He had set out in 1950 to record the great black musicians of the South: B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Joe Hill Louis and others. But when none of them could break into the mass market, said Peter Guralnick, the Elvis biographer and music writer, Mr. Phillips became convinced that "a white artist with a Negro sound and feel" could accomplish his purpose. "It was a secret assault on a racist system — the realization of a true sense of democracy, something very much against the mores of the time and place they lived," Mr. Guralnick said.
"He felt that you had to disguise it, that you couldn't be too explicit in your rebellion," he said. "If he'd said, 'I'm recording this music because I want to break down all segregation barriers,' nobody would ever have listened to it. But it was so implicit in the music, he felt that by pursuing it, it was bound to happen."
| David M. Halbfinger's New York Times article "Memphis Shaken as Rock 'n' Roll Heart is Stilled" lets Peter Guralnick examine Sam Phillips' B-side.
Peter Guralnick, in his book "Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley" (Little, Brown, 1994), said that Mr. Phillips's accomplishment was realizing "the unlimited possibilities, and untapped potential, in the popular appetite for African-American culture."
This sort of talk irritated Mr. Phillips, who denied that before Presley he had said he could make a million dollars if he could find a white man who sang black rhythms with a black feel — an oft-reported statement.
"That quote is an injustice both to the whites and the blacks," Mr. Phillips said in an interview with The New York Times in 1978. "I was trying to establish an identity in music, and black and white had nothing to do with it."
| Guralnick spins the records again in Douglas Martin's New York Times obituary "Sam Phillips, Who Discovered Elvis, Dies at 80"
The other crucial component in the establishment of the myth that Presley's genius and talent stemmed predominantly from black sources is the invocation of the oft-repeated statement attributed to Sam Phillips that "if he could find a white man who sounded black he could make a million dollars." The source of this quote is Marion Keisker. Sam has stated that he does not actually remember saying this, although he does admit that it is quite possible that he said something akin to this. If Sam Phillips did either say or think such a thought, there is nothing in the demos that Elvis Presley recorded at Sun that would indicate in any way, shape or form that he was the man Phillips was looking for.
Sam Phillips had long been interested in the cross-pollination of white and black cultures. For quite some time he had been encouraging his black artists to cover white material and his white artists to cover black material, along the way dispensing with the primary sonic indicators of hillbilly culture: the fiddle, banjo and pedal steel guitar. Once he finally decided to record Presley, Phillips continued apace with these experiments. Similar aesthetics were informing the activity in Cincinnati at King Records, where hillbilly artists were regularly covering r&b material, and r&b stars such as Wynonie Harris were recording country covers. There was analogous activity in other parts of the United States. A number of Fats Domino's hits, including "Blueberry Hill" and "I'm Gonna Be a Wheel Someday," involved the re-recording of country material, while Chuck Berry simply rewrote a country fiddle tune, "Ida Red," for his first rock and roll hit, "Maybellene."
It should be obvious by now that my position is that the notion that Elvis Presley was simply a white man who sounded black is a significant misreading of Presley's early work. Unfortunately, as I have indicated, this sentiment has deep resonance within both black and white America, due to the United States's particularly twisted legacy of slavery and racism, and consequently this sentiment has deep resonance within the mythology of rock history itself. As seductive as it is, this myth gets in the way of our ability to come to terms with the reality of Presley's accomplishment and its consequent social and musical meanings.
| An excerpt from Rob Bowman's Crawdaddy article "Elvis Presley and the Impulse Toward Transculturation"
posted in articles on August 1, 2003 12:58 AM | t (0)
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