Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley: The Voice That Split the Century

On 5 July 1954, in a small Memphis studio, a nineteen-year-old truck driver, a guitarist and a bass player were getting nowhere. During a break, the singer started clowning through an old Arthur Crudup blues called "That's All Right." Sam Phillips, listening from the booth, told them to start over and do it properly. That accident was the sound Phillips had been looking for, and it went out on Memphis radio within days. Within eighteen months the boy was the most controversial performer in America.

Tupelo to Memphis

He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on 8 January 1935, to Vernon and Gladys Presley. His twin brother, Jesse Garon, was stillborn — a fact that shadowed his relationship with his mother for the rest of her life. The family moved to Memphis when he was thirteen, into a city where the radio dial carried country, Southern gospel and the blues stations that white listeners were not supposed to be listening to. He listened to all of it: Hank Snow, Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb; the gospel of Jake Hess; and the African-American blues and spirituals that would give his singing its rhythmic authority.

He taught himself guitar and never learned to read music. Everything he did, for twenty-three years, he did by ear.

The Sound Sam Phillips Was Looking For

He cut acetates at the Memphis Recording Service in 1953 and began recording properly at Sun in June 1954, with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. The trio played its first date at the Bon Air club on 17 July 1954, and at the Overton Park Shell later that month Presley discovered — apparently by nerves — what his legs did on stage and what it did to an audience.

RCA Victor bought his Sun contract on 21 November 1955 for $40,000, an unheard-of figure. The first Nashville session followed on 10 January 1956 and produced "Heartbreak Hotel," his first number-one pop hit. His self-titled debut album, out that March, became the first rock and roll album to top the *Billboard* chart, where it stayed ten weeks.

1956: The Year of the Scandal

What followed was less a career than a national argument. Six *Stage Show* appearances in early 1956, then the Milton Berle broadcasts in April and June that turned him into a moral emergency. *The New York Times*'s Jack Gould filed the verdict that has been quoted against him ever since: "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability." Ben Gross of the *Daily News* said popular music had "reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics." Ed Sullivan pronounced him unfit for family viewing. A Catholic diocesan paper in La Crosse, Wisconsin, wrote to the FBI to report that "Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States."

Sullivan then paid him $50,000 for three appearances. The first, on 9 September 1956, drew roughly sixty million viewers — 82.6 per cent of everyone watching television in America. By the third, in January 1957, Presley was being shot from the waist up and singing "Peace in the Valley," and Sullivan told the country he was "a real decent, fine boy."

The numbers were absurd. "Don't Be Cruel" backed with "Hound Dog" held the top of the charts for eleven weeks, a record that stood thirty-six years. RCA sold ten million Presley singles in his first year on the label. Merchandise grossed $22 million in 1956 alone.

Uniform, Then Hollywood

He was drafted on 24 March 1958 and served with the 3rd Armored Division in West Germany from October 1958 to March 1960, rising to sergeant and donating his army pay to charity. Two things happened there that shaped everything after: he met a fourteen-year-old named Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he married in 1967, and he was introduced to amphetamines, about which he became, in the sources' word, practically evangelical.

The 1960s were the waste. He made twenty-seven films, nearly all profitable — the producer Hal Wallis said "a Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood" — and nearly all built on a soundtrack formula that Jerry Leiber described as three ballads, a medium-tempo number, an up-tempo number and a break blues boogie. Between 1962 and 1968 he released exactly one non-soundtrack studio album, the gospel record *How Great Thou Art*, which won him his first Grammy. Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires remembered him saying, of the film songs, that he felt like he couldn't sing them.

Black Leather, 1968

The NBC special taped in June 1968 and broadcast that December was the correction. Squeezed into black leather, playing live for the first time since 1961, he took 42 per cent of the viewing audience. Jon Landau, writing in *Eye*, said: "He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock 'n' roll singers."

The following June came *From Elvis in Memphis*, the best album of his adult career, carrying "In the Ghetto" — his first non-gospel top-ten single since 1963 — plus "Suspicious Minds," "Don't Cry Daddy" and "Kentucky Rain." His Las Vegas engagement opened at the International Hotel on 31 July 1969 with a standing ovation before he had sung a note, and turned into a five-year, million-dollar-a-year contract. "Suspicious Minds" went to number one that November. It was the last American pop number one he ever had.

Why Elvis Is Called a Genius

The case has to be made carefully, because the obvious version is wrong. Presley wrote almost nothing. He played no instrument at virtuoso level and could not read a note. Judged as a composer — the standard by which the rock era eventually measured greatness — he does not register at all, and Gould's 1956 dismissal was not simply snobbery.

His genius was interpretive and physical, and both halves are specific. The interpretive half is an ear: an uncanny ability to hear a song in one idiom and know what it became in another. Country, blues, gospel, pop, bluegrass and rhythm and blues were separate commercial categories in 1954; he heard them as one thing and sang them as one thing, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 1986 essay by Lenny Kaye credits him with combining "the tangled musical strains of rock's prehistory." The physical half is that he invented what a rock performer looks like. Dave Marsh wrote that his early recordings "contain the seeds of what rock & roll was, has been and most likely what it may foreseeably become." John Lennon put it flatter: "Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles."

The counter-case is real and has two parts. First, he squandered the gift for the better part of a decade on films he despised and songs he told colleagues he couldn't sing — genius that abdicates for seven years is a strange kind. Second, and heavier, is the question of what he took. He built a fortune on Black musical forms at a moment when the men who made those forms could not get on television, and the Hall of Fame's own language — delivering Black-influenced music to mainstream white audiences — concedes the shape of the transaction even while praising him. He was a great interpreter, not a great originator, and the distinction matters most precisely where his originals came from.

Legacy

He died at Graceland on 16 August 1977, aged forty-two, his health destroyed by prescription drugs and years of self-neglect. He has sold an estimated 500 million records, holds the record for the most RIAA-certified gold and platinum albums and the most UK number-one singles by any act, won three Grammys and a Lifetime Achievement Award at thirty-six, entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 — inducted by John Lennon's sons — and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. The historian Marty Jezer credited him with giving American youth "belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation." That is a larger monument than any of the records.

Achievements

• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1971
• Gospel Music Hall of Fame
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 1986
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 2018
• Grammy Awards
• Instruments: guitar, piano and voice
• Genres: rock and roll, pop music and rockabilly