[July 19th 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 19th 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 19th, 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 16th, 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 19th 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 20th 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?
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