What was the place of rock and roll in the struggle for support of racial equality? To what extent did key players forward a musical agenda for social change? These are some of the burning questions addressed by Louis Cantor in Dewey and Elvis and Michael Bertrand in Race, Rock and Elvis. In some ways rock and roll and the emergence of Elvis Presley are remembered like a great war. As such, both writers inevitably have to contend with a popular version of history. The events from fifty years ago are constantly revisited and romanticised as moments of collective struggle that helped to transform society for the better. They describe a structure of feeling marked by the generation gap, an interpretation of youth as hedonistic rebellion, and a universal empathy in the struggle for racial progress – a structure of feeling that continues to inform popular music. In this war the ground troops were teenagers, the enemy was uncritical support of traditional Southern values, and the generals were Sun studio manager Sam Phillips and WHBQ disc jockey Dewey Phillips. Their greatest weapon was a young Elvis Presley, the Atomic Powered Singer.
As we know, Elvis fused country, gospel, and rhythm and blues into a seamless style of rock and roll. He still has the largest fan club in the world, and his story can be taken in at least two ways: first as myth, a popular tale that supports or scandalises his continued fame, and second as a series of facts about what happened, where, when and to whom. Neither the mythic, nor the chronological mode of explanation are quite able to encompass the relationship between rock and roll and the shift in entrenched Southern values. It is therefore the job of historians to return to the battle zone, re-examine the evidence and create interpretations more meaningful than chronology and more complex than myth. In their own ways, Cantor and Bertrand do exactly that, and they manage to do so with a surprising amount of agreement. From slightly different perspectives, they both address the function of rock and roll as a catalyst for social change.
Half a century after the rock and roll shake up, its transformational role is hard, if not impossible, to fully comprehend. Experience of the previous musical and social climate is inaccessible to younger generations. Ways of thinking about the 1950s are primarily shaped by popular culture, its myths and media. Louis Cantor, who went to Humes High School with Elvis and his friend George Klein, exploits this epistemological premise. He addresses the idea of rock and roll as catalyst through the prism of Dewey Phillips, the exuberant Memphis deejay who exposed the Presley sound on Red Hot and Blue. As Cantor says, ‘The Dewey Phillips story is the stuff that movie scripts are made of. As we fade in, Memphis in the early 1950s already looks like a scene from American Graffiti, the only departure being that the ubiquitous voice blaring from the radio of every teenaged drive-in in town is not Wolfman Jack but that of Daddy-O-Dewey, the hottest deejay in the Mid-South … Not only was he a made-for-the-movies character who attracted a huge audience immediately, but his explosive presentation also made him the kind of pitchman every sponsor dreams of’ (p. 2).
This intriguing cinematic approach is used to actively forward a particular interpretation of key players in the Memphis music industry. As Cantor reminds his readers, even though what followed reversed their importance to history, in the early days Elvis had a minor role in Dewey's story. This is prescient because Cantor paints Dewey not only as Elvis's midwife, but also as his doppleganger. Ascending on the rising spending power of the black and youthful dollar, Dewey was a controversial iconoclast who confounded the class-based establishment in radio with his eclectic blend of vernacular music. He dressed at Lansky Brothers too, took his audiences by storm, and, as top forty formats gradually ousted him from the local air waves, he also descended like Elvis into a personal battle with prescribed drugs. He even died at the same age.
The facts of Elvis's debut are well known and well worn: his trip to Sun Studios to cut a record for his mother, Sun secretary Marion Keisker's endorsement of him to studio owner Sam Phillips, his recorded session with musicians Scotty Moore and Bill Black, and the airing of his acetate, That's Alright Mama, by an excited Dewey on WHBQ. What is interesting are the stories that emerge behind and around this train of events. One way in which Cantor's book is different to Bertrand's is that it is based on a close series of personal interviews with characters central to the main story, their wives and children. The writer uncovers details of business relationships that worked in Dewey's, Sam's, and eventually Elvis's favour. Specifically he shows how Dewey began as a salesman hustling records at Grant's store; how he took his disc jockey act to WHBQ initially for free, because Grant's still paid him commission on the sales of records that he had promoted; and how he formed a symbiotic relationship with Sun owner Sam Phillips that helped the careers of several stars on the label. Readers are reminded that Dewey was a gateway to a substantial teen audience for Sam, and it was Dewey's ears that screened Sam's output well before release. The two men had a symbiotic relationship that spawned a jointly-financed country single before the Sun label was created. In that sense, if, as biographer Peter Guralnick once said, Sam Phillips was a bit like an old testament prophet, then Dewey was John the Baptist. Not only did he give Elvis's earliest single air play before its release; he also convinced Sam to transfer That's Alright Mama to acetate after listening to the initial demo tape. With a keen eye for details like these, Cantor extends our knowledge of one of the key moments of the rock and roll era.
Michael Bertrand's Race, Rock and Elvis works around and beyond Elvis's story to explore the complex, shifting racial politics of the South. Bertrand and Cantor agree that urbanisation and growing prosperity led to the increasing commodification and mediation of black culture. They see the release of growing quantities of rhythm and blues records and the discovery of black listeners as an economically viable radio audience as a reflection of growing disposable income held by local black consumers. White teenagers tuning their radio dials, in turn, overheard the exuberant music. Although they were raised to reproduce the racial hierarchy, their excitement for the passion and individuality of the rhythm and blues style began to stir them. Its effect was to loosen any vestiges of racism that they were encouraged to hold.
It is important to recognise here that the emergence of rock and roll sparked anxieties about race, class and culture across a much wider context. Drawing lightly on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Bertrand brings quotes from Elvis together with those of many others from his time in an effort to trace the effects of this process of change. He argues that without taking class into account, the way that rock and rollers saw themselves and were seen by others cannot be assessed. Demand for the music upset a variety of existing elites including America's intellectual class, with its dominant model of mass education through culture, and the major labels, with their staid production regime. Class also made a crucial difference to how racial identity was negotiated. White working class Southerners dabbling with rhythm and blues were very different in outlook to the bohemian ‘white negroes’ of jazz and beat poetry. In a South steeped in the traditions of Dixieland, where black economic and political aspirations were beginning to challenge the traditional hierarchy, working-class whites had more to lose by embracing integration. Some were its fiercest enemies. It is no wonder, then, that rock and roll was perceived as part of a particularly heated battle for the minds of the future generation. As sounds that incorporated the black vernacular spread out far beyond the region, they were portrayed as tasteless hillbilly music. It was precisely because rock and roll destabilised existing cultural interests and hierarchies of taste that it was stereotyped as the province of reprobate performers, mindless teenagers and cow pokes from Tennessee.
Because Elvis became a symbol of the success or failure of the struggle to emancipate young minds from the slavery of racist thinking, the singer's personal ethics and sense of respect have become objects of contention. Bertrand contends that historians ‘regularly work to protect the past from myth and make sure that myth does not supplant history … [yet] when an image becomes so pervasive, no matter how stereotypical, it can enter the historic record. It can become fact’ (p. 191). Despite its false origin, the racial slur that Elvis was rumoured to have once said (‘The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes’) has become resonant for the way that it articulates these anxieties. In that sense it is interesting to parallel the academic historian's struggle with that of Elvis fan and former CNN editor Todd Rheingold, who addressed many of the same issues in a lesser-known 1992 book on Elvis and race called Dispelling The Myths. While both Bertrand and Rheingold address Elvis's personal relation to black artists, Dispelling The Myths illuminated at least three avenues that, as a social historian, Bertrand does not fully explore. The first is Elvis's generous treatment of black servants at Graceland, such as Mary Jenkins. The second is an instance in 1975 when members of his backing singers, The Sweet Inspirations, walked off stage at a show in Norfolk, Virginia, after Elvis angrily quipped that it smelt as if they had been ‘eating catfish’. My point in raising this is not that Elvis was a racist, so much as that to a degree his racial imaginary was inevitably shaped by his Southern upbringing. He emerged from a mileux where racial difference was such a pervasive part of the social order that it acted as a universal point of cultural reference. To see any ordinary individual from this culture as staunchly race baiting or, conversely, colour blind would seem to be entering into a process of extreme reductionism. A final avenue pursued by Rheingold and not addressed directly by Bertrand is the role of the white man's burden in shaping perspectives on Elvis and race. In other words, what impact does white guilt about the history of racial inequality have on how Elvis is understood? As Bertrand explains, ‘Simple diagnoses and arguments of countless pop psychologists do not measure fully the intricacy of Elvis Presley's personality, attitudes or appeal. Accordingly, the controversial entertainer, like a substantial number of people who bought his records, deserves an evaluation free of clichés and misleading characterizations’ (p. 224).
Consequently, when it comes to reassessing the idea of Elvis as a white minstrel exploiting black traditions for his own gain, Bertrand looks carefully at various aspects and nuances of Elvis's relation to rhythm and blues. He argues that rather than enacting a burlesque, the singer was sharing a cultural response that illuminated a common experience of poverty and caste. The surviving pictures of a very young Elvis Presley standing comfortably next to black artists, and them standing comfortably next to him, make the ideas of Elvis as a culture thief disrespected by black audiences hard to accept. If the facts of the case had not already made that clear, by confronting some rock and roll myths with the details of the historic record, Bertrand succeeds in painting a picture of a turbulent society rifted in a process of social transformation. The Atomic Powered Singer heralded a growing attitude amongst young people that alarmed their elders. His uninhibited public enjoyment of ‘race music’ and the excitement of his teen audience made parents uncomfortable, precisely because he seemed to disregard segregationist tenets. Efforts to maintain control over racial segregation by pointing to stark cultural difference between the races were now failing. In the field of popular music, Elvis had helped rip up the map that kept the races apart. Bertrand therefore demonstrates that Elvis Presley was a complex organic intellectual who reflected his generation's refurbished attitudes towards race and music.
With their compatible interpretations of the Elvis story, both Cantor and Bertrand bring the rock and roll era and questions of its interpretation back to life. As Bertrand notes, here ‘the past usually works as an obstacle that limits rather than liberates a person's actions and attitudes. It is indeed a barrier to be struggled against, a set of forces that must be recognized as socially constructed and imperfect rather than natural and inviolable’ (p. ix). After a closer inspection of the evidence, however, broad new generalisations inevitably have to be made in order for the details to make sense. One such generalisation about rock and roll is that it marked a time of change when one cherished way of life faced extinction at the hands of another. This does not mean that the cultural movement was the deliberate vehicle of a political agenda to integrate the South. Dewey's radio show flourished because increasingly affluent black consumers bought records at Grant's and young whites began to overhear their music. Sam was in business to cater to these audiences, and Elvis was given his own break by their collective mission to deliver hot sounds to cool teenagers. Yet it was a moment that was not to last. It is important to remember that Dewey was a product of his time, his leverage in radio appearing as fortuitously as it then disappeared. Sam switched to white performers after he found Elvis, and never especially fostered mixed race outfits. Elvis, in turn, eventually joined the army, moved away from the blues and focused on his career as a family entertainer in Hollywood. For a while, though, they were not so much the instigators of a popular shift as the channels for it, riding a sea change of tastes to new commercial levels. Dewey, Sam and Elvis enjoyed the diverse musical heritage of their home city with a refreshingly colour-blind attitude. They ignored the tradition of otherness and unjustified ignorance that had been used to support racial segregation. The sounds of rock and roll therefore played a role in challenging Southern traditions because they showed that both blacks and whites could enjoy a common culture.
