Today, January 8th, is the birthday of Elvis Presley, born 91 years ago. He didn’t make it half that long, gone at the age of 42 in 1977. All his life and still today, he remains a controversial figure. Coming out of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records in Memphis, he did not invent rock’n’roll as a new musical genre, but he sure did popularize it, and in the making, polarized American society ever since.
Was he a true innovator or did he appropriate the music of others on his climb to the top? The answer is yes, all the way around, which in some ways, is how music goes. If you listen to the same song, performed by two different artists, it always sounds different, unless one is doing a blatant copy of the other.
Supposedly, Sam Phillips once said, “If I could find a white man who could sing with a black man’s soul, I could make a million dollars.” Though Elvis had come in a year earlier to record a record for his mother, his biggest fan, Sam did not recognize that the singer he was looking for could be found in the aspirations of a teenage truck driver.
According to our most current understanding of how it all happened, it was Sam’s secretary, Marion Keisker who really made the connection. She was the one who recorded Elvis when he sang “My Happiness” for a Mother’s Day present. And it was Marion Keisker who remembered Elvis when Sam went on the hunt for his million dollar singer. She encouraged a full audition.
Sam pulled together a two-piece combo (Scotty Moore on guitar, Bill Black on bass) on a hot summer night in June of 1954. They played various songs. Nothing seemed to work. It wasn’t until they took a break, Elvis broke into “That’s Alright, Mama,” Scotty and Bill followed the lead, and Sam Phillips found his ideal singer.
“That’s different” was Sam’s appraisal of what he heard. To some it might seem that Elvis was too twangy to sing rhythm and blues, but too soulful to do country. Eventually, Sam heard different. Within a month, the record was burning up the airwaves all across Memphis. Within two years, Elvis was a national phenomenon, all because he was too different.
Sam Phillips never made a million dollars on the talent of the guy Johnny Cash would call “the shaky kid” during a period when they toured together. RCA paid Sun Records $35,000 for the contract.
But Elvis accomplished a monumental feat. He was the first singer to cross over and bridge a musical divide that had been artificially constructed between white and black music. It wasn’t that the youth of America did not know that R&B music existed prior to Elvis. It was available at night on radio stations across the nation. The rise of Elvis helped merge us into musical market that made enjoying a song possible just because you liked it with no racial considerations.
Happy Birthday, Big E.
Photo: Sam and Elvis, pioneers in rock’n’roll.
