots.
Twenty years after Presley’s death, the questions curl like ivy around Graceland’s iron gates: What and how much did Elvis Presley take from black music, and what, if anything, did he give back?
His success blew down doors and created new opportunities for black musicians. It also paved the way for a slew of blue-eyed pretenders who cynically built careers on the work of black artists _ performers and composers who did not always share in the rewards.
Should black America be grateful for Presley’s contributions _ if that’s what they were _ or angry for the precedents he helped set?
In a country as racially polarized as ours is today, it should come as no surprise that Presley _ the performer, the person and the cultural symbol _ still gets mixed reviews.
“Elvis did invoke some degree of resentment among black audiences and musicians because of the kind of acclaim he achieved,” says Howard Dodson, a scholar with the New York City-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Presley had styled himself after black role models: He shaped his dramatic vocals according to the black gospel and r&b; music _ whites called it “race music” _ that had captivated him as a youngster listening to Memphis radio.
Even the country-grown white rockabilly music he drew on had black origins, in the blues.
“No white man had so deeply absorbed black music, and transformed it, since Jimmie Rodgers,” Greil Marcus wrote of Presley in his 1975 treatise, Mystery Train. Rodgers is considered the father of country music; Presley, the king of rock ‘n’ roll.
Separate charts
But Presley’s path was more easily followed by whites than blacks. The record industry saw to that.
Record contracts and the resulting acclaim were handed out “ostensibly . . . on the basis of quality and merit,” Dodson says. “But the money didn’t flow that way and the recognition was ultimately reserved for someone that was white.”
Whatever good he did, Presley would always symbolize, for some, the way the deck was stacked against black musicians.
“That kind of sentiment has been there within the African-American community across the board,” Dodson says.
Through the first half of the 20th century, success in black music was confined mainly to the r&b; charts _ which tended to represent the tastes of black audiences and a subculture of curious white listeners. The mainstream barometer, the pop charts, was white America’s preserve.
Until Elvis.
Presley took the blues and, without really meaning to, rammed it through America’s racial firewall. He unleashed forces so far removed from the simple act of singing that it seems absurd in hindsight to credit such a massive shift in consciousness to a single soul, unless you’re discussing Jesus or Martin Luther King.
But there it is. Elvis Aron Presley, the workingman’s boy from Mississippi, was the fellow destiny chose to change the world, black and white. He introduced the latter to the musical spirit of the former _ albeit in a borrowed, handsomely bastardized form, and with a trailblazing verve that subsequent black artists would, in turn, borrow back.
It was an unprecedented _ and for a while, terribly uneasy _ cultural exchange.
Presley, no social revolutionary, was nevertheless dancing on a racial tinderbox in a region where bigots greeted black enfranchisement of any kind with threats and violence: On April 14, 1956, black r&b; singer Nat “King” Cole was beaten by six whites _ members of a group calling itself the North Alabama Citizens’ Council _ who rushed the stage at a show in Birmingham, Ala.
As rockabilly legend Carl Perkins says in his 1996 autobiography, Go, Cat, Go!: “White boys like Presley and Perkins warranted investigation for singing black music and bringing young girls to their knees with suggestive gyrations. In short order rock ‘n’ roll would take its place in the councils’ eyes as a threat even more insidious than school desegregation.”
‘Grunt and groin’
But Presley’s love of black music hasn’t always been returned.
“Elvis was a hero to most,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D raps on the 1990 song, Fight the Power, “But he never meant [expletive) to me, you see/Straight-up racist that sucker was.”
Chuck D finishes the thought by declaring, “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”
Of course, nobody in 1950s America was nominating Presley for a stamp, either.
“[Popular music) has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley,” wrote a critic in the New York Daily News, after seeing him on The Milton Berle Show.
A second New York television writer likened Presley’s performance to “an aborigine’s mating dance.”
Stung by these criticisms, the normally soft-spoken Presley shot back in a 1956 interview with the Charlotte Observer, noting, without explicitly stating, the racism that drove his detractors.
“The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now . . . for more years than I know,” Presley said. “They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind till I goosed it up. I got it from them.”
Presley was, by all accounts, unreserved in his praise of other musicians.
“During his Memphis days, he was very much an aficionado of the black performers in town,” says Jimmy Guterman, author of several books, including The Worst Rock ‘n’ Roll Records of All Time. (Presley’s 1974 collection of non-musical concert banter, Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, ranks first and worst, at No. 1.)
“He went to see B.B. King. He went to see Junior Parker. . . . On the Million Dollar Quartet sessions, you can hear him talking about having gone to Vegas for the first time and having seen a great new performer, and it turns out that was Jackie Wilson,” Guterman says, adding, “You listen to the songs that he _ nobody else _ that he chose to cover, and you’re talking about people like Arthur Crudup and Junior Parker. It’s clear his listening is very diverse.”
Pieces of the pie
Black performers who inspired him, black composers who wrote some of his best songs, watched his ascent with amazement _ and in some cases, chagrin. Many profited by the association. Black songwriters saw their efforts made eternally famous by the King _ Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who wrote That’s Alright (Mama); Otis Blackwell, who wrote Don’t Be Cruel, All Shook Up and Return to Sender; and Doc Pomus, who co-wrote A Mess of Blues, Little Sister and the theme for the 1964 Elvis movie, Viva Las Vegas.
If they had misgivings, most simply swallowed them and took the work when it was offered.
Mojo Nixon, the rock ‘n’ roller and Presley fanatic who wrote Elvis Is Everywhere, says, “I interviewed Doc Pomus once, and he said that to him it was just another hack job, possibly with a lot of money involved. You know, you got a phone call: ‘Elvis needs three songs for a movie.’ [Pomus) and his partner, they’d get together over the weekend and write a couple of songs. And I think some of those other cats probably had the same idea.”
But some doors stayed shut. Many black musicians associated directly or indirectly with Presley were denied even a fraction of the King’s spoils.
Crudup himself recorded That’s Alright (Mama) 10 years before Presley. It was a minor hit. When Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton first covered Hound Dog, the Jerry Lieber-Mike Stoller song, she made the r&b; charts. When Elvis sang Hound Dog, he conquered the world.
“The implication,” Marcus wrote in Mystery Train, “always there when Crudup or Willie Mae Thornton . . . looked out at the white world that gave them only obscurity in exchange for their music and penned them off from getting anything for themselves, is that Elvis would have been nothing without them, that he climbed to fame on their backs.”
Marcus argued against that conclusion: “Singing in the ’50s, before blacks began to guard their culture with the jealousy it deserved, Elvis had no guilty dues to pay. Arthur Crudup complained his songs made a white man famous, and he had a right to complain, but mostly because he never got his royalties.”
Crudup was hardly alone.
“The subject really can’t be discussed outside of general music industry practices in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” says Dodson of the Schomburg Center.
Before Elvis, there were plenty of black artists working within that system: Chuck Berry and LaVern Baker, to name a couple, wrote and performed electrifying music. But the industry’s thinking at first was “that white audiences weren’t ready for it,” Dodson says, “and so they looked for a white person to do the black thing.”
Sam Phillips, who ran Sun Studios in Memphis, found Elvis Presley.
Others found what were “usually very poor imitations of the originals,” Dodson says. “But that’s what the white music industry people seemed the think that the public was prepared to buy.”
The Presley boom would only encourage that kind of thinking. But there were others before him.
Bleaching the lyrics
Pat Boone, a white-shoed, cardigan Christian with wholesome looks and advertised values to match, started out in 1954 _ two years before Presley _ covering black artists’ songs, and sanitizing their lyrics to suit middle-American tastes.
Onstage, he would introduce his version of Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame as the grammatically proper “Isn’t That a Shame.”
Was it ever.
“Now, there were some white guys and gals who went into recording studios and on television doing milquetoast covers of black music,” says Todd Morgan, director of creative resources at Graceland, the Presley estate and business headquarters. “And it was an abomination.”
But it wasn’t Presley’s abomination, his supporters say. Nobody could stop less scrupulous types, the poachers and industry put-ups, from trying to duplicate the trick.
Marcus also contended in Mystery Train that Presley, who grew up poor, knew something of whence his music came: “As a Southerner and white trash to boot, Elvis was already outside.”
The difference was, society made it easier for whites, even poor whites, to get inside. That Elvis did it using the very soul of the culture that white America had locked out _ or marginalized as a kind of forbidden, primal thrill _ was richly ironic.
But irony wasn’t paying Arthur Crudup’s bills.
Mojo Nixon says these arrangements were an unfortunate sign of the times.
“The crime is not that Elvis took a black thing and combined it with a white hillbilly thing and made a million bucks,” Nixon says. “The crime is that no black man would have been able to do that. . . . Jackie Wilson could only have been Elvis in a world where skin color is not a problem. That’s the crime.”
For a spell, the world almost was colorblind. Rock ‘n’ roll exploded in an electric, genre-blending whirl that could obscure skin color _ especially back when televised imagery was not so pervasive. People going to concerts because they loved a particular single on the radio often were getting their first actual look.
“Chuck Berry showed up at gigs and [until people in the audience saw him) they thought he was white,” Nixon notes. “Buddy Holly showed up at gigs and [likewise) they thought he was black.”
Perkins, in his autobiography, remembers that the first time that he and Berry met, Berry remarked, “You know, I thought you was one of us.”
No social agenda
Numerous artists, black and white, credit Presley as an influence. Rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix _ musically, a disciple of the blues _ had his eyes opened to the possibilities of performance by the first concert he ever attended: Hendrix was 15 when his father took him to old Sicks Stadium in Seattle to see The King.
Presley didn’t set out to be an example. And as time went by, he retreated even from his accidental role as rock ‘n’ roll missionary. He locked himself away from the world that he had helped to change. He hid in his Graceland palace or his Las Vegas penthouse, binging on junk food and drugs, delegating nearly everything but his vocal chores to an entourage _ manager Col. Tom Parker and the so-called “Memphis Mafia” _ that had even less of a social agenda.
“When he became the biggest thing on the planet, there’s a level of isolation that comes in, in which he becomes very distant from what’s happening _ in black pop as well as white pop,” says writer Guterman. “I don’t think there’s a race issue there.”
Indeed, it is likely that, had he lived, Presley would have applauded the music industry’s later reforms _ the retroactive payment of royalties to black performers and composers who were long shut out. Presley, who was always so openly grateful to black musicians for what they gave him, could hardly have begrudged them a piece of his good fortune.
“It is aggravating when we read commentary that Elvis somehow stole black music,” says Graceland’s Morgan. “We take exception to that and so do a lot of his black colleagues in the business. When you talk to James Brown, or you talk to B.B. King, or you talk to Jackie Wilson’s family _ Elvis paid some of his medical bills _ or you talk to the Sweet Inspirations, who worked with him from 1959 to the end, they take exception to that. Elvis opened a lot of doors.”
