Elvis Presley's Impact On Rock And Roll

The reading I will focus on this week is an article written by the journalist Kays Gary for the Charlotte Observer in June 1956. In the reading, Gary recalls his time spent with Elvis Presley during an interview with the local press before an early performance in North Carolina. Although Elvis was evidently being very flirtatious and open with his young female fans on the afternoon of the interview, his attitude towards the media is notably more hostile, with the singer remarking that “them critics don’t like to see nobody win doing any kind of music they don’t know nothin’ about” (p. 19). This bitter response to the criticism faced by Presley after his appearance on the Milton Bearle Show appears to indicate that Elvis believed rock and roll to have a high cultural value that made it inaccessible and unintelligible to certain groups of people (in this specific instance, journalists). However, when asked why he does what he does, Presley retorts with the disappointingly honest line that he performs for the money and would be willing to abandon rock and roll should a new style become more lucrative (p. 20).

This passage demonstrates the

While a rural blues artist may have utilised music as a tool to address the hardships they faced in life, Elvis rarely received any songwriting credits for the music he recorded. Consequently, he is unlikely to have had the same emotional attachment to his work that an artist like Muddy Waters would have done to his. Presley’s rebranding into a more mainstream artist after 1961 only reaffirms this idea that he cared little about his integrity as a rock and roll artist, and was content to diversify into ballads and acting roles if it meant more fame and money. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this necessarily invalidates Elvis 's status as one of the greatest performers of all