From the August 11, 2007 edition
of The New York Times an article
by Elvis biographer Peter
Guralnick.
One of the songs
Elvis
Presley liked to perform in the
�70s was Joe South�s �Walk a
Mile in My Shoes,� its message
clearly spelled out in the
title.
Sometimes he would preface it
with the 1951 Hank Williams
recitation �Men With Broken
Hearts,� which may well have
been South�s original
inspiration. �You�ve never
walked in that man�s shoes/Or
saw things through his eyes/Or
stood and watched with helpless
hands/While the heart inside you
dies.� For Elvis these two songs
were as much about social
justice as empathy and
understanding: �Help your
brother along the road,� the
Hank Williams number concluded,
�No matter where you start/For
the God that made you made them,
too/These men with broken
hearts.�
In Elvis�s case, this simple
lesson was not just a matter of
paying lip service to an
abstract principle.
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 fuelled 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.��
That same year, Elvis also
attended the otherwise
segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue,
an annual charity show put on by
the radio station that called
itself the �Mother Station of
the Negroes.� In the aftermath
of the event, a number of Negro
newspapers printed photographs
of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas
and B.B. King (�Thanks, man, for
all the early lessons you gave
me,� were the words The
Tri-State Defender reported he
said to Mr. King).
When he returned to the revue
the following December, a
stylish shot of him �talking
shop� with Little Junior Parker
and Bobby �Blue� Bland appeared
in Memphis�s mainstream
afternoon paper, The
Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a
short feature that made Elvis�s
feelings abundantly clear. �It
was the real thing,� he said,
summing up both performance and
audience response. �Right from
the heart.�
Just how committed he was to a
view that insisted not just on
musical accomplishment but
fundamental humanity can be
deduced from his reaction to the
earliest appearance of an ugly
rumour that has persisted in one
form or another to this day.
Elvis Presley, it was said
increasingly within the
African-American community, had
declared, either at a personal
appearance in Boston or on
Edward R. Murrow�s �Person to
Person� television program, �The
only thing Negroes can do for me
is buy my records and shine my
shoes.�
That he had never appeared in
Boston or on Murrow�s program
did nothing to abate the rumour,
and so in June 1957, long after
he had stopped talking to the
mainstream press, he addressed
the issue � and an audience that
scarcely figured in his sales
demographic � in an interview
for the black weekly Jet.
Anyone who knew him, he told
reporter Louie Robinson, would
immediately recognize that he
could never have uttered those
words. Amid testimonials from
black people who did know him,
he described his attendance as a
teenager at the church of
celebrated black gospel
composer, the Rev. W. Herbert
Brewster, whose songs had been
recorded by Mahalia Jackson and
Clara Ward and whose stand on
civil rights was well known in
the community. (Elvis�s version
of �Peace in the Valley,� said
Dr. Brewster later, was �one of
the best gospel recordings I�ve
ever heard.�)
The interview�s underlying point
was the same as the underlying
point of his music: far from
asserting any superiority, he
was merely doing his best to
find a place in a musical
continuum that included
breathtaking talents like Ray
Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five
Blind Boys of Mississippi and
Howlin� Wolf on the one hand,
Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and
the Statesmen Quartet on the
other. �Let�s face it,� he said
of his rhythm and blues
influences, �nobody can sing
that kind of music like colored
people. I can�t sing it like
Fats Domino can. I know that.�
And as for prejudice, the
article concluded, quoting an
unnamed source, �To Elvis people
are people, regardless of race,
colour or creed.�
So why didn�t the rumour die?
Why did it continue to find
common acceptance up to, and
past, the point that Chuck D of
Public Enemy could declare in
1990, �Elvis was a hero to
most... straight-up racist that
sucker was, simple and plain�?
Chuck D has long since
repudiated that view for a more
nuanced one of cultural history,
but the reason for the rumour's
durability, the unassailable
logic behind its common
acceptance within the black
community rests quite simply on
the social inequities that have
persisted to this day, the fact
that we live in a society that
is no more perfectly democratic
today than it was 50 years ago.
As Chuck D perceptively
observes, what does it mean,
within this context, for Elvis
to be hailed as �king,� if
Elvis�s enthronement obscures
the striving, the aspirations
and achievements of so many
others who provided him with
inspiration?
Elvis would have been the first
to agree. When a reporter
referred to him as the �king of
rock �n� roll� at the press
conference following his 1969
Las Vegas opening, he rejected
the title, as he always did,
calling attention to the
presence in the room of his
friend Fats Domino, �one of my
influences from way back.� The
larger point, of course, was
that no one should be called
king; surely the music, the
American musical tradition that
Elvis so strongly embraced,
could stand on its own by now,
after crossing all borders of
race, class and even
nationality.
�The lack of prejudice on the
part of Elvis Presley,� said Sam
Phillips, the Sun Records
founder who discovered him, �had
to be one of the biggest things
that ever happened. It was
almost subversive, sneaking
around through the music, but we
hit things a little bit, don�t
you think?�
Or, as Jake Hess, the
incomparable lead singer for the
Statesmen Quartet and one of
Elvis�s lifelong influences,
pointed out: �Elvis was one of
those artists, when he sang a
song, he just seemed to live
every word of it. There�s other
people that have a voice that�s
maybe as great or greater than
Presley�s, but he had that
certain something that everybody
searches for all during their
lifetime.�
To do justice to that gift, to
do justice to the spirit of the
music, we have to extend
ourselves sometimes beyond the
narrow confines of our own
experience, we have to challenge
ourselves to embrace the
democratic principle of the
music itself, which may in the
end be its most precious gift.
Peter Guralnick is the author of
�Careless
Love: The Unmaking of Elvis
Presley.�