THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25P
ie ces of electrical tape mark three Xs on the grungy tan floor
at Sun Studio. After the eccentric opulence of Graceland,
Sun exudes a refreshing grit. The studio space is unremarkable,
like an old garage with microphones, yet it tingles with the magic
of history. The floor tape marks a milestone moment from 1954.
On one X stood guitarist Scotty Moore. On another stood bassist
Bill Black. And X No. 3 marks where 19-year-old Elvis Presley
sang “That’s All Right,” the song that changed American music.
Tour guide Josh Shaw tells the story. He’s 26, African
American and frontman for an indie-rock band called Blvck
Hippie. The enthusiastic Shaw guides me and three middle-aged
women through the studio as well as an upstairs museum
devoted to Sun’s history and artists, including B.B. King, Howlin’
Wolf and Johnny Cash. When the tour is over, I ask Shaw, who
studied rock-and-roll in a collegiate music class, if he’s an Elvis
fan.
“I’m not really the demographic,” he says. “It means some-
thing to me as far as having pride in your city, and everybody
loves your hometown heroes, but it’s not up my alley personally.
The occasional joke with a lot of Black Memphians is that we’ve
never been to Graceland.”
Today Elvis fandom seems divided on racial lines, though that
wasn’t always true. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Black
Americans were among his most avid fans, according to Ponce de
Leon. Elvis had seven No. 1 hits on Billboard’s rhythm and blues
chart, which reflected African American music sales, and Black
stations were more likely to play his music than White stations.
White bigots saw the rise of Elvis and the integrated crowds as a
threat to Jim Crow and segregation.
Attitudes changed, Ponce de Leon says, during the civil rights
movement when “many Blacks were discouraged from patroniz-
ing White artists” and cultural appropriation claims became
more common. By 1989, in Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,”
Chuck D raps, “Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant s---
to me you see / Straight up racist that sucker was.” Yet in a
Newsday interview tied to the 25th anniversary of Elvis’s death in
2002, Chuck D offered a more nuanced view:
“As a musicologist — and I consider myself one — there was
always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sunexciting, shocking, hypnotic, different. For
subsequent generations, it’s hard to grasp
that initial thrill. A shaking leg seems tame
compared with Beyoncé dancing in front
of her marching band at Coachella, or
Lady Gaga skyfalling from the top of the
stadium during her Super Bowl perform-
ance. Roger Ebert once noted something
similar about the Marx Brothers. It was
hard for modern audiences, he said, to
appreciate how manic, how radical, how
original they appeared to astonished audi-
ences watching “Horse Feathers” in thea-
ters. What’s new becomes familiar, de-
manding something fresh.
“Music has changed so much: the
fragmentation of genres, the emergence of
specific subcultures attached to genres,
the domination of hip-hop, the eclipse of
rock as a popular musical form,” says
Charles L. Ponce de Leon, author of the
Elvis biography “Fortunate Son.” “Even
with the top 40, insofar as there is such a
thing, you see what the top hits are, and
few if any songs have any connection to the
older rock and pop for which Elvis is
known.”
Joel Weinshanker says he’s not worried
that young people will discover Elvis, for a
simple reason: They always do. Women in
their 20s, he says, are the second-highest
demographic for Graceland visits and
Elvis merchandise. He compares it to the
enduring success of “A Christmas Story,”
which debuted in 1983 and still airs in
annual yuletide marathons on TBS. “Why
is it just as popular today as it was when it
came out? Because dads are watching it
with their sons,” he says.
Recently my sister-in-law, who teaches
high school English in Fairfax County,
showed 35 students a photo of Elvis, then
asked whether they could identify him and
name a song. Seventy-seven percent rec-
ognized him. Only 34 percent could name
a tune. Ponce de Leon, who teaches U.S.
cultural and intellectual history at Califor-
nia State University at Long Beach, has
found something similar. To his students,
Elvis exists not as a performer, but as an
image.
“Unless they’re music geeks, or they
had parents or grandparents who exposed
them to the music, they don’t know it,” he
says of Elvis’s repertoire. “But they know
the look — those iconic photographs
performing on Ed Sullivan or him decked
out in his white suit in his Vegas incarna-
tion. That’s really how they interact with
older culture now: as images. To use a
language they would understand, Elvis is
like a meme.”
Below: An undated
photo of a man
dressed as a
blue-faced Elvis at
Burning Man in
Nevada.
Opposite page: Chuck
Parr sings at the
Dead Elvis Ball during
Elvis Week in
Memphis in 2002.