In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

15 It Wasn’t All Elvis In the vast body of post-1945 popular-culture production one is surprised not to find at least one American movie somewhere about the rise of rock ’n’ roll entitled And God Created Elvis, in the way the French showcased the heart-stopping Bridgette Bardot in And God Created Woman. Actually, the one movie that leaps to mind on the musical subject—Rock around the Clock—still holds up remarkably as a chronicle of how things actually were in the beginning, featuring on one hand Bill Haley and the Comets as pioneers of white rockabilly and on the other the Platters combining doo-wop with African American blues and gospel—the kind of music in those days called “race.” And that was just the way, it was told, in which God actually created Elvis.Further,I would propose,something persists even in current American rock ’n’ roll lore of the idea of a great, incarnational narrative in which it all happened—or, in memory at least, may be said to have happened. In television history the legend would center on one nationally electrifying appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show (there were actually three, over a period of six months, with the camera positioning in the third notoriously truncating the performance from the waist down). In records it would immortalize a place called Sun Studios in Memphis, where a beautiful walk-in, an Indian-looking kid with a gospel-blues background and a truck-driving job got to make a trial cut of “That’s All Right,” and boom, suddenly there was “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Heartbreak Hotel.” In the movies, although maybe it took a little It Wasn’t All Elvis / 235 longer, there was Love Me Tender, then Jailhouse Rock, and then a whole legendary Hollywood cycle. An alternate creation narrative cherished by many is the one that might be called the American Hot Wax scenario, spotlighting such popularculture convergences as the rise of the teenager; the growth, following from the breakdown of school segregation,of an interracial youth culture; the transformation of radio into a largely top-forty musical format; and the emergence of the celebrity disc jockey and the TV bandstand and dance party shows. One reads the runes of early legend, remembering James Dean and Natalie Wood in Rebel without a Cause; Ricky Nelson moving from a 1950s family sitcom to the top of the record charts; Brenda Lee from Nashville, Chuck Berry from New Orleans, Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers from the Bronx; Frankie Avalon and Fabian, both from Philadelphia; a first constellation of teen icons; and then Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, going down to eternal memory in an airplane crash on the day the music died. Popular-culture musicologists frequently go back further to a kind of Old Testament foregrounding steeped in folk, regional, and racial vectors , a convergence of deep-seated, history-laden, profoundly political American cultural narratives: C&W,country and western,white; R&B, rhythm and blues, black. It makes for a kind of nice, acronymic plan of historical cross-reference and intersecting genealogies of class and race. The white, hillbilly tradition is made to summon up Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ballad minstrelsy, along with the keening harmonics of the backwoods church, shape-note singing, sacred harp, and the like. The “Negro ” blues legacy in turn becomes that of the work song, the African chant, the whole alternative tradition of black minstrelsy, coupled with its own parallel religious inheritance of spiritual, gospel, shout, and calland -response. Rockabilly and race: as a roots narrative it also legitimizes the new mythology of an insurgent post-1945 culture of youth, prefiguring its eventual 1960s breakout in early forms of musical and popular culture rebellion. Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, James Dean, the Beats, jazz legends such as John Coltrane or Billie Holiday—all become avatars of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane. 236 / Chapter 15 Meanwhile, as anyone who was actually there can tell you without much structural argument or scholarly exertion—anecdotally, experientially , that is, as part of living in the world—it was much, much more complicated than any of that. For a young person growing up in the rock ’n’ roll era, that is to say, music was simply the most exciting thing in the world, absolutely the place to be. Furthermore, it was a place right in the middle of the media mainstream—even as Elvis...

Share