![]() The article began by declaring that “colored opinion about the hydromatic-hipped hillbilly from Mississippi runs the gamut from caustic condemnation to ardent admiration. The affront first appeared in print in April 1957 in “How Negroes Feel About Elvis,” a story in the Fort Worth-based (and white-owned) Sepia magazine. Bertrand, writing in Race, Rock, and Elvis, noted that the infamous remark first appeared in an article about the singer as something said by an anonymous “person on the street”: To Elvis, people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.” “People will always try to start something like that about a celebrity,” he said, adding: “It’s a stupid rumor. One of his associates sees it as the natural result of success, coupled with his Mississippi birthplace. With this background, how did the rumor start? When asked if he ever made the remark, Mississippi-born Elvis declared: “I never said anything like that, and people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it.” Robinson went straight to the source, visiting Presley on the set of Jailhouse Rock: Finally, Jet magazine, finding that “tracing the rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth,” dispatched reporter Louie Robinson in search of the truth. Murrow’s Person to Person television program (on which Elvis had never appeared). It mattered not that the story came cloaked in impossible details, such as Elvis’ supposedly making the statement in Boston (a city he had never visited) or on Edward R. Brooks, describing Presley as “a helluva nice guy,” declared: “he faces everybody as a man … I never heard of the remark, but even so I can’t imagine Presley saying that, not knowing him the way I do.”īut millions of people knew only the public Presley image and very few knew Elvis the man, so the rumor grew and spread throughout early 1957. He just doesn’t impress me as the type of person who would say something like that.”Īnother man who knows Presley is Los Angeles pianist Dudley Brooks, who is Presley’s accompanist on records and for two of his movies. He lived near the colored section, and people around here say he’s one of the nicest boys they ever knew. He used to play his guitar and go around with quartets and to Negro ‘sanctified’ meetings. Zuber in the singer’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. When rumors of the alleged ‘Negro slur’ were at their height in mid-1957, plenty of musicians and other acquaintances whom Elvis had encountered during his rise to fame testified that the remark attributed to the singer was completely out of character for him:Īmong the people who know Presley is Dr. And to identify him as one of the main culprits was bad history, a misperception of the facts. There is no question that in the early days of rock and roll, some whites cynically appropriated black culture for commercial purposes and deprived African-American artists of recognition and royalties. Recognizing Elvis’s sincere affection for gospel, soul, and R&B, and his willingness to acknowledge his debt to the African-American musicians who had influenced him, black Americans had a higher regard for Presley than for any other white performer of the era. Ponce de Leon observed that:ĭuring the 1950s and early 1960s blacks had been among most avid fans. Sam Phillips, the producer and head of Sun Records who gave Elvis his start, noted that “The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to be one of the biggest things that happened to us …” And Elvis biographer Charles L. This alleged utterance of Elvis Presley’s was so completely at odds with his true personality and beliefs that anyone who knew him found it hard to believe the rumor could be taken seriously. So it was believed at the height of Presley’s popularity in early 1957, when the rumor began circulating that he had dismissively put down blacks by stating that “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” Never mind the rich rhythm and blues and gospel music heritage of blacks that Elvis had so assiduously mined in becoming the most popular entertainer the world had ever seen the only use he had for them was as servants and consumers of his products. A poor white Southerner who had achieved unprecedented fame and success by co-opting the black man’s music, surely Elvis must have been a racist at heart. Surely this private Elvis was too good to be true. Although his public persona was that of the wild, rebellious, gyrating rock-n-roller, Elvis was actually a shy, humble, religious, polite, respectful young man. Such was the case with the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. Nearly as great as our need to elevate certain common folk to the status of heroes is the need of others to tear them down - to show us that our heroes are possessed grievous flaws that make them unworthy of the praise and attention we lavish on them.
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