July 19, 2024: ElvisStudying: First and Last

[July 19^th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On how we can understand the profound changes Elvis underwent, and why they’re not the whole story.

It’s obviously coincidental but still quite striking that July 19^th so clearly marks both the beginning and the end of Elvis Presley’s recording career. By July 1954 the 19-year-old Presley had been unsuccessfully trying to release records with Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service (the predecessor to his hugely influential Sun Records label) for about six months; but when his version of Arthur Crudup’s 1946 blues song “That’s All Right” drew the attention of local radio DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation to Sam), Presley was finally able to put out a single on July 19^th, with the slightly retitled “That’s Alright (Mama)” on the A-side and Presley’s cover of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the B-side. And in July 1977, Presley put out his final album, Moody Blue, a compilation of live tracks and various recordings from his final studio sessions in February and October 1976 (including the hit title track which had been first recorded at Graceland in February 1976); less than a month after the album’s release Presley would pass away at the tragically young age of 42, and the album would go on to be certified Gold and then Platinum by September.

It takes nothing away from the genuine tragedy of that very early passing to note just how much had changed for Elvis between these two July 19ths just over two decades apart. When Dewey Phillips interviewed Presley in July 1954, he had to ask him what high school he attended in order to communicate to the radio audience that this young artist whom they obviously could not see and knew less than nothing about was white; when Elvis died in July 1977, he was arguably one of the most recognizable as well as one of the most famous people in the world. That fame had begun to develop relatively quickly—Presley bought his first home in Memphis in 1956, but fans began to congregate outside it so consistently that the neighbors became annoyed and he purchased the more isolated and difficult to access Graceland mansion less than a year later. His fame only grew from there, and would remain an inescapable presence until the literal last hours of his life, as illustrated by a famous paparazzi photo taken upon Presley’s return to Graceland after midnight on the day he died, August 16^th, 1977. (And of course his fame endured long after his passing, as reflected by the persistent rumors of Elvis sightings across the subsequent decades.)

Yet despite those unquestionable and in some ways unfathomable changes between 1954 and 1977, I believe these two July 19^th releases can also remind us of some unchanging aspects of Presley’s career in music (which, as Tuesday’s post on his films illustrates, was not his only career, but was by far his most influential one). While he apparently contributed some ideas to the production of a few songs here and there (getting the occasional and controversial collaboration credits as a result), Presley never truly wrote a song, meaning that all of his releases were at least performances of others’ songs if not outright covers (as was the case with both his first single and a number of songs from his last album). To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean he “stole” others’ music (as recent narratives have sometimes put it)—as I’ve written multiple times in this space, covers were a ubiquitous if not indeed defining presence in the early decades of rock ‘n roll. But it does mean that Elvis was always first and foremost a performer, gaining popularity and success and fame for his iconic such performances and all the layers of identity that they embodied (literally and otherwise), rather than for his own creative output. Indeed, he may well have been the 20^th century’s most successful performer, a title for which he was at least competitive from his first release to his last.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?