The Elvis Perplex: How “The Seven Ages of Elvis” Shows It

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Works reviewed in this post:

The Seven Ages of Elvis (Sky UK, Fireball Television, Raydar Media, Bleat Post Production, So Speedy, 2017)

Sun Records Sings Elvis Presley (Sun 015047809769, LP, 2024)

Elvis Aron Presley (RCA 07863 67455-2, 4 CD’s, 1982; originally 8 LP’s, 1980)

Last Saturday, August 17 – just a day after the 47th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley on August 16, 1977 – PBS showed a documentary called The Seven Ages of Elvis. The ultra-pretentious title has become all too typical of projects featuring or documenting the successful but troubled life of Elvis Presley. It comes from William Shakespeare’s quote from As You Like It: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” According to David Upshal, who produced and directed The Seven Ages of Elvis, the titular “seven ages” were “Elvis the Child,” “Elvis the Pelvis” (a reference to the tag line that got attached to Elvis’s early, intense rock ‘n’ roll performances even though Elvis himself hated it), “Elvis in the Army,” “Hollywood Elvis,” “’68 Comeback Elvis,” “Las Vegas Elvis” and “Dead Elvis.” The Shakespearean trappings give an aura of Importance with a capital “I” even though the show as a whole was just a pretty straightforward telling of the well-known story of Elvis’s career and life. He was born January 8, 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, inside a one-room house that was later moved off its original lot by a new owner who had no idea of its importance. (In the early 1970’s Jerry Hopkins, Elvis’s first serious biographer, ultimately traced its whereabouts and let its then-current owners know they had a piece of cultural history in their possession.) Elvis was the second of twins; the first, Jesse Garon Presley, was stillborn and it was only when the doctor Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys Presley, noticed that there was still activity inside Gladys’s womb that he realized she’d been carrying twins. In 1948 the Presley family moved from Tupelo to Memphis, Tennessee, already a hotbed of Black blues and the rhythm-and-blues style that would later morph into rock ‘n’ roll. It had been the home town of self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy, who’d written the first hit blues song, “Memphis Blues,” in 1912 (and got screwed out of the royalties for it until he was able to reclaim the copyright in 1940), and by the early 1950’s it was the home of major blues artists including Howlin’ Wolf (true name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett), B. B. King, Elmore James, Bobby “Blue” Bland and a young piano player and bandleader named Ike Turner.

It was also the home of a young white man named Sam C. Phillips, who ran an enterprise called the Memphis Recording Service that allowed people with $4 to spare to make a professionally produced record of their voice and whatever instrument they used to accompany themselves. Phillips also owned a portable recording rig that he hired out to record weddings, funerals, lodge meetings and whatever else they wanted documented, and when he wasn’t doing that he ran a recording studio on 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. There he recorded young Black R&B artists and sold their master discs to other companies, usually Chess in Chicago and Modern in L.A., until in 1953 he realized how much money he was losing with that business model and decided to start his own label. Phillips called it “Sun Records” and commissioned a local graphic artist to design a label: a rooster standing triumphant in front of a field of sunbeams. Elvis Presley, a truck driver for Crown Electric, walked into the 706 Union studio for the first time in 1953 to make a record of The Ink Spots’ hit “My Happiness” – ostensibly as a birthday present for his mother, though since the Presleys didn’t own a record player it was probably more just because he wanted to hear what his voice would sound like on professional equipment. Phillips was out of the office that day, but his secretary, Marion Keisker, was and she heard something special in Elvis’s voice. Though the amateur records were usually cut directly to acetate 78-rpm blanks, she made sure to run the studio’s tape recorder and got half of “My Happiness” and all of the other song Elvis made that day, “That’s Where Your Heartaches Begin,” on tape so Phillips could hear it when he got back. Elvis returned to the Memphis Recording Service for a second amateur record – and this time Keisker was out but Phillips was in, and he took down Elvis’s name and phone number with the notation, “Good ballad singer. Hold.” In June 1954 Phillips called Elvis for his first professional session to record a ballad called “Without You,” but didn’t like the result. Then Elvis and the two musicians there to accompany him, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, started jamming on blues songs by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, a minor star in the Black musical world. Phillips was electrified by the band’s version of Crudup’s 1946 hit “That’s All Right, Mama,” and decided then and there to make that Elvis’s first professional record and release it on Sun. For the flip side Elvis and the others recorded “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a country song that had been a hit for Bill Monroe. Phillips would release five Elvis Presley singles on Sun, always coupling a Black R&B cover on one side and a country song on the other, and would bill Elvis as “The Hillbilly Cat” to promote both the Black and white roots of his music.

Then he called a friend and former business partner, Dewey Phillips – The Seven Ages of Elvis says they weren’t related but other sources say Sam and Dewey Phillips were second cousins – who’d landed a job as a D.J. on a Memphis station. Dewey Phillips promoted Elvis extensively and did an interview with him in which he carefully asked Elvis where he’d gone to high school. “Humes,” Elvis said – which in the still-segregated South immediately signaled to the white radio audience that, however Black Elvis might sound, he was really white. Elvis bombed at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry – the manager, Jim Denny, told Elvis, “If I were you, I’d go back to driving a truck” – but scored at the Louisiana Hayride, a Shreveport-based Saturday night radio show that had broken Hank Williams and offered edgier fare than the Opry. In late 1955 Elvis signed a management contract with “Col.” Tom Parker, a sleazy carnival veteran who for the rest of his career steered him away from anything even remotely adventurous and made a series of bad business decisions that, at least in my view, kept Elvis from developing much of his potential. In earlier articles about him I’ve referred to what I call “the Elvis perplex”: the enormous potential talent he had, the little of it he actually used, and the huge popular success he had on the basis of that little. It was Parker who engineered the deal that got Elvis off the tiny Sun label and onto RCA Victor, the biggest record label in the country. It was also Parker who insisted not only that Elvis accept being drafted into the military at the end of 1959 but serve as an ordinary private instead of a special-services assignment that would have enabled him to continue much of his career even while technically in uniform. Parker’s thinking was that rock ‘n’ roll was a flash in the pan, and if he wanted Elvis to have a long-term career he’d have to steer him into safer, less threatening forms of entertainment. He also tamped down Elvis’s rebel image and promoted him as just a good ol’ country boy who loved his mother. Gladys Presley died of a heart attack in 1958 at age 42 (Elvis also died of a heart attack at 42, and his daughter Lisa Marie died of a heart attack at 54, suggesting that the Presley family was genetically predisposed to heart disease) after visiting Elvis in Frankfurt, Germany, where Elvis had been stationed with an artillery unit. Gladys expressed concern that the sound of artillery being test-fired was weakening Elvis’s hearing, and she was right: years later, when Elvis began regular live tours, he had the loudest monitor speakers (the ones that point away from the audience and are there so the musicians can hear themselves and each other) of anyone in the business.

Once Elvis got out of the Army he made a campy movie called G. I. Blues that riffed off his real-life military stint, then was cast in a pro-Native Western called Flaming Star, directed by Don Siegel, that had originally been set for one of Elvis’s favorite actors, Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, Flaming Star was Elvis’s first box-office flop. Director Siegel blamed it on 20th Century-Fox’s promotion; instead of stressing that Elvis emerged as a serious actor in the film (he sang a theme song over the credits and one other song early in the film, but after that it was a non-musical action Western), they released it like any other Elvis movie, and his fans told each other, “He doesn’t sing after the first few minutes. Stay home.” After that Col. Parker shoved him into Blue Hawai’i – and even Upshal’s mostly even-toned narration called that “the film that ruined him.” Blue Hawai’i set the tone for virtually all of Elvis’s subsequent movies: a picturesque location, lots of hot young starlets for Elvis to canoodle with on screen and sing romantic songs to, and nothing in the way of acting challenges for him. A man who had come to Hollywood with ambitions to be the next Brando or James Dean saw he’d been reduced to acting in mindless films set in exotic locales – at one point Elvis himself referred to his next film as “my latest travelogue” – and I’ve often said that one of the most appalling missed opportunities of Elvis’s career was the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. Written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, A Face in the Crowd was a stark, unforgiving melodrama about a man named “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) who becomes a big star and develops a self-destructive megalomania. Before Kazan cast Griffith – who was superb in the role in every respect but one: he couldn’t sing, and the part needed a singer – he offered it to Elvis. Col. Parker turned it down without even telling Elvis it had been pitched to him. I’m sure Elvis, a fan of Brando and Dean, would have accepted in a heartbeat if he’d known that the man who’d directed both Brando’s and Dean’s star-making vehicles (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively) wanted him for a film. In 1968 Elvis was so burned-out as a movie attraction that even Col. Parker couldn’t get him any more million-dollar offers for such crap, and he agreed to let Elvis star in a TV special. Col. Parker’s idea was to have Elvis do a holiday special in which he’d sing Christmas songs, but the show’s sponsor, the Singer sewing-machine company, had other ideas.

They hired a talented young director named Steve Binder who’d made his reputation with The T.A.M.I. Show (1965) – the initials stood for “Teenage Awards Music International,” which was as silly as it sounds – which featured a wide variety of musical acts, both Black (James Brown, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles) and white (The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas). Binder immediately clashed with Parker – who kept calling him by the anti-Semitic slur “Bindel” – over his ideas for the show. Binder wanted to present Elvis before a live audience (aside from a benefit concert in Hawai’i to raise money for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor in 1961, Elvis had not performed live anywhere since 1957) and be reunited with the musicians he’d worked with at Sun, Scotty Moore and drummer D. J. Fontana. (Bassist Bill Black had died in 1965.) He also worked out some sketches, including one in which Elvis sings Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” while being confronted by an actor who strikingly resembles Col. Tom Parker. When Col. Parker saw the show, he was incensed that it contained no Christmas music and threatened to prevent it from being aired – until Binder found a clip of Elvis’s 1957 novelty single “Blue Christmas” from one of the jam sessions and spliced it into the show. Binder also wanted Elvis to make some sort of social comment – this was 1968, after all, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and the Democratic convention in Chicago literally turned into a riot – and eventually he commissioned Billy Goldenberg and Walter Earl Brown to write a song for the show’s finale, “If I Can Dream,” which would evoke King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington and allow Elvis to look like he cared about the state of the country. Alas, no sooner had the Singer special aired that Col. Parker reasserted control over Elvis’s career and worked him into a stint at the International Hotel in Las Vegas (there’s a mistake in The Seven Ages of Elvis: they refer to it as the “Hilton International” but in 1969 it was just the “International” and still owned by the man who’d built it, entrepreneur Kirk Kerkorian; it didn’t become a part of the Hilton chain until 1970) that he would repeat twice a year until he died.

Then Col. Parker started booking Elvis on long concert tours throughout the U.S. He never let Elvis perform in any other country because “Col. Tom Parker” was really an undocumented immigrant from The Netherlands named Andreas Van Kuijk, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be let back into the U.S. if he ever left. One of Elvis’s most famous TV shows, the “Satellite Special” from early 1973, was a response to a team of Japanese promoters who wanted Elvis to tour Japan. Instead Col. Parker booked the show for Hawai’i because it was as close as he and Elvis could go to Japan and still be in the United States, and the hall where the concert took place was festooned with Japanese banners. Throughout the 1970’s Elvis worked on an endless treadmill due to the Colonel’s relentless schedule, and he was so burned out that when RCA Victor wanted new records from him, he made the company send mobile equipment to Graceland, the home in Memphis he’d bought for himself and his parents in 1957. In 1974 Col. Parker made the worst deal of his life: for a mere $6 million he sold all the royalties from Elvis’s records back to RCA Victor. Elvis’s “black” biographer, Albert Goldman, suggested he did this because he was a compulsive gambler who owed millions in gambling debts to the Mafia. So when Elvis died he was only worth $5 million and his former wife Priscilla, who took over his estate as trustee for their daughter Lisa Marie, worked her ass off to rehabilitate Elvis’s fortunes, including turning Graceland into a museum and making it a major tourist attraction. The Seven Ages of Elvis ends with the assertion that Elvis dead has been a bigger moneymaker than Elvis live; it claims he’s made more money posthumously than Frank Sinatra, John Lennon and David Bowie combined.

And yet to me Frank Sinatra remains the example of the kind of career Elvis should have had: the far more self-assured Sinatra would have never let an unscrupulous, self-dealing manager like Col. Parker push him around the way Elvis did. One remarkable anecdote about Elvis told by Larry Geller, his hairstylist and spiritual advisor (as I wrote in a previous post about Elvis, only in Hollywood could someone combine those two jobs), was that when Elvis made his 1965 gospel album How Great Thou Art, he wanted the record mixed so he’d be the lead singer in a gospel quartette. Instead, without any word to Elvis in advance, someone at RCA Victor remixed the record to put Elvis’s voice front and center, as it was on all his other records, and reduced his quartette partners to mere backup singers. Elvis didn’t find out about this until he bought a copy of How Great Thou Art as a present for a friend and played it. Geller said he should complain to the record company and demand that his initial mix be restored, but Elvis said, “There’s nothing I could do about it anyway.” The moment I read that, I thought of how Sinatra would have reacted if one of his records had been remixed without his knowledge or consent. He’d have demanded it be changed, and maybe even dropped hints to whoever at his record company had screwed up his album, “And if you don’t change it back, I might just call one of my special friends and have you taken out!” (Since then I’ve read an interview with Joan Deary, who was in charge of Elvis’s records both in the last years of his life and in the 1980’s, who admitted she’d had Elvis’s records remixed to keep his voice front and center because she thought that’s what people buying a record with Elvis’s name on the cover wanted to hear.) I remember my reaction when I heard Way Down in the Jungle Room, a reissue of Elvis’s final Graceland recordings from February and October 1976 (his last studio sessions, though a few live songs he made after that were released), and was stunned at how many of the songs were ballads about heartbreak and relationships gone terribly wrong. It seemed to me that the breakup of his marriage to Priscilla had led him to that kind of material, and had he been a more grounded artist, musician and human being the way Sinatra was, he might have created a deeply moving concept album about love and loss the way Sinatra did when he responded to his breakup with Ava Gardner by creating In the Wee Small Hours (1955), the first true “concept album.” Elvis’s whole career is full of might-have-beens like that, and oh, how I wish that the one time he and Sinatra worked together (on the 1960 Timex-sponsored TV show Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley), Sinatra had watched Elvis taking orders from Col. Parker, gone up to him and said, “Just why do you take all that shit from that old man?”

It’s impossible to write about Elvis’s career with any degree of objectivity and not mention his drug use. In that regard, Elvis’s career strikingly parallels Judy Garland’s. Both spent the first half of their careers mostly making movies and the second half doing live shows. Both became prescription drug addicts at relatively early ages, and for the same reason: to keep their weights down to movie camera-friendly levels. And both died drug-related deaths in their 40’s. Though Upshal’s narration for The Seven Ages of Elvis suggests that Elvis’s politics were progressive, and in some respects (notably his affection for Black musicians and the styles they had created) that’s true, Elvis was also enough of a political reactionary that in 1970 he crashed the White House, won a meeting with then-President Richard Nixon, and made Nixon a bizarre offer to rat out other entertainers who were taking drugs. (At least one of the Secret Service agents present on Nixon’s protection detail recalled that Elvis himself looked stoned that day.) To me the most interesting aspect of Elvis’s drug use was the skill with which he constructed an alternative reality that concealed what he was doing to himself from almost everyone around him, especially himself. Elvis, according to Elvis, didn’t take “drugs”; everything he did take came in a little amber bottle or clear glass ampule with a doctor’s name on it. Like most prescription drug abusers, he referred to the substances he ingested as “medications.” And as his career spiraled down in the 1970’s and his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu broke up, Elvis responded not only by upping his drug intake but also by eating more of the high-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate food he’d grown up with, until he blew up to such enormous size his costumers had to keep letting out his one-piece suit-of-lights stage suits without telling him or giving it away that they were doing so. This has led to all the subsequent jokes about “fat Elvis” and how he managed to maintain his commercial appeal as an entertainer. As Albert Goldman wrote in his 1981 “black biography” Elvis – basically the book Elvis fans love to hate – “One of the bizarre ironies of his career, always characterized by the incongruity between his limited talents and his limitless fame, was the way his myth imposed itself on the world in later years, mounting to ever greater peaks of popularity and power, while the man who was the object of all this adulation was steadily declining to the condition of a hapless wretch. Ultimately, the only way to account for this awesome disparity between cause and effect, between the moribund star and his immensely vital image, is to invoke concepts like royalty or divinity that explain how even a man so far gone that he can barely mount a stage can compel the admiration of millions of people the world around because they believe that in his grotesque body and deadened mind there lies some wondrous essence that gives joy to their own humble existence.” It’s this incongruity that modern-day political commentators are referencing when they compare the increasingly weird and incoherent Donald Trump to “fat Elvis” and marvel at his continuing popularity among a large section of America’s voters.

The four-CD boxed set Elvis Aron Presley was first released as a limited-edition eight-LP box in 1980 and heavily “hyped” by RCA Victor as a definitive CD collection two years later. I’ve been interested in this album for 44 years now, since it first came out, because the first CD promised two key recordings in the Elvis legend: four songs he played at the New Frontier hotel in Las Vegas in 1956 and the complete show he played in Hawai’i as a benefit concert for the memorial for the U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1961 – the only live show Elvis ever played between 1957 and 1968. Disc two of Elvis Aron Presley contains “Collectors’ Gold from the Movie Years” (most Elvis fans consider the “movie years” between his return from the Army in 1960 and his comeback TV special in 1968 to be the nadir of his career) and bits from his TV specials. Disc three contains excerpts from his Las Vegas shows and a collection of obscure Elvis singles and album tracks (including his overwrought and very overarranged version of Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” – the hit was by Black woman singer Roberta Flack but I’d heard it before that in a quite beautiful version by Gordon Lightfoot and it was hard for me after that to get used to hearing the song sung by a woman), and the oddball version of the song “Softly, As I Leave You” (an Italian song, originally called “Piano,” by Tony de Vita with Italian lyrics by Giorgio Calabrese and English lyrics by Hal Shaper) as well as its original flip side, “Unchained Melody” (by Alex North with lyrics by Hy Zaret, adapted from the film score North wrote for the 1955 movie Unchained, about California’s pioneering minimum-security prison at Chino), which Elvis recorded in two versions, both live, on April 24, 1977 in Ann Arbor, Michigan and on June 21, 1977 at Rapid City, South Dakota. There’s also a song called “Fool” that was on an Elvis LP that RCA Victor had deleted from its catalog; I remember an interview the compiler of this set, Joan Deary, gave to Goldmine magazine in which she said that ordinarily RCA deleted records once their sales fell below a certain point (“a computer does it”), but “we never delete an Elvis record – sales just go on and on. I haven’t been able to find out why that particular record was deleted.” The fourth CD contained live performances from May and June 1975.

The first true “boxed set” of Elvis’s career, Elvis Aron Presley suffers from Deary’s determination to include as much previously unreleased material as possible – which often meant inferior alternate takes of songs that had been available for years in better renditions than these. It’s also a set full of surprises, and not all of them welcome ones. Both the New Frontier 1956 gig and the Arizona benefit concert of 1961 show how ill at ease Elvis was in live performance despite his famous stage moves – though the New Frontier gig was significant because Elvis heard a white lounge act called Freddy Bell and the Bellboys do their rewrite of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” and it was Bell’s version, not Thornton’s, that Elvis eventually covered and had one of the biggest hits of his career. (Thornton’s “Hound Dog” credited Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller and veteran bandleader Johnny Otis as songwriters, but Leiber and Stoller claimed they were underage when they signed the original contract and used that to cut Otis out of the royalties for Elvis’s mega-hit version. Also I’d assumed Freddy Bell and the Bellboys were Black, but there’s a film clip here that shows they were white.) The “Collectors’ Gold from the Movie Years” CD includes a lame alternate take of one of the theme songs from Elvis’s films, “Follow That Dream” – which in Bruce Springsteen’s cover from a May 5, 1981 concert in Stockholm, Sweden is a slow, sensitive, heart-rending ballad but in Elvis’s too-fast version is just another silly song from a forgettable film. The full Springsteen concert from Stockholm is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WskRlbSBWuU, and a separate Springsteen recording of “Follow That Dream” at London’s Wembley Arena from June 5, 1981 is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9l6U74HGnQ. (Elvis’s – the original version, not the alternate from the Elvis Aron Presley collection – is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD0xsv2BHFw.) At the same Stockholm concert Springsteen performed Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and prefaced it with a long introduction about Elvis’s untimely death. (It’s at 47:51 of the above-cited video.) “I used to wonder a lot about how someone who seemed like such a big winner could lose so bad in the end, you know?” Springsteen said. “Because he deserved a lot better than what he got. But this song is about living free. It’s about not having to die poor and work in some factory, or it’s about not having to die in some million-dollar mansion and a lot of dope running through you. It’s about feeling yourself strong inside, no matter who you are.”

It’s also impossible to write seriously about Elvis Presley and ignore the whole issue of race. In his loathsome book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, critic Greil Marcus made an attempt to argue that Elvis created a whole new musical style that owed little or nothing to African-American artists. Nonsense: you can’t listen to Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama” on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtHW8wpDjkg and then Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCP_g7X31nI without hearing how closely Elvis copied Crudup. Likewise with Elvis’s second single on Sun, “Good Rocking Tonight”: though its composer, Roy Brown, didn’t even have the Black hit on it (Wynonie Harris did), Elvis clearly learned the song from Brown’s version and in particular Brown’s register leaps from his natural baritone to falsetto. I’ve often written that, while Louis Jordan led the first rock ‘n’ roll band, Brown was the first rock ‘n’ roll singer. Brown’s own recollection was that he was leading a dance band and singing ballads in a deep baritone like Billy Eckstine’s, while he had another singer who had a higher voice and sang blues numbers. One night his blues singer called in sick and Brown figured, “Well, we’ll just do ballads then.” Only it was a tough club audience that wanted to hear blues, so without time to rearrange the songs in lower keys Brown just sang them in falsetto – and that night the rock ‘n’ roll voice was born. Brown’s version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgdzS4OSQ1M; Harris’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SllhnR7D8LA and Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FeWJHUB8aU. Elvis even tried to copy Brown’s vocal leaps, though without Brown’s professional vocal training (like a lot of other Black singers, Brown had started out in Black churches and learned vocal technique from their choir directors) he couldn’t do the leaps as smoothly as Brown could and his attempts created a snapping sound that itself became one of Elvis’s trademarks. And on Elvis’s 1957 Christmas album, he closely copied Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters’ arrangement of “White Christmas” (the Drifters’ version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ6LIS6m8qE and Elvis’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XNXT4-SIK8), though with his incredible vocal range Elvis was able to copy both Bubba Thrasher’s bass voice and McPhatter’s lead tenor. Certainly hearing Elvis’s versions of Black songs back-to-back with the Black originals makes Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler’s frustration with the institutionalized racism of the music business in the 1950’s all the more understandable. “[W]e had a real tough time getting our records played,” Wexler told music historian Arnold Shaw. “All the jocks had to see was the Atlantic label and the name of the artist — and we were dead. We’d say, ‘Just listen and give your listeners a chance to listen.’ But they had a set of stock excuses: ‘Too loud.’ ‘Too rough.’ ‘Doesn’t fit our format.’ They’d never say, ‘We don’t play Black artists.’ But then they’d turn around and play a record of the very same song that was a copy of our record, only it was by a white artist.”

The whole question of Elvis and race comes up at the start of the new LP Sun Records Sings Elvis Presley, with the song “Mystery Train” by Black R&B artist Little Junior Parker. Though this disc is presented as a collection of later Sun artists covering Elvis, Parker’s “Mystery Train” is actually the first recording of the song and Elvis’s is the cover. One other song on Sun Sings Elvis, Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” is also the original recording and Elvis’s the cover, though this time Elvis took the hit away from another white artist. It’s interesting that nine of the 12 songs heard on Sun Sings Elvis were pieces Elvis originally recorded during his all too brief (1 ½ years) tenure as a Sun artist, and even the three that were recorded after that (“Blue Suede Shoes,” “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Jailhouse Rock”) were made during 1956 and 1957, before Elvis got drafted and lost his edge. (When Elvis died in 1977, someone was able to reach John Lennon for a comment. Lennon said, “Elvis didn’t die last week. He died the day he went into the Army.”) The Sun Sings Elvis compilation is actually a quite good one, featuring Jerry Lee Lewis on three tracks (“Good Rocking Tonight,” in which he inserts a bit of his own star-making hit, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and Lonnie Johnson’s “Tomorrow Night”), Johnny Cash on two (“I Love You Because” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” – the latter one of only two Elvis songs that were covered by The Beatles), Roy Orbison on one (“Trying to Get to You,” originally recorded in 1954 by a Black R&B group called The Eagles, on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfQjLxAeRZo: The Eagles did it first, Elvis second and Orbison third in both chronology and quality) and a couple of more obscure artists, rockabilly legend Sleepy LaBeef on “Baby, Let’s Play House” and The Climates, an excellent late-1960’s Black soul group, reclaiming “Don’t Be Cruel” after Elvis bought it from Otis Blackwell, a major Black R&B artist in his own right as well as co-author of almost all of Little Richard’s songs. Like virtually all writers of songs Elvis recorded, Blackwell had to give Elvis co-credit and half the royalties to get the record made. Blackwell was once asked why he put up with that, and he said, “Because 50 percent of something is a whole lot better than 100 percent of nothing.” The other two songs on Sun Sings Elvis are 1972 releases of the two sides of Elvis’s first Sun single, “That’s All Right, Mama” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” They’re credited here to an artist named “Orion” but were originally released with no artist credit at all. RCA Victor threatened Sun Records and its new majority owner, Shelby Singleton, who had bought 51 percent of the label from Sam C. Phillips in 1969, with a lawsuit, claiming that the artist was actually Elvis and Singleton had released either alternate takes or new recordings without authorization. RCA Victor dropped the suit after voiceprint identification of the records said that the singer was not Elvis – and hearing them now, it’s pretty obvious it isn’t, though it’s a quite good impersonation.

If nothing else, these three releases are a testament to the continuing power of Elvis Presley as both a cultural icon and a commercial industry. It’s been 47 years since Elvis passed and he’s as big a moneymaker as ever. Elvis’s story is also a textbook example of the pitfalls of the music business and how often the original creators get screwed over by the capitalists who run the show. It’s also a uniquely American tragedy of how someone with incredible talent and almost no will power was a sitting duck for the exploitation of Col. Parker – and how Priscilla Presley, through sheer will power, was able to rehabilitate Elvis’s finances after his death (according to David Upshal’s narration for The Seven Ages of Elvis, when Elvis died he was worth $5 million, a nice piece of change but not at all commensurate with what his career had earned. What I’ve long called “The Elvis Perplex” – the gap, not “between his limited talents and his limitless fame,” as Albert Goldman rather unfairly put it, but between his enormous potential, his limited achievement and his continuing repute – is on full view across all three of these media products. In a peculiar way, the story of Elvis Presley is a microcosm of the story of American capitalism and how it has strip-mined this nation’s resources for short-term gain. It also intersects the whole dogged question of race in America and how African-Americans exist only because the white Southern plantation owners wanted literally to own their workers and realized, as slavery advocate John C. Calhoun acknowledged in the 1830’s, that in a nation devoted to the principle that “all men are created equal” (even though in practice that originally meant “all white male landowners”) the permanent servant class, on which they believed a republic had to rest, couldn’t be white. So in a rather twisted way, the story of Elvis Presley is the story of America.