History Correcting the Record
posted by on August 12 at 14:45 PM
God damn The New York Times is strapping today: A long overdue front-page article on the failures in Afghanistan; a major editorial on America’s inadequate health care system; a titillating NYT Magazine cover story “Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Year in the life of a couples-therapy group”; a lead book review on Harry Potter by Christopher Hitchens?!; and the Arts&Leisure section kicks off with an essay on my favorite movie ever Bonnie & Clyde.
However, it’s actually an article from yesterday’s New York Times that got clipped out and put on my fridge. Rock and Roll historian Peter Guralnick weighs in with: “How Did Elvis Ever Get Turned Into a Racist?”
I’m a big fan of the Rock & Roll era—late 40s “Race Records” right up through Gene Vincent and Buddy Holly—but man, I’ve never dug Elvis. Mostly because he seemed schmaltzy and pre-fab and mainstream. And yes, because I associated Elvis Presley with cultural thievery. I think I’ve relayed this story on Slog before, but back when I was a super odd-ball, I used to write the word ‘racist’ on those Elvis stamps that came out in the early 90s (?) before mailing letters.
Anyway, I liked being set straight by yesterday’s editorial which was published in honor of the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death (this Thursday, August 16.)
Here’s some of Guralnick’s piece:
It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”
It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”
No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.
Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.
It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.
“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”
An Elvis footnote from Seattle also came to light this week.
Damn, I was hoping the link would bring up something about "It Happened at the World's Fair," the lame Elvis feature film where he visits Seattle and madcap boredom ensues.
Chin up, Josh. Even if you were wrong about Elvis, you can still be an odd-ball.
Thank you, Josh, for the all-too-rare humility.
I was a teenager in a majority black community when Elvis appeared on the scene. Elvis was the King, period. Not only did the black kids think he was black before they saw him, they liked him even after they discovered that he was white.
I can't speak to Guralnick's assertion that the black community somehow now views Elvis as a racist. I'm talking about 1956-1957.
The parts of the article you showed us didn't address how he came to be seen as a racist. A common theme in rock history that Little Richard could bend your ear about is the re-making of black songs as white songs. To what extent did Elvis partake of that thievery? I'm no historian. Just curious. For a long time in music, certain songs were considered "standards" that anyone could play without fear of copyright issues, but I suspect a fair amount of what happened in the 50s was just straight jacking. Again, I'm no historian. Someone knowledgeable please educate me.
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I see you put it on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I
my mom was attending mr. lee's beauty school (formerly downtown) when elvis was filming it happened at the world's fair. she and her fellow students would go to his hotel in the morning and see him off to work.
according to claudia harrop, elvis was a very polite and charming man. over a two week period, he would greet them by name and compliment the gals on their hairstyles or dresses.
no word on whether or not he was a racist, but my mom says, "he was always so kind."
@4, the rest of the article talked about that. Elvis made it very clear that he was indebted to all the great Black artists who had come before him -- and in fact he never liked being called the King, because he was just following in those artists' footsteps, nothing more.
He seemed to be a truly humble man in many ways.
I grew up just after the Elvis era so I had a rather jaundiced idea of his music . . . until I heard the Sun Sessions. Let me tell you, that boy could sure catch your ear. I finally understood what all the fuss was about.
James Brown said Elvis was the only person he'd met who knew more gospel songs than he did.
Eh. Fuck that noise about cultural theft. The proper term for this is cultural efflorescence, when different cultures meet, learn from each other, and create new culture. Rock and roll, manga, Brazilian jiu-jitsu (a Japanese martial art transformed by a Scottish immigrant to Brazil!), the California roll, Native American horse cultures, they're all examples. Get over it.
Josh,
I completely agree. The Sunday NYT will be a work in progress all week as I try to chip away at all the great articles.
Christopher @ 4:
Until I read the op-ed, I didn't even know that a substantial number of black folk (or white folk?) considered Elvis racist. The cultural appropriation that Little Richard referred to was really more about people like Pat Boone. Elvis performed lots of schmaltzy, crappy stuff. But, just take a fresh listen to the Sun Sessions. This is not the work of a cultural appropriator, but someone who truly had this music and at least some of the accompanying cultural traditions deep in his soul. Even many of his recordings from the later 50s and 1960s (his recording of Sonny Till and the Orioles' "Crying in the Chapel" is a great example) show an authenticity and level of sincerity absent from the records of all the hacks like Pat Boone who were quite consciously exploiting the most racist aspects of the radio and record distribution businesses at that time.
Thanks for the 411. Y'know as fans of music, it's a shame we're called on to pick sides in screwy debates sometimes. I like a lot of bands with weird politics, like P.E., for example. They're the first people I think of when the "Elvis-as-Racist" conversation comes up. Chuck D also defends Farrakhan and some other people with nutty-ass ideas. Another band I dig with some odd ideas: Rage. I'm all for giving the US economy a hearty injection of pinko compassion, but violent revolution?... I dunno about that.
Elvis had a hell of a voice and some sweet tunes, but even without racism I have reason to be glad he's dead: Suspicious Minds. Keep on rotting, buddy boy.
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http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/presley1.asp
You learn something new every day. I had never heard that Elvis was considered racist. I grew up listening to his music as my grandmother & mother were huge fans and I always thought it was the opposite.
It's really terrible, I'm racist AND sexist. I didn't want to, but I was advised to file a lawsuit after getting that seizure. They said it was only ethical that I should Fight the Powerpuff company.
The irony of the modern revisionist history of "Elvis as racist" is that the major difference between Elvis Presley and most every white artist is that Elvis had tons of black fans. In the early days, Elvis managed to top the country, R&B and pop charts with the same song three different times. Later in his career, his singles consistently went gold despite middling positions on the pop charts because of his diverse fan base.
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