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The Dividing Line
It's hard to imagine, if you weren't there, just how tight, repressive and bland mainstream American culture was after World War II and through much of the 1950s. When Elvis first popped his hip, shook his legs, curled his lip and howled, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog" on television in 1956, he set in motion a revolution in American life that loosened the reins of social control and led, over the next decade, to a new appreciation of personal expression, of personal style, and of plain guiltless fun.
Just as importantly, he became, in a way that was unstated but deeply felt by the whole country, the embodiment of new racial attitudes. In other words, Elvis was the spark that ignited the pop culture that we live in and take for granted. He was the great dividing line between the old, pre-war white cultural consensus and our present-day, everchanging climate of clashing, interweaving, diverse cultures. As filmmaker Ralph Bakshi put it, "Presley freed us." Or as John Lennon told Elvis when he first met him, "Before you there was nothing."
Those are impossibly high standards to live up to, especially for a guy who never had any intention of being the cultural catalyst he turned out to be. But no matter how he hard he may have fallen from his initial perch, no one can take away the fact that Presley really did cause a whirlwind of change.
But it took real courage, and that's what has been forgotten. If you read or listen to most histories of early rock, it's easy to have a romanticized view of the pre-civil rights movement South. When critics or historians talk about the cross-fertilization that took place between black and white forms of music, you can almost imagine a South where it was OK for southern blacks and whites to get to know one another, to trade guitar licks in each other's homes. That wasn't the case by a long shot.
During the South's "Happy Days" of the 1950s, nearly total segregation was the law -- not just social custom, but the law. To most whites, it was ludicrous to think they could gain anything from black culture -- hell, it was insane to even call something so raw, so savage, culture. Under no circumstances was it acceptable for a white person in the South to seek out, much less copy, black behavior of any sort, including music. Any frank cross-cultural exchanges had to occur in the shadows.
Yet it was impossible to keep the two races totally separate. In the murky areas of the South's history, the fringes of the two cultures had a way of weaving themselves into new, exotic cloth. But this was never done openly, sometimes not even consciously -- and certainly not in the revealing bright light of the national media. Not until Elvis Presley.
The great Southern rockers -- Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a slew of others -- became who they were by breaking the rules, and rising above segregation's rigid restrictions. It was the kind of thing you could be killed for.
In 1956, the year of Elvis' big national breakout, the greasy-haired, rubber-legged kid who would soon become a symbol of freedom for millions of teenagers was, to many Americans, more symbolic of degeneracy.
Elvis was the only white man to move so freely onstage, or to dress and sing in a way that was so unabashedly, defiantly black. The kind of music Presley had appropriated and made his own was tolerated among southern blacks because it was seen as harmless. But when Presley sang Little Richard's "Ready Teddy," not only acknowledging R&B's legitimacy but celebrating its power and fun, he stirred up outrage and blind hatred in his native region and beyond. The kind of hatred that led the Alabama White Citizens Council to announce that it had "set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock & roll bop."
The Leap of Faith
As with most great musical innovators, the young Presley was a cultural sponge. He listened to and loved and sought out all types of music, from Dean Martin crooning, opera, and Tin Pan Alley show tunes to white gospel, Country & Western, and, most significantly, the music of the culture he was supposed to hate. He took the blues and R&B to heart and proclaimed his newfound self to the rest of Memphis, and then, through non-stop touring, to the rest of the South, and finally to the world.
In an early interview with the Charlotte Observer's Kays Gary, Presley explained, "I remember old Arthur Crudup (a black bluesman). . .and I used to think if I could just feel what ol' Arthur felt, I'd be a music-maker like nobody ever saw!"