A classic generational culture clash was taking shape. At one 1955 show at Florida’s Gator Bowl, screaming girls chased Elvis off the stage and back into a dressing room, tearing pieces of his clothes off and forcing him to climb up on top of a shower stall for safety. Also on the bill that night was country matriach Mother Maybelle Carter.
PART IV: Rebel without rejection
It was the attitude with which Elvis delivered his performances — a sneer and a smirk balanced together on his lips, his leg trembling to the beat, the beat, the beat — that caused all the hysteria so alarming to old-school country fans. It was that “Something More” that Elvis had heard in R&B (and had seen in the careers of Tony Curtis and Dean Martin and Bing Crosby, too) that all these country boys and girls were now identifying in Elvis, and they were racing after it, and away from country music and what it seemed to stand for, as if their very lives might depend upon it. Country music, so the cliche went, was about an acceptance of life’s limitations, but rock ‘n’ roll was about rejecting those limitations altogether. Where country represented resignation, rock ‘n’ roll reached for freedom.
Surely we can see today that such a dichotomy is reductionist; that it offers a superficial understanding of “freedom” is the least of its problems. But at the same time, we can understand how the teenage country youth who were Presley’s original audience, a group standing at that tender age when life’s limitations begin to first make themselves known most concretely, would rush desperately to an alternative, would feel the difference between country and rock in just such oversimplified ways.
Like his fans, Elvis was certainly reaching for Something More in those early successes too, as he fumbled to discover his powers and to control them, to locate a bit more possibility in the world, a bit less pain. But he also never ran away from anything. Though he followed his dreams, he never failed to return to his down-home Mama. Although he was musically innovative, he was also deeply respectful of the country tradition he was helping to re-create. Even as he grew more worldly, he remained a country boy. You can hear these contradictions in his music and especially in his voice, from the earliest Sun recordings all the way up to the final concerts in the months before his death. To revise an old analogy, Elvis didn’t just want to light out for the territory, a la Huck Finn; he wanted to keep in constant touch with the folks back home on the Mississippi too.
Perhaps it was this desire to have it both ways, inchoate as it may have been, that as much as anything else explains why Elvis was the one crowned King rather than one of his many talented contemporaries. For example, Jerry Lee Lewis’ rock ‘n’ roll (which was also strongly influenced by country music and which rivaled Presley’s in popularity, for a time, on both the pop and country charts) does indeed sound like a rejection of limits, even a complete dismissal of them. His “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” is a defiant “Fuck You.” Now, there can undoubtedly be something glorious and empowering in an impassioned and well-timed Fuck You. But such a stance can be naive too, and it can build new limitations. A Fuck You alone, no matter how beautifully or seductively it’s delivered, does not remove limitation from the world.
Presley’s best work is altogether more profound. His greatest performances sound like a struggle for Something More, a kind of negotiation for just a little more space, by someone who is acutely aware of just how strong life’s limits can be, someone who understands that grasping Something More will come with unexpected responsibilities and will require difficult trade-offs. This hard wisdom was perhaps more felt than understood by Elvis, but it’s there in every note he sang, an ever-present but unspeakable awareness, even pride, that, by God, Elvis Presley is a country boy.
PART V: Searching for a newer sound
You’ve no doubt heard this one before: With Presley and the other rockabilly kids invading its turf, the country music establishment created the sweeter, more pop-influenced Nashville Sound in a three-pronged attack designed to broaden its audience in the pop field, to secure the more mature country audience it still had, and to beat back the young heathens. That is, the Nashville Sound was a reaction against Elvis. This cause-and-effect has been repeated as gospel for four decades now, but it doesn’t really tell the whole truth. Though he should certainly be credited for forcing the country music industry to reposition itself in the late ’50s, Elvis was not simply a catalyst for the stylistic reactions of others. In fact, he was one of the Nashville Sound’s chief architects, as important to the style’s development as any other single figure, perhaps even more important.
Although it refers to a system and a means of production (and an era and a mystique too) as much as it denotes an actual sound, and though it was created accretively over many years rather than in one epiphanic flash, the Nashville Sound is generally considered to have dawned around 1957 or ’58. Writer Colin Escott has proclaimed Jim Reeves’ “Four Walls”, recorded February 7, 1957, to be the first Nashville Sound record. Country historian Rich Kienzle calls “Gone”, a Ferlin Husky hit recorded in November 1957, a recording that “may well have pointed the way to the Nashville Sound.” Chet Atkins, the RCA-based producer and guitarist generally considered the Sound’s primary artistic brainchild, points to another watershed moment: his production of Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” in late 1957.
But the country boy from Memphis may have beat them all. Though Presley’s initial RCA recordings sought to re-create the slap-back sound Sam Phillips had captured at Sun, Elvis was already in the midst of creating new sounds for himself when he entered a New York studio on July 2, 1956. First that day he put down “Hound Dog”, as explosive an example of rock ‘n’ roll as has ever been recorded (albeit a cut that took Elvis in a direction he would rarely pursue). But when he next turned to “Don’t Be Cruel”, the result was something that included all the defining characteristics of the Nashville Sound — and that, just as importantly, had the unmistakably warm, relaxed feel of the Nashville Sound. It was all there: the spare instrumentation and restrained playing; the at-ease yet crisply defined production; the lead vocal and the bass way out front in the mix; the backing by the Jordanaires; the arrangements devised on the spot by the musicians; and, of course, no fiddle and no pedal steel. The result was a new kind of rock ‘n’ roll, a new kind of pop, and the beginnings of what, in the country boy’s next RCA sessions in Nashville, would help create a new kind of country music too. A two-sided single, “Hound Dog”/”Don’t Be Cruel” proceeded to top the pop, R&B and country charts.
At Presley’s next RCA sessions, on September 1-3, he immediately set to fine-tuning the new “Don’t Be Cruel” sound — the style he would stick with, more or less, at least until the mid-’60s — and he did it with the most country-oriented batch of songs he’d had since back in his Sun days. “Playing For Keeps”, a Top-10 country hit written by Stan Kessler (who’d written Presley’s two most explicitly country numbers at Sun, “I Forgot To Remember To Forget” and “You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone”), was a gorgeous ballad so completely within the archetypal Nashville Sound style that one can easily imagine Patsy Cline’s or Jim Reeves’ voice replacing Presley’s over the rhythm track.
