Critical Noir

Love Me Tender: The Complex Legacy of Elvis Presley

Posted 08/18/2007 at 9:10 AM  |  1 comment/s

In a televised interview about a decade before his death, Ray Charles was asked to comment on the legacy of Elvis Presley, and to paraphrase, he responded that Presley didn’t do anything but shake his ass and black folk been doing that for centuries. As a contemporary of Presley and a musical innovator in his own right, Charles could afford to be a little salty, but his comments capture the view from this critic, that so much of what does make Presley important has little to do with the music he recorded.

To be fair, on the issue of race, Presley has often been the target of blame for nefarious practices that were not of his making. Yes, Presley may have covered Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (written by two young white Jewish guys Leiber and Stoller) or Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right," but Presley’s motivations for recording those songs likely had more to do with an affection for the music. Presley was exposed to rhythm & blues, gospel, country and the nascent strains of rockabilly in his early years and simply sang the music that was always in his head. The same can’t be said about record company executives who quite consciously mined the black rhythm & blues charts—the race music charts—to find songs that could be covered by white artists like Georgia Gibbs, Patti Page, and Pat Boone who were part of a cottage industry of covering songs by Ruth Brown and Little Richard. The race politics of the time made it difficult for black artists to get the support and distribution to gain mainstream audiences and Presley often gets unfairly indicted here, because he was simply the most popular and visible of those white artists singing so-called "black" music.

Presley has also been judged by the myth the he was racist, purported to once utter that “all black folks can do is by my records and shine my shoes.” The quote has long been proved a myth and many of Presley’s black contemporaries—B.B. King in particular—have often described him as respectful to them and their music. But there is no way to discuss Presley without dealing with the reality of race. Simply put, if Presley had been a black man, there would be nary a mention of the 30th anniversary of his death. Instead, I’d like to argue that Presley’s lodging into the consciousness of America has little to with his music—enjoyable yes, groundbreaking no—but has everything to do with notions of white male sexuality that he unleashed to the American public.

Presley’s primary competitors within the pop music industry in the mid-1950s were older white male crooners like Perry Como, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Many of the more than 60 million people who tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show in September of 1956, did so, so that they could see Presley—unlike those aforementioned singers—“shake his ass”. Indeed when Presley appeared on the show for a third time, a year later, CBS famously shot him from only from the waist up, choosing to censor the wild gyrations that Presley engaged in. Prior to Presley’s emergence, black bodies often served as metaphors for the dangerous excesses of sexuality in American society, but Presley’s embrace of American youth music--and black masculine expression--transferred those anxieties on to white masculinity. Pop music would never be the same and figures such as Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, and even Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain and D’Angelo all benefited from the presence of Presley as the prototypical sexualized male pop icon.

While we can lament that it was Presley’s whiteness that made him the lasting icon that he his, his legacy is much more complicated. Indeed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and notably Ray Charles were never gonna achieve Presley’s status, in large part, because they were black and could not circulate through American culture in what was still a critically racist society. Ironically it was Presley’s embrace of rhythm and blues music that created a wider audience for it and allowed many of those aforementioned black artists to cross-over. Ultimately though, the fervor that exists over Presley, thirty-years after his death, has to do with what he represents to those who hark back to a more comforting view of American society. The young Elvis Presley is a reminder of that last moment of American innocence—before the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement, before the Vietnam war became the definitive generational divide, and before the End of Camelot. As America is continuously rendered as anything but innocent—and legitimately so—Elvis Presley’s legacy offers a comforting cocoon.

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