VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: Elvis Was a Straight-Up Racist – Mary J. Blige, Quincy Jones, Chuck D Weigh In on a Persistent Controversy

In 2002, hip-hop vocaliser Blessed Virgin J. Blige sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” a Carl Perkins strain popularized past Elvis Presley, during the “Divas Live” special on wire web VH1.

She later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I prayed most it because I live Elvis was a racist. But that was just now a vocal VH1 asked me to sing. It meant goose egg to me. i didn’t wear off an Elvis flag. I didn’t interpret Elvis that day.”

In 2021, Grammy-winning producer Quincy Inigo Jones told the Hollywood Reporter that he refused to ever work with Presley. Pressed to explicate why, the 88-year-old flashed plunk for to his years piece of writing for orchestra leader Tommy Dorsey in the ’50s.

Elvis came in, and Tommy said: ‘I don’t require to caper with him,’” Inigo Jones recalled. “He was a racialist mother******.” Inigo Jones and then said, “I’m sledding to shut up now,” reverting after a vanquish to add: “But every clip I saw Elvis, he was existence coached past Elisha Graves Otis Blackwell, telling him how to sing.”

As noted past the Hollywood Reporter, Blackwell told Saint David Letterman on his exhibit in 1987 that he and Presley had ne'er met.

Elvis – who would experience turned 88 on January 8 – seemed to represent a similar sore recognise for Ray Charles Stuart in a 1994 interview with NBC’s Bob Costas. “To say that Elvis was so outstanding and so outstanding, like he’s the world-beater … the queen of what?” Charles I asked. “He was doing our tolerant of music. So what the the pits am I supposed to receive so excited about?”

In 1989, Public Enemy recorded what is at present the soundtrack to the anti-Semite(a) Elvis rallying cry. The rap group’s vocal “Fight the Power” reaches its emotional pinnacle with Chuck D’s combative lyrics: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he ne'er meant s*** to me, you see, straight-up racist, the sucker was, simple and plain.”

Hate Me Tender

Elvis’ cultural appropriation of Negro beat & blues strikes many people as an playact of racism.

Presley – who shares Las Vegas sponsor sainthood on with the Rat Pack – plundered from dark singers piece benefiting dearly from something they could never enjoy: whitened privilege.

It’s what allowed Elvis to achieve the form of notoriety and riches vocalizing inglorious music that opprobrious singers such as Chester A. Arthur Crudup – author and original vocalist of Elvis’ number 1 hit, “That’s All Right, Mama” – were ever denied.

Crudup was credited as the composer on Elvis’ 1954 Sun Records single, but had to hold off until the 1960s before receiving a paltry $60K in backrest royalties for the vocal that made Elvis a star.

While Elvis didn’t go and relocation similar a fatal vocaliser as a gimmick to earn money – that’s how he naturally sounded and moved – he understood how it gave him a crystallize runway to success. a whitened boy performing what was and then deemed “race music” gave white teenagers a built-in defense lawyers for overwhelming it. And that’s wherefore he became the male monarch of sway n’ roll.

But was Elvis a antiblack inward any uglier sensation of the concept?

Segregated Vegas Residency

It is extremely potential that Elvis played to whites-only crowds during his Las Vegas debut at the New Frontier from April 23 to May 9, 1956. While this assertion can’t live proven beyond all doubt, no business relationship of the participation has ever so noted otherwise.

Not unless Elvis pose (integration) into his contract, as Josephine Baker did,” said Claytee White, theater director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries.

Seen through and through the lens system of Bodoni font morality, playing to segregated audiences also seems the like a antiblack act. However, inward 1956, it wasn’t seen that way. All crowds on the Las Vegas Strip – including those serenaded past Nat Riley B King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Bellafonte – were white. African-Americans weren’t allowed to go into showrooms during shows unless they were headed to the stage, and fifty-fifty bleak headliners were forced to exit the resorts after their sets.

It wasn’t until March 1960 that cassino bosses – during a group meeting with the NAACP and metropolis and land leaders at the shuttered Moulin Rouge gambling casino hotel – reluctantly agreed to earmark African-Americans to support their establishments. Inspired by the wave of civil rights activism wholesale the country, the NAACP threatened a march on the Strip that would experience deep embarrassed Las Vegas.

As for wherefore he didn’t assert on integration inward his contract, Elvis was noneffervescent a freshman to the scene, with small bargaining power. (He was non technically the headliner, but a third-billed “special guest” who sang quadruplet songs at the stop of apiece show.) Standing up for equation at this tip inward his calling could have ended it. (It’s a moot repoint anyway, since his domineering manager, Col. Uncle Tom Parker, did all the negotiating and would ne'er hold entertained such a risky move.)

The Racial Slur

In 1957, Elvis was accused of uttering a antiblack slur that relieve occasionally gets attributed to him. In Apr of that year, Sepia, a white-owned sensationalist monthly for inkiness readers, published a story headlined: “How Negroes Feel About Elvis.”

“Some Negroes are unable to bury that Elvis was born inwards Tupelo, Mississippi, the hometown of the foremost Dixie race baiter, former Congressman Jon Rankin,” the author wrote. “Others trust a rumored crevice by Elvis during a capital of Massachusetts appearing inward which he is alleged to make said: ‘The only thing Negroes tin get along for me is shine my shoes and purchase my records.’”

Suppose anything about Quincy Jones’ account statement of his first off coming upon with Elvis is to follow believed. In that case, this journalistically irresponsible cover is to the highest degree likely what soured Tommy Dorsey, as considerably as many other musicians of the day, on Elvis.

Aware of Sepia‘s dubious reputation, the sinister link editor of the black-owned JET powder store sought to enquire whether Elvis ever actually uttered such an inexcusable statement.

“Tracing the rumored racial slur to its seed was same running a pocket gopher to earth,” Louie Esme Stuart Lennox Robinson wrote. “No thing what golf hole it dived back up in, it popped come out of another one.”

Some people interviewed by Robinson repeated Sepia‘s exact that Elvis Presley had uttered the commentary in Boston, a urban center Elvis had in time to see at that point.

Others claimed he said it on Edward R. Murrow’s show, on which Elvis had ne'er appeared.

Robinson and so asked several blackness people who knew Elvis whether they believed he could say such a thing – even out in common soldier to another whitened person. Not a single someone did.

In the summer of 1957, James Harvey Robinson finally landed an question with Elvis himself inwards his bandaging way on the Hollywood circle of the pic “Jailhouse Rock.” “I never said anything similar that,” he stated emphatically, “and people who cognize me live i wouldn’t have got said it. a lot of people seem to cerebrate i started this business. But stone n’ stray was hither a long clip before i came along. Nobody tin can sing that form of euphony similar dark people.”

Robinson’s investigating not only declared Elvis innocuous of the charge, it went as far as stating: “To Elvis, people are people, regardless of race, color, or creed.”

While this should get cleared Elvis of voicing the racist comment erst and for all, it still survives as an urban fable all these decades later.

“Many whites inward the 1950s, including celebrities, had used anti-black rhetoric,” wrote St. David Pilgrim, conservator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, inwards a 2006 financial statement published on Ferris State University’s website. “It was loose to believe that Presley, the Mississippi-born, once-working class, former truck device driver had unappreciatively lambasted blacks.”

But Pilgrim continued, “there is no more grounds that it happened … Moreover, at that place is evidence that Elvis Aron Presley donated money to the NAACP and other civil rights organizations; (that) he publicly lauded disastrous musicians; and (that) he treated the blacks he encountered with respect.”

Elvis’ Black Roots

Elvis grew upwards on the ignominious position of the railroad tracks inward the segregated American South. Though none of his schools were integrated, most of his just childhood friends were black. He learned his evangel inflections and hip-shaking moves during the “sanctified meetings” he was invited to hang inward the all-black churches of Tupelo, Miss.

In Memphis, the II African American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed Elvis for standing upwardly to society’s rules of exclusion. In the summertime of 1956, the World reported, “the rock n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” past attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement parkland “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

A month later, Elvis tended to(p) a charity event sponsored by WDIA, Memphis’ inkiness radio station. Its all-black roster of performers included B.B. King, who sang Presley’s praises. “What most people don’t know,” Riley B King said, “is that this boy is serious virtually what he’s doing. He’s carried out by it. When I was inward Memphis with my band, he used to stand up in the wings and follow us perform … He’s been a jibe in the fortify to the business, and all i tin can say is, ‘That’s my man!'”

’68 Comeback Special

Probably the topper refutation of Presley’s rumored racism is the story of what was supposed to be a ho-hum NBC Yule special titled “Singer Presents … Elvis,” after the stitching machine company. The special was readiness to secretive with Elvis singing the 1943 Bing Harry Lillis Crosby standard, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Both NBC and Col. Parker insisted on it.

But that just didn’t sit down redress with Elvis. Henry M. Robert F. President John F. Kennedy and Martin Martin Luther Billie Jean King had lately been assassinated, and the humans seemed similar it was coming aside at the seams. Elvis thought he should death the special with a language promoting sodality and unity. It’s said that this was the first of all clip inward his calling he cared passionately sufficiency nigh something to remain firm up to Dorothy Parker over it.

But Elvis, who wasn’t a author – he sang songs written past others – just couldn’t follow upwardly with the right words. Luckily, the show’s director, Steve Binder, had a best idea. Instead of talking most brotherhood, Elvis should sing about it. And the vehicle should live to a greater extent than just a song. It should live a gut-wrenching declaration of racial equality.

Binder shared his idea with the show’s vocal arranger, Earl Brown, who had co-written “In the Shadow of the Moon” for Frank Sinatra. John Brown went nursing home that nighttime and pulled an all-nighter with his piano. By 7 a.m., he had written arguably the best strain Elvis would of all time record.

“If i Can Dream” imagines Dr. King’s vision, where “all my brothers paseo hand inwards hand,” and then asks, “why can’t my woolgather come admittedly … right now?”

Elvis channeled his internal MS revivalist preacher, rearing his vox and flailing his arms as if leading a sermon. The song took several takes to nail – not because Elvis was off, but because the ring and all-black backup singers, including Darlene Love, kept throttling up at his impassioned performance.

Chuck D-Escalates

When asked by Newsday inwards 2002 to rearwards upwardly his armorial bearing of Elvis beingness a “straight-up racist,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D sounded much to a greater extent nuanced than he did in his lyrics.

“As a musicologist – and i deal myself I – at that place was ever a outstanding trade of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions,” Chuck replied. “My whole thing was the one-sidedness – like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted.

My heroes came from someone else,” Chuck continued. “My heroes came before him. My heroes were in all likelihood his heroes. As far as Elvis beingness The King, I couldn’t purchase that.”

Ironically, Elvis himself would feature in agreement(p) with this. In 1969, when a reporter referred to him as the “king of tilt n’ roll” during a military press group discussion next the opening dark of his Las Vegas residence at the International Hotel, Elvis rejected the title, as he e'er did.

Instead, he called attending to the front in the way of his friend Fats Domino, its rightful bearer inward his mind.

A Final Reckoning

Did Elvis Elvis Presley dramatic play to segregated crowds back up when they were the only crowds useable on the Las Vegas Strip? Most likely, he did.

Did Elvis Elvis Presley knowingly capture disastrous euphony to attain his outstanding renown and wealth? Definitely, he did. And so did the Rolling Stones. Mick Mick Jagger practically channeled the vocals of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf patch employing trip the light fantastic moves taught to him during common soldier lessons from Tina Turner.

And yet, the Rolling Stones are rarely, if ever, accused of racism. So wherefore is Elvis?

“Presley took the swinging bound and the playful (sometimes mischievous) sexuality of musical rhythm and blues music into mainstream American living rooms,” Pilgrim Father wrote. “While talented mordant entertainers labored in smaller venues – sometimes in relation obscureness – Presley became a wealthy and famous international star. So, some blacks resented his success (and him).”

Does Elvis deserve to follow branded a antiblack just because he allowed a antiblack system to pee-pee him a principal at a time when it was the only if scheme useable to him?

There are many shipway to answer that, depending on one’s perspective. But a straight-up yes is hard to justify.

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