Wonderful article!
How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
By 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 fueled 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 rumor 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 rumor, 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, color or creed.”
So why didn’t the rumor 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 rumor’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.”
A great way to reach the African American community would be for EPE to hire a black marketing team to promote EP in the black community and get Myrna and other blacks that knew him best to speak with Ebony magazine or BET and spread the news that he wasn't racist. This should have been done for the 30th anyhow.
Thanks for posting the article.I, for one, was SHOCKED the first time I read on this board that ELVIS was considered a racist by some in society.
I would not, in a million years, dreamed that could be thought by anyone...so it took me quite by surprise.
I will never forget you Rosanne.
R.I.P. 4-27-59~7-22-09
You're welcome and I completely agree with your reply. A lot of the "Elvis was a racist" crap is simply just pure envy on the part of black America. I could understand if he was on record using a racist slur which he is not. And no, the comment he made in Ashville in 1975 was NOT a racist slur. I eat catfish as do many white southerners. In fact more whites eat catfish than blacks. Plus Myrna even said they never thought of it like a racist slur. The only reason they (Sylvia and Estelle) left the stage was due to his behavior that night and for basically calling Kathy a ***** on stage. The catfish comment had nothing to do with blacks or race. Only a ***** would think otehrwise. Besides he told JD he was going to kick his *** too that same night too. EP was just F'd up that night. Plain and simple.
Posting this great article, then following it up with this ludicrous reply completes your resume for being mentally incompetant.Originally Posted by EP75
So, if it wasn't a racist comment, elaborate for us, please, just what kind of comment was it ?And no, the comment he made in Ashville in 1975 was NOT a racist slur.
Is this a FACT or opinion ? could you provide us with some stats to back this info up ?In fact more whites eat catfish than blacks.
The catfish comment wasn't the only comment/s Elvis made that nite, or on that specific Tour for that matter. You should recheck your facts.The only reason they (Sylvia and Estelle) left the stage was due to his behavior that night and for basically calling Kathy a ***** on stage. The catfish comment had nothing to do with blacks or race.
You act and preach as if your the only Elvis fan who knows the one and only truth.Only a ***** would think otehrwise.
Before you make erroneous and childish assumptions, how 'bout learning how to spell first ... ? LOL
Oh, so that makes Elvis' comments and outbursts any better ... ?Besides he told JD he was going to kick his *** too that same night too. EP was just F'd up that night. Plain and simple.
And you have the courage to insult and judge Elvis for being F'd up ...
Name ONE thing EP said that night or any other night that was 'racist", Mr troublemaker?Posting this great article, then following it up with this ludicrous reply completes your resume for being mentally incompetant.
So, if it wasn't a racist comment, elaborate for us, please, just what kind of comment was it ?
Is this a FACT or opinion ? could you provide us with some stats to back this info up ?
The catfish comment wasn't the only comment/s Elvis made that nite, or on that specific Tour for that matter. You should recheck your facts.
You act and preach as if your the only Elvis fan who knows the one and only truth.
Before you make erroneous and childish assumptions, how 'bout learning how to spell first ... ? LOL
Oh, so that makes Elvis' comments and outbursts any better ... ?
And you have the courage to insult and judge Elvis for being F'd up ...The catfish comment was an inside joke. Myrna has even said this and that was who it was aimed at, the girls. It went too far and they felt offended. But NOT because they were black. But how he took something personal and made it public.
I'm not even going to reply to the other crap you posted because it's just that....CRAP.
Don't continue this thread in this manner, both King Creole and EP75, please.
Sonny
I know and that's why I didn't go into further details and left it at the catfish reply only. I have no other reason to reply to him anyhow. As you can now see, it's not me causing the trouble.
I posted this in the Articles section a day or so ago.
IMO This misconception-"Elvis a racist who stole his sound" is one of the biggest myths that concerns Elvis and his career. It has been stated in various places so often that no one challenges it when its said. I hope this is read by a few black Americans and puts a doubt in their mind about this myth. Its such a shame that some of them can not acknowledge his talent without turning it into a claim of theft from their culture. I have said this before Chuck Berry has always acknowledged he listened to a lot of country music as a kid. You can hear it in some of his records. Ray Charles also lists the Grand Old Opry off the radio as a place where he heard some of his first music. No one accuses them of stealing country to make their music. Some apply a double standard to Elvis.
I saw this on EIN..
Marty Lacker provides feedback...
franny
Marty Lacker: I read the article regarding Elvis as a racist and it is my intention to reach Mary J. Blige and give her the real story about Elvis' supposed racism.
This rumor was started years ago by someone and has been picked up mainly by young black artists most of whom were not even born when Elvis started and they believe the crap about him stealing the black man's music and that he was a racist. That's nonsense.
I intend to tell her some things that Elvis did for black people that like everything else he did was done without publicity because he just liked to see the joy on people's faces when he did it for them.
It's getting tiresome reading this false accussation about Elvis who had a great affinity for black people.
As for stealing the black man's music, I quote the great Ray Charles, "MUSIC HAS NO COLOR!'
Ida Ritter: As was said before this is an article that should be read by all and every Elvis fan, it really describes the real soul and reason for this man's singing. As somebody said before: he made America step down, but to this day the controversy persists on calling him a racist, why is yet to be discovered.
He was a humble man, that always gave credit to whoever he thought deserves it regardless of their race or color, he always was very uncomfortable when called the King of Rock an Roll, but the fact that to this day he is in top of all what a singer could ever be creates all source of stories to opaque his real inner in him fortunately with no success.
This article clearly portraits who Elvis was and why at the end he even ignored some of the comments always made to obscure his tremendous impact in the music history of this country and the world, but to the end I have to say as a fan that his life, his God's given voice, his actions, the way the sang and gave himself out as no other entertainer ever had, throughout his life talks better than anything anybody could say, sad to see the ones that still do not want to accept a reality that has always been there and that portraits what he really was, not letting anybody control what he really believe in no matter what. Even Sam Phillips the discover of this man said it all, and he knew him from the start of his tremendous carrier, to think of all the enduring he had to do during his life, when at the time of his beginnings it was hard to accept by a lot the change that was coming in and the way America use to act especially at the time of so much racism that still prevails to this day.
His life said it all, and this article is one that confirms it.
Sandy: Thank you for publishing Peter Guralnick's article I found it fascinating. Why don't these knockers do their homework and find out just what Elvis thought of his musical peers and how he helped Black Americans.
Marjorie Robins: Elvis was not a racist! To even think so is a ridiculous thing. How could someone who was racist buy a new Cadillac for a Black American woman who he didn't even know? It saddens me deeply that ill minded and misinformed people want to desicrate Elvis' good name!!!
Peter S: The whole argument about misappropriating black music is spurious. When was musical style ever the restricted domain of one group of people!
Thomas J: Well said Peter Guralnick.
Andrew Parker-Smith: The world is full of small minded, bigoted asses who wouldn't know goodness if it hit them in the face or kicked them up their sorry backsides. Elvis racist. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I don't believe Elvis was a racist, but the catfish comment he made to the Sweets was a racist comment, no way around it. Doesn't make Elvis any more of a Saint or a Sinner. It is what it is.
I wasn't there and only know comments were made which caused the problem. How they were meant, or if they were racist I don't know. But it happened and it was a bad night for all involved- and they made their peace with it amonst themselves. IMO Elvis is never going to be a hero to most young African Americans. They are almost 3 generations removed from the start of his recording career. They will never know the bridges he helped build which helped race relations. They see him as a man who ripped off their culture. I know in my heart this is untrue but they will never see that.
Name ONE thing EP said that night or any other night that was 'racist", Mr troublemaker?
I'm not even going to reply to the other crap you posted because it's just that....CRAP.
You said in your last reply that "EP was F'up that nite.
Now, predictable and convining as always, your backpeddling and claiming the "catfish" remark was now an inside joke, which is ludicrous and false.
Hmmm....what about the concert on the same tour where ELvis claimed he smelled green peppers and onions and looked over at the SWEETS, curled his lip and asked them again in front of 20,000 people in attendance ???
2 of the SWEETS left the stage, angered by Elvis' rude comments, and you still wanna claim it was an inside joke ???
And seriously, even if Myrna or Sylvia were to talk about it publically, do you think they are going to come out publically and admit that Elvis could be obnoxoius and rude at times ??? Think about it, we'll wait ...
Try reading, (and maybe learning and comprhending), Jerry Hopkins awesome 1981 book, ELVIS: The Final Years. outstanding book.
There are others too, but this one is a good start.
Happy Reading !!!
I'm African American and I don't believe that Elvis was a racist.
I would like to hear the whole "catfish" story, I see you all debating about it and I'm like
That comment had nothing to do with race. Get over it. And by making that false claim you are polluting this negativity even further.
Please ignore some of the nonsense on this forum. There are those out there that claim to be big fans but at the same time will throw EP's faults and flaws out there faster than they will his good deeds. As is the case by a couple on this thread.I'm African American and I don't believe that Elvis was a racist.
I would like to hear the whole "catfish" story, I see you all debating about it and I'm like
EP was not in any way shape or form a bigot or racist. Just because he grew up in the deep south in the heart of the segregation period does not make him a bigot or that he went around dropping the N word. I am white and born and raised in Alabama and I am proud to admit that I have never in my life used the N word in front of a black person or even a white person. It makes me proud to make that claim and statement. I like EP grew up around black people. I wasn't poor and neither were they. We were all middle class.
Back to the catfish quote. It was taken so far out of context that most who have actually heard it want to believe it was some type of typical comment coming from a white male from the south. But the fact of the matter is that EP was so messed up that night on drugs and on that tour at times that he blasted everyone, no matter what race. What a lot of people seem to forget is that EP flat out called Kathy Westmoreland (a white girl and lover) a **** on stage and she left in tears. This was why everything else followed. The Sweets gave EP a dirty look for treating Kathy that way and EP didn't seem to like them standing up to him and then he told JD Sumner (white guy and long time friend) to sit up or he was going to kick his ***. Then he said "y'all gotta stop breathing on me. Your breath smells like catfish". But to clear this up-Myrna herself has stated in interviews and articles over the years that it wasn't a racist cmment and was an inside joke just between them and EP because he hated the smell of catfish. That's all. This prompted 2 members of The Sweets to get up and walk off stage in protest. But mostly because EP was out of it that night and had had enough. Myrna remained and immediately EP got it together and realized he went too far. He gave Myrna a ring then as an apology gift. The girls were back on stage and on tour the following night. EP presented each girl with a new $5,000 ring for what he had done and promised them it would never happen again. They forgave him and all started crying together with EP. End of story.
King Creole says they walked off stage again on that tour in protest. That is incorrect. They walked off only ONCE at the incident I just comemnted on. I don't know where he got that information from but it is wrong. The truth is, EP wans't in a good mood the whole July tour due to drugs and a bad tooth ache. This was laso the beginnig of the end.
So PLEASE don't believe everything you hear when it refers to EP being a racist. There are some that want him seen that way and others who have no clue of how much just the opposite he really was.
Recheck your facts, stop trying to re-write history and convince others to believe these innaccuracies and get over it.
Oh, so I guess that makes it excusable for Elvis' rude and obnoxious behaviour ?The truth is, EP wans't in a good mood the whole July tour due to drugs and a bad tooth ache.
Before you exclaimed Elvis was "F'up" ...
Now he was just in a "bad mood".
Which is it ???
Let's not forget the story where he tried to give Myrna a diamond ring and she flat out refused it. Why ? Because she was PISSED, that's why !!!
That was Elvis' way of trying to make up for being a jerk to people. He never said "sorry" to noone.
You never even acknowledged the concert where Elvis said "I smell Grenn Peppers and Onions ..." looking over at the Sweets.
You got that right. You should take your own advice.So PLEASE don't believe everything you hear when it refers to EP being a racist.
We all know you were there and were Elvis' right hand man!There are some that want him seen that way and others who have no clue of how much just the opposite he really was.
Last edited by King_Creole; 08-14-2007 at 09:17 AM.
Please don't continue down this path of insulting other members.
I dream a world where man no other man
will scorn. Where LOVE will bless the earth
and peace its paths adorn...
And for the record, Creole, Myrna told me herself that she refused the gift of the ring NOT because she was pissed off, but because she was satisfied enough with Elvis' apology.
The other members of the Sweets walked off stage just that once because of what he said about Kathy, nothing more. Myrna and the other Sweets have said there was no racial conotation to his comments, and that they have been misinterpreted over the years.
Last edited by Albert; 08-14-2007 at 01:09 PM. Reason: removed remark to members -> please contact moderators instead
Uh Huh, And I'm sure you also believe the world is flat too ... LOL
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