When “The King” Became The King-Elvis- July 5, 1954

When “The King” Became The King-Elvis- July 5, 1954-Take Two  

 

 

 

Frank Jackman comment:

You never know what will turn up when you read the newspaper, for those who still do, or what you will pick up as a nugget via the Internet if you don’t. The other day, July 5^th I happened to glance at the “This date in history” spot in the Boston Globe and noticed that it highlighted one Elvis Presley complete with be-bopping accompanying photograph from the session that on July 5, 1954 recorded That's All Right, Mama and the nowhere Blue Moon of Kentucky on the B side of the 45 RPM record (for those who know not of records I direct you to the relevant section in Wikipedia) in Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis and the rest was rock and roll history. By the way maybe today we need to use Elvis’ last name for identification but in my generation all you needed to say was “Elvis” or “the king” and that was all everybody, every coming of age in the 1950s teenager and maybe a few stray outraged parents who saw the incarnation of the devil’s work in him needed to know to know exactly who you were talking about.

No question we are today in the shadow of July 5, 2015 very far removed from the “from hunger” good old boy rockabilly side of the origins of rock and roll delivered to us by the likes of Elvis, Carl Perkins, Warren Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sonny Burgess, far removed from a time now called with a shutter the classic age of rock and roll to distinguish it from post-1964 rock and its progeny. Moreover rock as a genre has undergone many permutations and transformations on its way to a well-deserved if now somewhat faded niche in history.

But for one moment, one brief moment in the long history of music, we, those of us who came of age in the 1950s were proud to say that we had been present at the creation. Had been there at the sea-change.  Proud to say enough of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Patty Page, Andrews Sisters, McGuire Sisters, damn, enough of the musical sensibilities that got our parents through the dusty “from hunger” 1930s Great Depression and slogging fitfully and fretfully through World War II that we were force fed on the family radio. Yes, enough of that sound that made us grind our teeth after we had heard something new on our fugitive transistor radios held close to our ears away from prying parents, something with a be-bop-a-lula, be my daddy, shake that thing, take me to the sock hop beat. And Elvis gave us a big chuck of that beat, made us pick up our feet, snap our fingers.            

Get this though, and this is the true value of that notice in the Globe, as I thought about my own introduction to Elvis. Some of us if we were boys went into that new dispensation kicking and screaming, we the boys with two left feet. Worse, much worse, were thoughts about how to the girls that were beginning to go from last year’s nuisances to, well, interesting, said we didn’t compare with dreamy Elvis no matter how much we slicked back our hair, moved our cranky non-swivel hips or tried to imitate that sullen sneer. That patented sneer the girls who were just kicking and screaming every time they saw those hips swivel said that they wished could, no, they would die to, take off his face. Yeah, no question, those were troubled coming of age times, tongue-tied, two left feet, afraid, no, scared every time a school sock hop came along and you hoped to high heaven that you would not have to embarrass yourself by unchaining those cranky teenage hips of yours in front of some girl who had made your eyeballs sore looking at her all night. But from that moment on we said rock and roll would never die. And now through the good offices of YouTube it never will. So a retro-thanks to Elvis even if I still can’t move those hips of mine worth a damn.