Was Elvis a racist? Introduction Was
Elvis Presley racist? Last month, on January 8th,
the date of his 75th birthday the question
re-emerged. It was reported that when asked to sing an
Elvis number at a Presley tribute show a black female
artist did so ‘reluctantly’ because she felt
that ‘deep down Presley was a racist’. Chuck
D’s, ‘Elvis was a straight up racist
sucker’ quote has done the rounds again appearing in
a series of articles about Presley’s alleged racism.
Helen Kolawhole writing in the Guardian says Presley was
a racist who ‘stole black men’s music’. She
then argues that the myth which surrounds Elvis’s
cultural legacy is based on a racist narrative. It
struck me that Kolawhole’s argument is part of a
broader backlash against the corporate branding of Elvis
Presley as the undisputed ‘King of Rock and
Roll’. According to the argument, if Elvis is
‘King’, then where does that leave the likes of
Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and
Muddy Waters, or the influence on rock and roll made by
black jazz and rhythm and blues artists? Undoubtedly
there is an offensive cultural amnesia every time a
docile corporate media refers to Elvis as the
‘King’ who founded an art form. The first
person to disagree with this analysis would be Elvis
Presley himself, and it’s a shame he’s not
around to defend himself. For not once did he claim to be
the ‘King’, and he understood only too well
that at the heart of his music was a cultural fusion that
recognised no racial divisions. In
this article I explore three themes. The first looks at
the business empire that is Elvis Presley the corporate
product, and argues that we need to separate artist from
brand. The second theme is to point out that Presley the
artist was a true radical, a cultural and musical
visionary. The third part of this article argues that
Presley was no racist, in fact quite the opposite, and
that those who accuse him of stealing black men’s
music have misunderstood the ways in which rock and roll
was a cultural unifier. Getting
Rich from Elvis Presley The
marketing of Elvis Presley by the corporations that
control his legacy has been exploitative, sometimes crude
and on occasions down right tacky. Yet it’s made
many people rich beyond their wildest dreams.
‘Presley has been turned into the golden calf’,
says no less a figure than Bob Dylan. The people at the
heart of the Elvis Presley empire have made more money
since Elvis’s passing than Presley made in his
entire career. In a strictly monetarist sense dying young
makes good business for the managers, record companies
and ex-wives who inherit the dead artists legacy. Just
ask Yoko Ono, or in this instance Priscilla Presley. Last
year the Elvis Presley product made a cool $49 million.
‘The King’ is the highest earning ‘dead
celebrity’ - a ‘contest’ he wins every
year. Every time there is an anniversary, and in
today’s media driven culture of manufactured
nostalgia they come frequently, the money increases.
Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s shrewd manager once
observed, ‘I’ve got a great product and
I’m going to sell it’. And sold it he did,
usually to pay off his own gambling debts. Throughout
Presley’s career Parker took 50% of the royalties in
what had to have been the most lucrative deal in show
business. If Brian Epstein had dared to ask the
financially savvy Lennon and McCartney for something as
outrageous as 50% he would have been laughed out of town.
But unlike the Beatles, Presley never had the confidence
to control his own career, financially or artistically.
Parker’s 50% cut continued well into the 1980s only
to be dissolved when it was challenged by Presley’s
ex wife Priscilla. But
it’s Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’s and
Priscilla’s only child, only 8 years old at the time
of her fathers passing who has the biggest stake in the
Elvis Presley empire, and the money made by the Estate is
truly phenomenal. Worldwide, Presley is estimated
to have sold over a billion records. No one, not the
Beatles or Michael Jackson come close to selling that
many records. It’s serious money. And it keeps
rolling in as every year the old standards get repackaged
or ‘Remastered’, a marketing trick to make even
more money. Last in the pecking order when it comes
to milking the golden calf are former friends, the
ex-girlfriends, the people who call themselves
‘Elvis’s associates’, the body guards, the
‘music journalists’ and so forth, all of whom
have written their books about the ‘King’. With
one or two exceptions these books tend to be garbage, a
dreary mixture of woeful sentimentality and noxious
sycophancy. Elvis
Presley the Artist
Elvis Presley had just turned twenty
one years old when he swaggered onto America’s
television screens for the first time. His first
performances on television networks noted for ingrained
conservatism were witnessed by an American society that
was racist and sexually repressed. Something remarkable
happened on these shows. Presley was like a bolt of
lighting that struck out of nowhere. When he sang Hound
Dog on the Milton Berle show, or Shake Rattle and Roll on
the Lee Dorsey show, one wonders where on earth this guy
came from. Those that knew Presley before his fame
intuitively knew that he was different. At school he was
described as a ‘misfit’, even a
‘freak’, or a ‘trashy kind of boy’.
As he grew older people’s curiosity intensified. He
became an ‘enigmatic loner’ that
‘didn’t fit in’. Then suddenly the ‘loner’
from the conservative South was on national television
and causing uproar. Everything about him seemed
different: the way he sang the song, his hair and the
clothes, and, of course, the way he moved. Commenting in
1956, Emanuel Celler, a conservative New York
Congressman, said that Elvis’s ‘animal
gyrations violate all that I know to be in good
taste’. Cosmopolitan magazine wrote, ‘it
isn't enough to say that Elvis is kind to his parents,
sends money home, and is the same unspoiled kid he was
before all the commotion began. That still isn't a free
ticket to behave like a sex maniac in public’. One
million screaming teenage girls disagreed. Reflecting on the Elvis phenomenon
many years later, the right wing social commentator Peter
Hitchens wrote the following in his book the Abolition
of Britain: The
triumph of Elvis Presley, whose influence was rightly
seen as revolutionary by American conservatives, brought
an entirely new thing into our lives–the
sexualisation of the young, combined with the narcotic
emotional power of modern rock music. Even in the
vast and flexible society that is the modern USA, Presley
was the cultural equivalent of a 100-megaton
explosion. In Britain’s narrow, restrained
atmosphere, the charge was more powerful still.
Presley dug beneath the fortifications of British sexual
reserve, leaving them so weakened that John Lennon and
Mick Jagger could knock them down completely. The popular music industry as we know it today, the
good and the bad, began in 1956 with Elvis Presley. ‘He
introduced the beat to everything, music, language,
clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution…the
sixties came from it’ said Leonard Bernstein. Successful
and rich at an early age, Presley was disliked by a left
leaning cultural intelligentsia that dismissed rock and
roll music as a superficial mass produced limited art
from consumed by a docile working class that didn’t
possess the cultural intelligence to appreciate the finer
things in life. According to this narrative, Rock and Roll music
stupefied the masses and was the latest in a long list of
‘opium’s of the people’. The left
intelligentsia preferred folk music. These were the kind
of dogmatists who booed Dylan for ‘going
electric’ and thought the electric guitar was a
symbol of capitalism. ‘I can’t hear the
words’ screamed Pete Seeger. So many people
missed the point that at the core of this new music and
at the core of Elvis Presley, its most famous
representative, was something truly radical. Not content
with accusing Presley of possessing limited ability
others went on to say that he was a racist an accusation
that the cultural intelligentsia are fond of repeating. Elvis
Presley was Racist The
commentators like Helen Kolawhole who make this
allegation usually claim that Presley appeared on Edward
R Murrow’s Person to Person programme and said,
‘the only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my
records and shine my shoes’. But this is a lie. We
know that Elvis never appeared on the Edward R Murrow
show. Yet the lie endures as if some people want to
believe it. Having accused Presley of racism Kolawhole
then says he was responsible for cultural theft.
It’s worth quoting her at length: Media
arrogance and dishonesty means we are eternally bound to
live in a skewed world where Elvis is king of
rock'n'roll, Clapton is the guitar god, Sinatra is the
voice and Astaire is the greatest dancer. Accustomed as
we are to this parade of white heroes, the case of Elvis
is particularly infuriating because for many black people
he represents the most successful white appropriation of
a black genre to date. She then goes on to write: Elvis
also signifies the way so many black writers and
performers, such as Little Richard, were treated by the
music industry. The enduring image of Elvis is a constant
reflection of society's then refusal to accept anything
other than the non-threatening and subservient Negro:
Sammy Davies Jnr and Nat King Cole. The Elvis myth to
this day clouds the true picture of rock and roll and
leaves its many originators without due recognition. So
what is left for black people to celebrate? How he
admirably borrowed our songs, attitude and dance moves?
Elvis
didn’t steal black men’s music. He was not a
cultural thief, as Kolawhole proclaims. Through music
Presley was the bridge between the youth of black America
and the youth of the white middle classes. His music
broke down racial barriers as did rock and roll in
general. Presley opened the door for artists like Big Joe
Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little
Richard to break out of the ghetto of what was called
then called the ‘race market’ and to enter a
more lucrative mainstream market. Commenting on Elvis
Presley the artist, Peter Guralnick notes that
Presley’s music presents a ‘democratic vision
that could not have been broader or more
encompassing’. But
let’s finish with Elvis Presley the man. We know
that the racist quote was a fabrication. We also know
that Elvis Presley lived with black people all his life,
that in the heavily segregated Memphis of the 1950s he
was regularly seen at black only events defying the laws
of social segregation. So much has been said about
Presley yet we forget that Elvis seldom did public
interviews. But when he did speak never once was he
racist. It’s appropriate to let Elvis have the last
word on this issue: The
coloured folks been singing it and playing it just like
I’m doing now…they played it like that in the
shanties and in their juke joints…I got it from
them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old
Arthur Cradup 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 no other saw. Gary
Fraser (Please
note the quotes in this article come from Peter
Guralnick’s two volume biography of Elvis Presley
entitled Last Train from Memphis and Careless
Love: the Unmasking of Elvis Presley. In my opinion
these works constitute the definitive study of
Presley’s life and legacy.)
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