Shake Rag Roots—Elvis Presley

So the story goes that Elvis stole black music, exploited the influences he absorbed while growing up on the blurred edges of the coloured line in Memphis, and diluted and made them palatable to white America. Yet surely the very notion that you can ‘steal’ a form of music—let alone that music can be defined by hue—is preposterous. If that had any legal credibility, folk legends such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan would have been rendered indigent by litigation.

“The black man, the white man, has got no music of their own. Music belongs to the universe.” These wise words were uttered by Rufus Thomas, the sharecropper’s son out of Mississippi, who was a DJ on WDIA in the 1950s before hitting big as with Walking The Dog in 1963. Thomas used to play Elvis songs on his radio programme until the suits at the station told him to stop because, apparently, black people didn’t want to hear them. Then, in June 1956, Elvis “cracked Memphis’ segregation laws” (according to The Memphis World newspaper) by showing up at the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘coloured night’ ”, and later the same year attended WDIA’s annual fundraiser “for needy Negro children” in the city’s Ellis Auditorium.

“He was just watching from the wings,” said Rufus’ daughter, Carla, then 14 years old and a member of the Teen Town Singers, who were on the bill. “They didn’t announce him until the very end, because they didn’t want everybody to get carried away. And when they did and he came out and did his little, ‘How you doing?’ everybody said, ‘More! Do a little something for us’. So he did a little shake, and he tore everybody up.”

After the WDIA event, Elvis talked quietly with BB King, telling him, “Thanks, man, for the early lessons you gave me.” Those early lessons were learned by standing at the side of the stage as King and his band performed in Memphis. The boy who would become king was, BB told a reporter, “serious about what he’s doing”.

Elvis furthered his tutelage at home, listening to a stack of singles he had by the likes of Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton and Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup—records that, Peter Guralnick writes in Last Train To Memphis: The Rise Of Elvis Presley, “he studied with all the avidity that other kids focused on their college exams. He listened over and over, seeming to hear something that no one else could hear.”

Whatever it was he heard, Elvis felt empathy—a sense of kinship—with what the bigoted States stupidly termed ‘race records’, just as much as he identified with the hillbilly sounds of the south. Evidently the primal impulse, the unfettered expression in the music, resonated with him. You could tell that by the way he sang and the way he moved, unlike any white singer that had come before. Maybe on another level he was drawn to the outsider-dom of black America, the exclusion of a whole demographic because of their visible difference. He may not have descended from slaves, but Elvis dug the culture and, like the folks he encountered on Memphis’ Beale Street, wore garish pink shirts and pomaded hair. Or perhaps it was the common ground of poverty. In Tupelo, the Presleys lived on Commerce Street before relocating to little more than a shack in Mulberry Alley, opposite the black quarter, known as Shake Rag.

“There were times we had nothing to eat but corn bread and water,” Elvis’ father, Vernon, remembered. “But we always had compassion for people. Poor we were. But trash we weren’t. We never had any prejudice. We never put anybody down. Neither did Elvis.”

The Memphis of Elvis’ youth may have been segregated, but black and white mingled in live venues on Beale Street and Shake Rag, in country clubs and on river boats. Elvis got his fix of black gospel at the East Trigg Baptist Church. The city was a magnet for rural blues players, among them Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Bobby Bland and Arthur Crudup.

What became rock ’n’ roll had been around long before Elvis came along. “The coloured folks been singing it and playing it just I’m doing now, for more years than I know,” he remarked in 1956.

“They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo I used to hear Arthur Crudup 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.”

Interviewed for black magazine Jet the following year, Elvis, in response to Louie Robinson’s question about the origin of his “earthy, moaning baritone”, admitted, “I never sang like this in my life until I made that first record. That’s Alright, Mama. I remembered that song because I heard Arthur Crudup sing it and I thought I would like to try it.”

As far as bluesman Big Bill Broonzy was concerned, Elvis was just doing the same thing he was doing. “’Cause really, the melody and the tune and the way we used to call it ‘rocking the blues’ years ago when I was a kid, that’s what he’s doing now,” he suggested. Ike Turner claimed Elvis would show up at his Memphis gigs in 1952; at the time he regarded him as “just a white boy that would come over to black clubs. He would come in and stand behind the piano and watch me play. I never knew he was no musician.”

Back then, Elvis had assimilated rhythm and blues influences so well that many believed him to be AfricanAmerican – a belief affirmed by Sammy Davis Jr. “Early on somebody told me that Elvis was black. And I said, ‘No, he’s white but he’s down-home’. And that is what it’s all about. Not being black or white, it’s being down-home and which part of down home you come from.

Elvis found an ally in Sam Phillips, the head of Sun Records—someone who, in Peter Guralnick’s words, “shared with him a secret, almost subversive attraction not just to black music but to black culture, to an inchoate striving, a belief in the equality of man”. Phillips had recorded Howlin’ Wolf and BB King—he had a bona fide history with black artists—but had to be savvy in his attempts to bring R&B into the mainstream.

“I don’t think Elvis was aware of my motivation for doing what I was trying to do—not consciously anyway—but intuitively he felt it,” Phillips pointed out. “The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to be one of the biggest things that ever could have happened to us, though. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music. But we hit things a little bit. I went out into this no-man’s land, and I knocked the shit out of the colour line.”

Former Billboard editor Paul Ackerman agreed with Phillips’ assertion. The rock ’n’ roll conceived by Phillips and Presley and birthed at Sun was a bold statement of a sort of egalitarian ideal in one aspect of American cultural life, at least, integration had been achieved, a joyful synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore”. It was a gateway to wider acclaim for Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Michael T Bertrand, in his book. Race, Rock And Elvis, contends that the advent of Elvis and rock ’n’ roll enabled white southerners to rethink their attitude to race and provided impetus to the burgeoning civil rights movement.

“When he first started out in his career, Presley blurred racial lines. But later on in his career he became, for lack of a better term, whiter. When he tried to become more middle class, he lost what people perceived were his black characteristics.”

Of course, Elvis’ embrace of blackness elicited opposition on both sides of the racial divide. On a single day Ackerman received calls from two Nashville music executives, forcibly demanding that Billboard remove Elvis’ records from the country chart “because he played black music”. Little Richard resented the fact that Elvis made more money than he did, raging, “Elvis was paid $25,000 for doing three songs in a movie and I only got $5,000, and if it wasn’t for me, Elvis would starve.”

The venerable Muddy Waters, meanwhile, on hearing Elvis’ version of Trouble, thought it aped his own Hootchie Coochie Man. “I better watch out. I believe whitey’s picking up on things that I’m doing.” Others, such as Calvin Newborn, accused Elvis of plagiarising the physical element of his act; “He would sit there and watch me every Wednesday and Friday night. I’d wiggle my legs and swivel my hips and make love to the guitar. Sometimes I’d put it behind my head and between my legs and slide across the dancefloor.”

Elvis’ most vociferous opponent was Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who, on Fight The Power, labels him “a straight up racist”—a perspective he himself refuted after visiting Graceland for a Fox TV news story. “Elvis had to come through the streets of Memphis and turn out black crowds before he became famous,” said the rapper. “It wasn’t like he cheated to get there. He was a bad-ass white boy.

“Elvis had a great respect for black folk at a time when black folks were considered niggers, and who gave a damn about nigger music?”

THE END

 

It is a quote. VINTAGE ROCK PRESENTS – ELVIS COLLECTORS EDITION 2015