In April 1957 white-owned Sepia magazine, which catered to a black readership, published “How Negroes Feel about Elvis,” registering opinions that ran the gamut from condemnation to admiration. The article contained a racist comment rumored to have been said by Elvis. That summer, black-owned Jet magazine, also catering to a black audience, sent editor Louie Robinson (1957) to interview Elvis and others who knew him, including African Americans in his hometown Tupelo and in Memphis. Robinson found no credible basis for the rumor and offered up a sympathetic picture of his standing among African Americans. The article estimated that Fats Domino, his closest peer, would earn $700,000 in 1957 and that Elvis stood to earn twice that amount. (For comparison, earlier in the decade the biggest star in country music, Hank Williams, was earning $200,000 a year until his death in 1953 at age twenty-nine.) The Sepia magazine quote may be the original basis for rumors about Elvis that still persist.
Robinson also interviewed Brooklyn-based songwriter Otis Blackwell: “The lion’s share, or an estimated $900,000, of the Presley income is from records, two of the best of which were penned by a New York Negro, Otis Blackwell: Don’t Be Cruel, which has brought Presley a not-at-all cruel $202,500, and All Shook Up, which shook $135,000 into Elvis’ jeans. Blackwell refuses to disclose his earnings on the songs, but he says: ‘I got a good deal. I made money, I’m happy’” (1957: 61). Blackwell himself, according to his obituary in the New York Times, “from an early age crossed a cultural color line. At home, his family gathered around the piano to sing gospel songs, but while working at a nearby movie theater he became obsessed with the singing cowboy movies of Tex Ritter. ‘Like the blues, it told a story,’ he once said of country music. ‘But it didn’t have the same restrictive construction. A cowboy song could do anything.’ … Many of the songs he wrote for Presley gave both men songwriting credit, because of an arrangement with Presley’s management. ‘I was told that I would have to make a deal,’ Mr. Blackwell later said” (New York Times 2002).13
Some of the animosity toward Elvis among African Americans may be due to a perception that he did not publicly acknowledge his sources. The songwriters he covered, though, received copyright credit on his records (and presumably royalties from his sales and performance rights), and early interviews should dispel any doubts.
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goose it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw” (Presley, qtd. in Gary 1956).
Presley was frank about his own contribution: “A lot of people seem to think I started this business,’ he muses, ‘but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music. I used to go to the colored churches when I was a kid—like Rev. Brewster’s [Baptist] church [in Memphis]” (Presley, qtd. in Louie Robinson 1957: 61).
Presley recognized here another source of animosity: getting credit for inventing a musical style. Referring to Elvis as the king of rock and roll, suggesting that he either invented the style or did it better than anyone else, does a disservice to his African American contemporaries and predecessors. This was Chuck D’s point when he later reflected back on his incendiary lines in Public Enemy’s 1989 “Fight the Power,” lines that reinforced negative perceptions of Elvis for later generations: “Elvis [Presley] was an icon to America but he ain’t invent Rock & Roll. There were other Black heroes [that did]…. And that aspect was racist I thought, that people just obscured the Black foundation of what Elvis evolved from…. He started off being quite humble … hearing from people speaking that knew him and knew his beginnings: from Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, I had conversations with Little Richard, Ike Turner. He started out being this cat that loved Black music, the Black environment, the Black way of dress and all that” (qtd. in P. Arnold 2012).
From a commercial point of view, Presley was in a class by himself. His artistic contribution, a unique mix of styles drawing not only from R&B but also from country and white and black gospel can be readily heard by comparing his cover version of “Mystery Train” (1955) with Herman “Little Junior” Parker’s original from 1953. One would be hard pressed to doubt his talent and charisma as an entertainer. His age, eight years younger than Chuck Berry and two years younger than Little Richard, was also a major factor among a teen market that was asserting itself for the first time.
Presley’s appeal across generations, after an initial shock, was in part due to his lack of pretense: “One big element, it is clear, is his lack of all pretensions. A recurrent theme among the adult minority interviewed at Tuesday night’s show was expressed by Mrs. G. E. Anderson of Charlotte. ‘I didn’t like Sinatra in his day but I like Elvis. He’s country and I am too,’ she said. Nearly all the adults who expressed delight with Presley had 10 years before scorned the smooth Frankie boy” (Oberdorfer 1956: 1B).
Some quotations posted on the website of Graceland (2019), Elvis’s home since 1957 and now a major tourist site, provide a sense of his standing among his African American peers. Most are unsourced, but some can be tracked down, which can lead to many more. James Brown and Muhammad Ali, in particular, both icons of black identity and achievement, world famous, and born into poverty, have expressed close kinship with, and love and respect for, Presley. Muhammad Ali remembered, “All my life, I admired Elvis Presley. When I was in Las Vegas, I heard him sing, and it was a thrill to meet him” (qtd. in Hauser 1991: 481). “When I was 15 years old [about 1957] and saw Elvis on TV, I wanted to be Elvis. Other kids in the neighborhood were listening to Ray Charles and James Brown, but I listened to Elvis. I admired him so much and I decided that if I was going to be famous I’d do it just like him” (qtd. in Shanahan 2016: 138–39).
The year after Presley died, James Brown paid tribute to him, covering one of his early hits, “Love Me Tender,” saying in the introduction, “I want to talk about a good friend I had for a long time and a man I still love, brother Elvis Presley” (“Love Me Tender,” 1978). Brown wrote in his autobiography, “[in 1966] we threw everybody out of the room, and Elvis and I sang gospel together…. That’s how we communicated…. I could tell Elvis had a strong spiritual feeling by the way he sang that music…. His death hit me very hard. We were a lot alike in many ways—both poor boys from the country raised on gospel and R&B…. I went to Graceland that night” (1986: 165, 166, 247). B. B. King, who knew Elvis in his early days in Memphis, had this to say: “Respect, respect, respect. And he sorta earned it, earned that respect from me at that time. Finally I had a chance to meet him and I found out that he really was something else” (PBS 2001). Memphis all-black-formatted WDIA radio deejay Rufus Thomas stated, “I was the first black jock to play Elvis records…. We were doing a WDIA show at Ellis Auditorium, and Elvis was backstage. I took him by the hand and led him onstage, he made that twisting of the leg, and the people, these were all black people now, they stormed that stage trying to get to Elvis. After that, the show was really over. Elvis was doing good music, blues and rhythm and blues, because that was his beginning.” And R&B bandleader Roy Brown recalled, “Elvis followed us, from Tupelo to Vicksburg to Hattiesburg, and he just watched us. Later on, when I first saw him on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ all that wiggling and stuff, man, the blacks had been doing that for years. But there was something about Elvis that was different from the Fabians and them other guys. Elvis could sing. And he had a heart…. He had style, and he had soul” (qtd. in Palmer 1995: 27–28).
Elvis’s recording success immediately led to his film career, with over thirty films made from 1956 (Love Me Tender, released in November) through 1969, including Jailhouse Rock (1957), King Creole (1958), Kid Galahad (1962), and Viva Las Vegas (1964). After devoting much of the 1960s to acting, Presley made a comeback with an NBC television special in December 1968, hitting the Top 10 twice in