Peter Guralnick demonstrated in his definitive history of Soul music,
Sweet
Soul Music : Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom, that
he has a nearly unique grasp of the singular way in which popular music
and the political culture intersect in American society. Along with
Robert
Palmer (Deep Blues) and Greil Marcus (Mystery Train), he has
helped to craft a still pretty slender body of literature which takes pop
music and its impact seriously, but also places it within a larger societal
context. Now, in his two part biography of Elvis Presley, he has
set out to strip away both the mythology (Volume One) and the demonology
(Volume Two) that obscure Elvis and to restore some reasonable sense of
perspective on the man and his music. In so doing, he offers us a
new and useful opportunity to understand the personal and societal forces
that converged to make him into The King, one of the genuine cultural icons
of the 20th Century, and to trigger the Rock & Roll Era.
There are several main factors that Guralnick cites, which appear to
have had a particular influence on how events transpired. First is
the city of Memphis itself, which served as a nearly perfect crucible for
forging the blend of Gospel, Country, Blues and Rhythm & Blues that
made up Elvis's sound. A southern city, but not Deep South, there
was at least limited interaction between the white and black worlds.
But most importantly for this story, the city was saturated with music.
Second, Sam Phillips, owner of his own fledgling Sun Records operation,
was on the scene looking for a white act that could bring the black sound
to a mass audience:
Sam Phillips possessed an almost Whitmanesque belief
not just in the nobility of the American
dream but in the nobility of that dream as it filtered
down to its most downtrodden citizen, the
Negro. 'I saw--I don't remember when, but
I saw as a child--I thought to myself: suppose that I
would have been born black. Suppose
that I would have been born a little bit more down on the
economic ladder. I think I felt from the beginning
the total inequity of man's inhumanity to his
brother. And it didn't take its place with
me of getting up in the pulpit and preaching. It took the
aspect with me that someday I would act on my
feelings, I would show them on an individual,
one-to-one basis.'
Finally, there was the man, actually he was more of a boy at the
beginning, Elvis Presley. And Elvis was himself the product of several
forces. There was the impoverished kind of white trash milieu from
which Elvis came and which gave him a sense of alienation and otherness.
As Phillips said of him:
He tried not to show it, but he felt so inferior.
He reminded me of a black man in that way; his
insecurity was so markedly like that of a
black person.
Then there was his mother, Gladys, who--in addition to raising him to
be polite, respectful, humble, even deferential--also gave him unconditional
love, bordering on worship, which he returned in kind. These forces
combined, as so often seems to be the case, to make him insecure on the
one hand, particularly in the manner in which he approached and dealt with
people, but, on the other, left him burning with an inner certainty that
he was special and was meant to accomplish great things.
All of these forces combined into a volatile mix in the Sun recording
studios on July 5, 1954. Phillips had brought Elvis in to work with
a couple of local musicians, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, because he wanted
them to do some ballads and Elvis had done some demos there, which Philips
was not overwhelmed by but he thought Elvis had some potential as a ballad
singer. The session was pretty desultory, if not downright unsuccessful,
until that inevitable, now mythical, moment when during a break Elvis started
fooling around doing Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's old blues tune "That's All
Right [Mama]". Phillips, initially shocked that this quiet white
mama's boy even new the song, immediately recognized that this was just
the type of thing that he had been looking for and got them to record it.
All of the tumblers had clicked into place. It was the nature
of Memphis that Elvis and Sam had been exposed to, more like drenched in,
the music of the black community. Sam happened to be looking for
someone who could transport that music and, most importantly, the style
and atmospherics of the music, into the white community. And in walks
Elvis, that quintessential hybrid of insecurity and manifest destiny.
If success did not come overnight it did come quickly and Guralnick
masterfully charts the meteoric rise that took them up the charts and took
Elvis to television and then to Hollywood. This first volume also
sees Colonel Parker take over from Sam, the purchase of Graceland, the
eventual breakup of the original band, the death of Elvis's mother and
his induction into the Army. Guralnick makes it all seem fresh and
exciting, carrying the reader along on the tide of events. An incredible
number of famous names stud the narrative and prove to have significant
roles to play, including: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Hank Snow,
B.B. King, Sammy Davis, Jr., Eddy Arnold, Bill Monroe, Steve Allen, Milton
Berle and, of course, Ed Sullivan. This is a great biography, one
that should especially appeal to folks whose only image of Elvis is the
fat, sweaty, drug-addled lounge lizard of popular caricature.
