THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 27The Presleys were one of three White families that lived in
the Hill. Turner tells me the story of Elvis and his segregation-
era friendship with a boy named Sam Bell, whom Turner got to
know over the years.
“Elvis spent the night at Sam’s and vice versa, and they ate at
each other’s homes,” he says. “Sam was raised by his grandpar-
ents — his father was killed in World War II, and his mother had
gone north to find work. And he said his grandmother and
grandfather thought the world of Elvis because he always said
‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘no, ma’am,’ which no White person said to a
Black person during that era.”
The two boys would go the Lyric Theatre in town to see
movies. “Elvis would go in the front door, and Sam would go
around to the side and then into the colored section,” says
Turner. “When they got up in the balcony, Elvis would step over
this little barrier, probably 18 inches high, and sit in that section
with him. And Sam said, ‘Nobody ever bothered us.’ ”
Tupelo made Elvis, Turner believes, both musically and
spiritually. His music was shaped by the church and by the
Grand Ole Opry, and by the poverty of his youth. He shares a line
from Dundy’s book: “You can hear the soil in Elvis’s voice the
way you can hear the cement in Sinatra’s.”
Maybe it was his impoverished upbringing, but Elvis didn’t
like being called the King. In “Careless Love,” Guralnick tells a
story of a news conference after Elvis’s 1969 opening in Las
Vegas. He posed for a photo with his friend Fats Domino and
told reporters of the singer’s influence, declaring him the real
king of rock-and-roll. This was not unusual. Elvis routinely
noted his debt to Black artists. And to many White fans, the
American Dream appeal of Elvis should transcend race.
“Elvis came from nothing,” Weinshanker says, “and became
everything.”
On the issue of race, I think Chuck D had it right. The
problem isn’t Elvis the artist or Elvis the man. It’s a White-domi-
nated society that elevated Elvis over artists of color. And 45
years after his death, Elvis still serves as a barometer of racial
attitudes in America. “This barometer may measure less who
Presley actually was and more about who we are at the moment,”
Bertrand tells me via email.
Quincy Jones offered an example in a May 2021 Hollywood
Reporter interview. He called Elvis racist (at the Elvis birthday
event, an aggrieved Priscilla Presley addressed the comment,
saying, “I don’t think Elvis had any prejudice at all”). Yet as
Bertrand notes, Jones had worked with Elvis in 1956, and he
discussed Elvis in his 2001 autobiography. “[He] said nothing
about Presley being racist,” Bertrand notes. “In fact, Jones
included Elvis along with Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Stevie
Wonder, and Michael Jackson as icons that had changed
popular music and helped it progress. I have not corresponded
with Jones, but obviously 2021 is not 2001 or 1956. What
changed?”
Attitudes evolve, and race will be linked to Elvis’s long-term
appeal. And the discussion will be dictated not by octogenarian
record producers, septuagenarian actresses-businesswomen or
middle-aged academics. It will be led by smart, thoughtful
young people like Shaw, my Sun Studio tour guide.
“I have nothing against Elvis,” he says, while noting that he’s
a Johnny Cash fan. “I think he was a talented person, and he
definitely ushered in a whole generation of rockers, and he had
massive influence. But I feel like there’s so many discrepancies
with Elvis, especially in terms of how much of his success was on
the backs of Black artists who originally wrote the songs. It
doesn’t put a great taste in my mouth.”A
t the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, I see Elvis’s
custom-made beige wool jacket with velvet collar from the
1950s and his customized 1960 gold-plated Cadillac with portholes
and luxuries such as a refrigerator, record player and television. But
I’m here for a tour of nearby RCA Studio B, where Elvis recorded
many of his hits in the 1960s. I join a group on a shuttle bus for the
roughly 10-minute drive. Our guide, a gray-haired woman named
Debbie, tells a story she heard from a guest on one of her tours. His
uncle had an office in Los Angeles and Elvis was signing contracts.
An upset security guard raced in and said, “Mr. Presley, I’m sorry to
tell you this, but your fans are in the parking lot and they’ve torn
apart your car.” The property was fenced in, the guard had locked
the gate, and he was ready to call the police. Elvis said to let them
go. “They paid for it,” he said of the car.
Few stars were ever as gracious to his fans, and those kinds of
stories are legendary. When his beloved mother, Gladys, died, he
wanted to open the service to fans before the colonel convinced him
otherwise. He would often talk to fans who gathered near the
Graceland gates. Joan Gansky, a lifelong Elvis fan and friend of
Tupelo’s Roy Turner, met him multiple times in the ’60s while
living in Santa Monica, Calif.
“He always stopped and talked to us on his way home from the
[movie] studio,” says Gansky, an expat from England.
When we arrive at Studio B, Debbie shares some history, then
instructs each of us to sit at a piano that Elvis used to play. Two long
rows of chairs line each wall, and when the obligatory piano photos
are completed, she tells us to sit and points at multicolored lights
on the ceiling. When he was recording an up-tempo rocker like
“Little Sister,” Elvis wanted red lights. When he recorded gospel,
the lights were blue. In 1960, when he recorded “Are You
Lonesome Tonight?” he asked musician Chet Atkins, who was
working for RCA, to turn down the lights. Debbie now does the
same to re-create the mood. With its cornball spoken interlude,
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was never my favorite Elvis song. I’ll
take “Mystery Train” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” over anything
recorded in Studio B. But when Debbie turns off the lights and
plays the 62-year-old recording, something unexpected happens.
Sitting in the darkness, we hear only the voice. And suddenly all the
noise that comes with Elvis — the spectacle, the impersonators, the
merchandise — is gone. What remains, what envelops us all, is that
powerful, unmistakable voice.
Many singers had better voices, Guralnick had told me. But
Elvis’s voice connects immediately with listeners. It’s an unusual
gift, he said. Will people still be listening to that voice a century
from now? Who knows? We can’t predict what will endure. It took
300 years for people to recognize the genius of poet John Donne,
Guralnick pointed out. But whether humans are playing “Suspi-
cious Minds” in 2072 or not, it doesn’t devalue the work, and how it
influenced others.
Maybe impermanence doesn’t matter. What matters, at least
for me, is that in this Nashville moment, sitting with strangers in
the dark, I am moved by the all-encompassing sound of a voice. So
I listen, really listen, and I think of my mom and the singer who
joined us for errands, holidays and household chores. And when I
remember those moments, I’m reminded: Listening to Elvis, we
were happy.Ken Budd has written for National Geographic Traveler, the Atlantic, the
New York Times and many more publications. He is the author of the
memoir “The Voluntourist.”