Celebrity by Andrea McDonnell;Susan J. Douglas;

Author:Andrea McDonnell;Susan J. Douglas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

Figure 4.6. Elvis Presley performs, 1956. Photograph by Jay B. Leviton, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Elvis

Presley was rock ’n’ roll’s first star, made so via radio, and the 45 RPM single records young fans could then buy. And he was a sensation. Presley fused country music with the blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, and boogie-woogie, bringing together American music “from both sides of the color line and performed it with a natural sexuality that made him a teen idol.” He began recording at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio; when Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation) got a copy of “That’s All Right,” he played it over and over as the phones lit up. People hadn’t heard anything quite like it. As Sam Phillips put it, he had found “a white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel.”107 The combination of Presley’s good looks, baritone voice, vocal energy, and hip-thrusting sexual display onstage made him a phenomenon, especially with female fans. Photos of these girls and women show them in near rapturous delight, holding their hands up to their faces, screaming, dancing in the aisles, or extending their arms toward him on stage, desperately trying to connect with him. But there were male fans too and they swarmed venues to see him.

In an era of even greater opportunities for cross-promotion, Presley appeared on television and starred in movies like Love Me Tender, which recouped its $1 million cost in three days.108 His appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 was seen by 82 percent of the television audience. When he sang “Hound Dog” and bounced on the stage, standing on his toes and twisting his legs and hips, the audience screamed in ecstasy. By his third appearance, the cameras only shot him from the waist up.109 Prior to Presley’s success, virtually all of the R&B music that white listeners heard on the radio was performed by black artists. But once white performers began imitating blacks in their music, and performing with greater physicality on stage, it was clear that black music constituted the identities of a significant group of white teens. Presley and other rock ’n’ roll stars represented—and evoked—emotional and physical excess, “pleasure without connection to morality,” and a rebellion against conformist codes around gender, race, and sexuality. Because of his onstage display and the emotionality and sexuality of his voice, Elvis was no manufactured safe star like Pat Boone—Elvis was authentic, the real deal. In some performances, a shock of Elvis’s pompadoured hair hung suggestively over his forehead. As P. David Marshall notes, “a recurring technique for establishing authenticity in popular music performance is the breaking of codes and the creation of new or transformed codes of style.” This style—of dress and hair, onstage performance—is an emphatic statement of difference, but also one of solidarity with the audience, which fans identify with and embrace.110

Once again, this time in the form of rhythm and blues and then rock ’n’ roll, it was African American music that spoke to the cultural alienation, rebellion, and sexual energy of the younger generation.

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