A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Conclusion)

After roughly a decade, Angelique Pettyjohn resumed her career as a supporting actress in the movies. In 1979, for instance, she appeared as an extra in the comedy, Going in Style, but by then she was better known as a Las Vegas showgirl. In the mid-1970s, she had been a featured showgirl in the Vive Paris Vive show at the Aladdin Hotel, and by 1978 had teamed with comedian Bob Mitchell in an “Olde Tyme Burlesque” show at the Maxim Hotel & Casino which, at the time, was the only fully nude strip club in Las Vegas. (The advertisement is taken from the Vegas Visitor paper, October 5-11, 1979.) She was photographed by Robert Scott Hooper for the February 1979 Playboy pictorial, “The Girls of Las Vegas,” and beginning in the early 1980s, she began to make appearances at Star Trek conventions, appearing in her Shahna costume from “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” selling signed pictures for fans. She also appeared in several movies in the 1980s, and also married for the fifth time (not fourth), a marriage that also ended in divorce (1984-1989). Dr. Flynn met her on the Star Trek convention circuit in the early 1980s and became a friend of hers, remaining so until her death on February 14, 1992, at age 48. It was his friendship with her that prompted him to write the book, The Sci-Fi Siren Who Dared Love Elvis and Other Stars, although by the time of the book's publication, in 2020, the subject of his book had been dead 28 years.

Despite the argument put forth in Dr. Flynn’s book, there is no factual evidence that Elvis Presley was in Las Vegas in March 1961. There is not one shred of factual evidence in Dr. Flynn's book proving without doubt that Dorothy Perrins was in Las Vegas in March 1961, either. In 1967, she did indeed appear in Clambake with Elvis Presley, that is factually true. And she may indeed be the mother of the man who now calls himself Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. About that matter, I can say nothing. For additional information about Elvis's activities in 1961, there is a several hundred-page, exhaustively detailed book by Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, titled Elvis Day By Day (Ballantine, 1999), that provides additional evidence to support my claims. Ironically, Elvis's one child, Lisa Marie Presley (1968-2023) is now deceased, but the "zombie lie" of Elvis's supposed love children lives on.

A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy, Pt. 3

Unmentioned in any account of her life that I have come across, Angelique Pettyjohn had been married and divorced before she married Otho A. Pettyjohn, Jr. in May 1966. Her first marriage was to William Krebs (NOT his actual name; I am withholding his name out of respect for his privacy), which took place on April 6, 1963, in Elko, Nevada. Both of them were 20 years old. Did the couple impulsively choose to elope? The marriage lasted only two months. She and William Krebs separated shortly after the marriage, on June 10, 1963, with William Krebs, the plaintiff, filing for divorce on October 8, 1963, on grounds of “Extreme Cruelty.” The Certificate of Divorce indicates her address as Salt Lake City, where she may have been living with her parents. I am not precisely sure how “Extreme Cruelty” was defined by the courts sixty years ago, but after two months married to her, he had apparently endured all he could take, and the plaintiff’s divorce petition was granted under “Absolute” conditions.

Interestingly, the divorce certificate lists their “Kind of occupation or business” as “university,” which I take to mean they were university students, not necessarily university employees. They possibly may have met as undergraduate students. Dr. Flynn avers that Dorothy Perrins spent two years attending Salt Lake Community College in the early 1960s, where she took drama classes and showed a keen interest in acting (p. 79). However, taking classes there would have been impossible since Salt Lake Community College did not exist in the early 1960s. What is now Salt Lake Community College was, until 1967, Salt Lake Trade Technical Institute. In 1967, by which time Dorothy Perrins' acting career had begun, it changed its name to Utah Technical College at Salt Lake. It did not become the Salt Lake Community College until 1987. She could not have enrolled in the Salt Lake Trade Technical Institute in order to study drama, since the institute’s aim and mission was strictly limited to those entering trade and technical vocations.

I found the name and picture of “William Krebs” in the 1962 Utah State University year book (called the Buzzer), but I did not, however, find any mention of Dorothy Perrins in the Buzzer or other year books of the time period. Pure speculation, but perhaps she and her first husband met at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, which is located about 67 miles from Salt Lake City. Although established as an agricultural college, she could have taken courses in drama and dance at Utah State if she were enrolled there as a student. Alternatively, it is possible she studied drama at the University of Utah, much closer to home. In any case, I do believe that she met her first husband while enrolled in courses on one of those two campuses.

In addition, an article published in the May 2, 1967, Salt Lake City Tribune, titled “Former Salt Lake Girl Makes Good in Films,” unmentioned in Dr. Flynn’s book, reveals that she returned home to see her family in Salt Lake after her film career had begun just a year earlier. She had only just finished filming Clambake with Elvis Presley about a week before the article was published. (She appears in a Clambake lobby card above next to actor Bill Bixby on her right.) The article tells us that she had driven her new sports car from California to Salt Lake “for a visit with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Claude Herbert, and two sisters, at 549 Colorado St. (1340 West).” The 549 Colorado St. address is the same address as listed in the 1950 census, and it is the street address listed in her mother’s 1973 obituary notice as well.

As for the expected “reunion” with her lover Elvis during the making of Clambake, we are told by Dr. Flynn that “Elvis didn’t remember the eighteen-year-old showgirl that he met so many years earlier when they were re-introduced” (p. 74). “Met” is a profoundly misleading choice of euphemism after the reader had been informed in the preceding chapters that she and Elvis not only had a sexual encounter in Las Vegas, but subsequently spent several days together in Hawaii while Elvis was filming Blue Hawaii. While he was making Clambake a mere six years later, we are asked to believe that Elvis has no memory of her whatsoever. If it is not clear by now, the alleged brief "love affair" she had with Elvis Presley is a hoax.

The newspaper article also indicates that, among other roles, she had appeared as the “bad girl” in Tale of the Cock, a film directed by John Derek and David Nelson starring Don Murray and John Derek’s then wife, Linda Evans, released in 1967. Tale of the Cock was re-released in 1969 under the title Childish Things, and so far as I know, the film is available only on VHS under the title Confessions of Tom Harris. I believe Tale of the Cock, filmed in 1966 and released the next year, is the first movie in which Dorothy Perrins appeared billed as “Angelique Pettyjohn.” Interestingly, her character’s name in the film is “Angelique.”

By 1967, Angelique Pettyjohn seems to have begun a career in Las Vegas as well. The newspaper article states that she was to appear “in a musical at the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas for a 12-week engagement beginning May 9.” The “musical” referred to here is, I suspect, Minsky’s Burlesque, a “family burlesque” show which was a popular entertainment at the Silver Slipper for many years. (Incidentally, it was Harold Minsky who introduced the topless showgirl to Las Vegas, at the Dunes Hotel in 1957.) If the “musical” in which she was appearing opened on May 9, a 12-week run would conclude on August 1. At the time of the newspaper article’s publication, she had not yet filmed “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” filmed later that year during the week October 17-24, 1967, airing on television January 5, 1968.

Later that year, in December 1968, filming began on the AIP biker picture Hell’s Belles, in which Angelique Pettyjohn appeared as the female co-star. The movie opened in Los Angeles on April 16, 1969. Although reviews of the movie were mixed, the April 8, 1969, Daily Variety and the April 16, 1969, Los Angeles Times both considered the film to be a superior motorcycle drama, with both reviews praising co-star Angelique Pettyjohn’s performance, one of the rare instances of her performance being singled out for praise. Hell's Belles opened just over a year later in New York, on April 29, 1970, by which time her film career, for the next several years, had essentially come to an end.

To be continued...

A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy, Pt. 2

According to Dr. Flynn, Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early, at age 17, immediately moved to Las Vegas, and immediately became a showgirl. Serendipitously, shortly after she arrived, and a few days after her eighteenth birthday on March 11, 1961, Elvis showed up in Las Vegas looking for some action, and immediately singled her out from the many pretty girls swirling around him. Upon learning she was a virgin, he was immediately attracted to her, and subsequently had sex with her. She became pregnant and subsequently gave birth to a son, who now calls himself Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.

There is no evidence given to support this series of events other than her own testimony, as my previous post makes clear. Moreover, there is additional evidence that exists, in print, that contradicts it. The Magnum Opus Con 4 Convention Program from 1989 contains a short, one-page biography of Angelique Pettyjohn stating that she first moved to Las Vegas at age 19: “Her love affair with audiences . . . began at age 19 when she left Utah to find summer work in Las Vegas.” Which is to say, summer 1962, contradicting the information in Dr. Flynn’s book, that she moved there at age 17 early in 1961. The program biography suggests that her initial move to Las Vegas was not a permanent one, essentially temporary summer employment. I believe this to be true, and will indicate why I think so.

But to return to Dr. Flynn’s account, the romance between Dorothy and Elvis doesn't end with an early morning kiss goodbye on the streets of Las Vegas after a brief session of lovemaking. We are told by Dr. Flynn that Elvis, while lounging around backstage waiting to go on for the U.S.S. Arizona charity event in Honolulu on March 25, phoned Dorothy Perrins in Las Vegas and asked her to fly to Hawaii to spend some time with him during the filming of Blue Hawaii. She, of course, said yes, and immediately boarded a plane for Oahu. As I mentioned before, we are not told when she gave Elvis a slip of paper with her name and phone number on it, but this is a minor omission in a confabulation that is so utterly preposterous that it does not merit any further discussion. She did not fly to Hawaii to spend a few days with Elvis while he was filming Blue Hawaii.

But we may have already suspected what happens next, and it comes as no surprise. Having become pregnant with Elvis's child, now enters the villain of the story, although his sudden entrance from stage right should come as no surprise either: Colonel Tom Parker. As Elvis's handler, he has Elvis’s career to think about, and no eighteen-year-old tramp from Las Vegas is going to destroy it. We are told that Dorothy “managed to contact the Colonel and set up a meeting through a series of backdoor maneuvers worthy of a top spy. Her number one concern was she didn't want Elvis to know of her pregnancy, until Parker agreed” (pp. 64-65). Secretly, behind Elvis’s back, she and the Colonel worked out a deal in which she would move into a small apartment on the far south side of Chicago, “modestly furnished and stocked with everything the expectant mother would need” (p. 66). So accommodating and sentimental was the Colonel that near Christmas 1961“he brought her a small fake tree” (p. 67). Of course, everything depended upon her keeping her mouth shut, and being the good girl she was, she did. Although eighteen, unmarried, and alone, she was apparently transported by the Colonel to the far south side of Chicago and put up in an apartment all by herself. We are never told the month she was transported to Chicago and installed in an apartment in the south side of Chicago, whether her parents knew of her pregnancy or whether her parents were informed of the arrangement. In fact, although she was barely eighteen, they are completely absent from narrative, vanishing from the narrative as soon Dorothy graduates high school “early" and hightails it to Las Vegas. Fast forward to the day her baby boy is born: Christmas Eve, 1961. Given up for adoption, the boy is adopted by circus people and given the name Phillip Stanic. Years later, he would legally change his name to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.

Why the south side of Chicago, of all places? Why an anonymous hospital in Gary, Indiana? The latter location is explained by Dr. Flynn: the Colonel “secretly bribed several officials at a nearby hospital” located in Gary. (p. 66). Bribed these corrupt officials to do what, to keep the whole thing quiet? Destroy the birth certificate, pretend the whole thing never happened? As should be increasingly apparent, Dorothy Perrins’ claim about her brief affair with Elvis is a fantastic confabulation designed to cover up the father’s true identity, whoever that person may be.

Assuming she ever gave birth to a child in the first place.

Marty Lacker:

There's some guy making the rounds of the tabloid TV shows saying he's the love child of Elvis and Dolores Hart, who played his girlfriend in Loving You and King Creole. She left show business in 1963 and became a nun, and this guy claims she dropped out because she was pregnant and that she kept quiet about it for the love of Elvis and his career. All of us were around all the time then, and if something like that had happened, Elvis would have talked about it He would have been scared as hell. (Nash, Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, pp. 76-77)

One thing we do know, with absolutely certainty, is that Dorothy Perrins never became a nun.

Let us flash forward to May 11, 1966, Dorothy Perrins’ twenty-third birthday, her alleged fling with Elvis now five years in the past. On this day, she wed Otho Albert Pettyjohn, Jr., and in less than a year will henceforth become known as Angelique Pettyjohn. They met in Las Vegas, Dr. Flynn tells us, Dorothy Perrins having resumed her career as a showgirl, and he, unsurprisingly, a gambler, but a nice gambling man though, from Glendale, California. My research indicates that Otho A. Pettyjohn Jr. was born on December 11, 1921, and by 1966 had been married and divorced twice. He was 44 years old when he married Dorothy Perrins; he was a World War II veteran who would die at age 59 in 1980. Her marriage to Mr. Pettyjohn would last slightly over two years, by which time her film and TV career was established and her most famous role, Shahna, in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” was behind her. She was 24 years old when she played Shahna, and as Fate would have it, her life was half over. The marriage was dissolved two years later, finalized on May 31, 1968. By this date her movie and TV roles had become fewer, the production budgets more parsimonious. Her film credits vanish for about a decade after 1970, although she did resume her career in 1979, as an extra in the Las Vegas sequence in the George Burns comedy, Going in Style. Dr. Flynn states that she made a film released in 1974 titled Bordello, but I have been unable to find out much information on this film. I am not especially inclined to do so.

To be continued...

A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy, Pt. 1

They say rock ‘n’ roll will never die. If so, then neither will the myths about it. Among the most persistent myths are those that claim during a concert Alice Cooper bit the head off of a chicken and drank its blood, that Michael Jackson once owned the skeletal remains of the “Elephant Man,” and that in 1968 Jimi Hendrix introduced the ring-necked parakeet to the isle of Britain. Recently, I heard a phrase used that I had not heard before: “zombie lie.” A “zombie lie” is a lie that everyone knows to be a lie, but despite it being a lie, it lives on, everyone acting as though it were true. One of these so-called “zombie lies” is that Elvis Presley fathered children outside of marriage. Such rumors first swirled around young actress Dolores Hart, the love interest of Elvis Presley in Loving You (1957), and who appeared with Elvis a second time in King Creole (1958). The gossip mill held that she left the Hollywood spotlight at the height of her career in 1963 after Elvis impregnated her. In fact, she joined the Abbey of Regina Laudis and became a nun, a story that has been well documented.

Now in his early 60s, many years ago a man having the adopted name Phillip Stanic came forward alleging his father was Elvis Presley. As if to proclaim the name of his father, he had his name legally changed to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. At issue is the identity of his biological mother, whom he believes to be the actress Angelique Pettyjohn (pictured above, in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion"). His assertion possibly may be true, that she may be his biological mother. I am not saying it is true, I am simply saying it may be possible. I don't know. That is one issue. The other issue is the identity of his biological father, whom he believes, or once believed, or once thought possible, to be Elvis Presley. While I believe Elvis Presley is not his father, and will show why I do not believe it, according to John L. Flynn, Ph.D., author of The Sci-Fi Siren Who Dared Love Elvis and Other Stars (Galactic Books, 2020), Elvis is his father. I will hereafter refer to John L. Flynn, Ph.D. as Dr. Flynn. In his book, Dr. Flynn claims that Elvis Presley is Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr.’s father—or to be clear, that is what his friend and the subject of his book, Angelique Pettyjohn, claims to be true. However, simply because Phillip Stanic changed his name to Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr., does not thereby point to the identity of his biological father. As far as I can tell, his current occupation is that of an Elvis imitator, so I suppose one could argue that the name change was, in a way, justified, given the way he earns his livelihood.

My actual subject is Angelique Pettyjohn, a minor actress who became famous because of an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” filmed in October 1967 and which aired on television in January 1968. In his book, Dr. Flynn discusses her troubled life and provides a useful catalogue of the films and TV shows in which she appeared prior to her death in 1992, at the young age of 48. In truth, she was an actress for a very short period time, because Angelique Pettyjohn was primarily a Las Vegas showgirl, a burlesque dancer and stripper, and it was in Las Vegas that she spent much of her life. At issue is not her chosen career as a burlesque dance and stripper, since it is widely known that many current celebrities, both male and female, have been strippers. The issue is whether her claim that she gave birth to Elvis Presley’s son is true. I do not believe her claim is true, and I will present evidence to prove that it cannot be true.

Angelique Pettyjohn was born Dorothy Lee Perrins on March 11, 1943, in Los Angeles. Her father was Richard Lee Young Perrins (1909-1983). Richard Lee Young Perrins’ father, Ross Young (born 1885) died in 1919, and his mother, Rosa Dodson (1890-1979) subsequently remarried. Angelique Pettyjohn's mother, Maia Irene (Enke) Herbert (1921-1973), was a German immigrant, who married Richard Lee Perrins in 1942. Richard Perrins' marriage to Maia Enke was his third marriage. They divorced soon after Dorothy Lee Perrins’ birth in 1943, and Maia Perrins subsequently married Claude Herbert, living the remainder of her life in Salt Lake City, Utah. In the 1950 U. S. census report, Dorothy Perrins is listed as Dorthy [sic] L Herbert, age 7 years. At some point, she chose to take her biological father’s surname, not her adoptive father’s. Her high school yearbooks show that she was active in the drama and dance clubs at West High School in Salt Lake City, where she graduated in 1961.

Dr. Flynn, however, claims—almost certainly based on information given to him by Angelique Pettyjohn—that Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early, but if so, the West High year books do not support this claim. The entire narrative that unfolds about her alleged meeting with Elvis Presley in Las Vegas in 1961 rests on this one critical point, that she graduated high school “early.” Below are pictures of Dorothy Perrins from the 1960 and 1961 West High yearbooks, her junior picture below left and her senior picture below on the right.

Dr. Flynn avers (p. 42) that Dorothy Perrins appeared in the school play, Arsenic and Old Lace, in 1960, but cast and performance pictures from the play appear in the 1961 year book, not the 1960 year book. Below is Dorothy Perrins’ cast picture from Arsenic and Old Lace in the 1961 West High year book. In addition, she appears in group pictures of both the drama club and the dance club in the same 1961 year book.

If we are to accept the narrative offered by Dr. Flynn, Dorothy Perrins graduated high school early (December 1960, presumably? We are not told) at age 17. Eager to get away from home and start a career, she immediately moved to Las Vegas, presumably in January or February of 1961, since she allegedly met Elvis Presley there in March. According to Dorothy Perrins’ account, as told to Dr. Flynn, she met Elvis Presley shortly after her 18th birthday, that is, sometime after March 11, 1961, and became pregnant with his child. She was selected by him from among lots of pretty Las Vegas showgirls, apparently because she was young, just 18, and a virgin: 

I think he [Elvis] singled me out from all the other girls because I was so young—I had just turned eighteen only a few days before—when most of the other showgirls were in their twenties and thirties. . . . Later, when I told him Iwas [sic] still a virgin, which most people find pretty hard to believe when you’re a showgirl, it just blew his mind. I thought it would be great to have him as my first lover. (pp. 57-58)

There are a number of problems with her account. One is that Elvis was not in Las Vegas at the time. Another is her assumption that Elvis was sexually attracted to her because she was a virgin: this is merely conjecture. Marty Lacker, one of Elvis’s bodyguards and a member of the so-called “Memphis Mafia,” said, “Elvis didn’t think virginity was really all that important” (Alanna Nash, Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, p. 170 [UK edition]). And, according to Lamar Ficke, “When it comes to sex, you've got to remember that Elvis was more interested in titillation than anything else. He didn’t like penetration that much because he was uncircumcised, and sometimes intercourse tore his foreskin and he'd bleed. But he was a stone freak, and don’t ever think different. He had every fetish there was” (Elvis and the Memphis Mafia, p. 170). In Dr. Flynn’s account, we are also told that on the evening she confessed her virginity, the chivalric Elvis volunteered to walk her back to her (shared) apartment at the Flamingo Hotel. If so, presuming they met at the Sahara Hotel (Milton Prell, its owner, was a friend of the Colonel's, and Elvis usually stayed there in the early Sixties) the distance between the Sahara Hotel and the Flamingo Hotel would have been a walking distance down the Las Vegas Strip of about 2.5 miles (one-way). Moreover, we're also supposed to believe that as the two of them strolled leisurely hand in hand for over two miles, they were unaccompanied by any of Elvis’s bodyguards. There is no mention in her account of meeting Elvis that his bodyguards were anywhere near. This is highly improbable, as Elvis didn't even go to the bathroom in a public place without at least two of his bodyguards accompanying him (see Elvis and the Memphis Mafia).

I will return to my central question: Is there any evidence that Elvis was in Las Vegas during the time period from March 11 to March 20, 1961? No. There is no evidence to support this claim. One reason is that on March 12 and 13, 1961, Elvis was in Nashville, recording several tracks at RCA Studio B. These tracks would soon be included on the album, Something For Everybody, released in May 1961. Once these recording sessions were finished, Elvis returned to Memphis. From there, according to the chronology published in Inside Blue Hawaii (Elvis Unlimited Productions, 2009), Elvis boarded a plane for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18, and had a layover in Chicago, where he stayed at the O'Hare Inn (p. 18). The next day, March 19, he stayed at his home on 525 Perugia Way in Bel Air. On Monday, March 20, he had a preproduction meeting at Paramount Studios. According to Dr. Flynn's account, Elvis left Las Vegas for Los Angeles on Saturday, March 18 (p. 58), which contradicts the known facts. As one might expect, he provides no source or sources for this piece of information. Dr. Flynn gets many other details wrong as well. For instance, he writes, "On Monday, March 20, 1961, Elvis Presley began work on Blue Hawaii, splitting his time between the location filming and at the recording studio, doing the film’s soundtrack” (p. 59). (We are told this because during his down time, Elvis was calling Dorothy Perrins in Las Vegas. We're not told when, precisely, she gave him a slip of paper with her name and phone number.) The Blue Hawaii recording sessions took place March 21 through March 23 in Los Angeles, not in Hawaii (the "location"), and Elvis did not begin location shooting until March 27. He also states that Elvis, the Colonel and the members of the so-called “Memphis Mafia” flew from Los Angeles to Kauai and stayed at the Coco Palms Hotel, where they were “mobbed” by eager fans. This assertion also contradicts the known facts: Elvis landed at the Honolulu International Airport on March 25, 1961. Here is a detailed account of Elvis’s arrival:

 

The morning of March 25, 1961, Elvis boarded a Pan American Airways jet in Los Angeles to start what he knew would be a long, tiring day for him. Even before the plane took off from LA, an estimated crowd of 3,000 began gathering at Honolulu International Airport to greet Elvis on his arrival. At 12:15 p.m. the plane carrying Presley touched down in Honolulu, and at 12:27 Elvis, wearing a black suit and a ruffled white shirt, appeared at the rear door. “For 10 minutes the handsome lad with the baby blue eyes passed in review,” reported a local newspaper, “just like they do in the Army--up and down before the crowd with the wire screen and a cordon of Honolulu and military police between him and the fans. Some of them looked as though they were ready to tear him limb for limb, and take home the pieces for souvenirs....  Then Elvis jumped into a waiting car and was escorted by police to the Hawaiian Village Hotel, where he would stay for three weeks while filming Blue Hawaii. (Source: http://www.elvis-history-blog.com/elvis-uss-arizona.html)

 

The Coco Palms Resort [to refer to it by its proper designation], to which Dr. Flynn refers, is indeed on the island of Kauai, but the Coco Palms Resort is where Elvis and Joan Blackman’s characters are married in Blue Hawaii. It is also the site of other key scenes in the movie, including the final scene in which Elvis sings the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” and holds Joan Blackman’s hand while they board a raft to cross the lagoon. While it is true and well documented that Elvis and his entourage would party in Las Vegas for a few days, the partying occurred almost always after a movie had been completed, not before it was made. Blue Hawaii wrapped on May 23, 1961. I have not taken the time to find out whether Elvis and his buddies did, in fact, stop in Las Vegas on the long way back to Memphis. Did he take time for a clandestine liaison with Dorothy, his latest flame? No, Dr. Flynn tells us, because “by then, the romance had started to cool down" (p. 60). By the end of May, however, she would have been two months pregnant, at least according the narrative we are asked to believe.

However, Dorothy Perrins would indeed meet Elvis Presley, that much is true. She would also have a role in one of his films; that is also true. But that was six years later, and the movie was not Blue Hawaii, but Clambake, released in 1967.

To be continued...

The New School

How many critics—of the theater, movies, music, contemporary fine arts—wake up each morning with the uncomfortable feeling that someday they will be wrong in their critical judgment? After all, what is a critic’s deepest fear? To have erred in judgment, to have made the wrong call, to have missed the boat. Certainly, no movie critic wants to miss the boat—to have critically underestimated, or what’s worse, to have dismissed the next Citizen Kane (1941), for instance—so in order to avoid making such an unwitting mistake, the critic engages in what Robert Ray, employing a term taken from Max Ernst, calls critical overcomprehension (How a Film Theory Got Lost, Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 82). Ray writes:

 Aware of previous mistakes, reviewers become increasingly afraid to condemn anything....Hence ... [one] ... of modern criticism’s ... great dangers, what Max Ernst called “overcomprehension” or “the waning of indignation”.... (82)

 

No critic, of course, can see beyond the curtain of Time. Time is the ultimate critic, and the critic’s limited perspective doesn’t allow him to see beyond his own pitifully narrow moment in history. Critical overcomprehension—the act of giving every new movie an equally glowing reception—is a result of the critic’s deep fear that history may prove him wrong. No one wants to be, for instance, television critic Jack Gould, who reviewed The Milton Berle Show appearance of Elvis Presley for the New York Times in 1956:

 

Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. His specialty is rhythm songs which he renders in an undistinguished whine; his phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. For the ear, he is an unutterable bore, not nearly so talented as Frank Sinatra back in the latter's rather hysterical days at the Paramount Theater. (qtd. in Robert Ray, 80)

 

However, as Ray points out, Gould’s kind of critical misjudgment has its own unintended consequences: such gross critical mistakes have led to “rejection and incomprehensibility as promises of ultimate value” (82). For instance, if a record album sold poorly, or the artist who recorded it was given little or no attention—or worse, completely neglected in his or her own time, the record must therefore be great, perhaps even a masterwork. The initial neglect of 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico serves as a useful example. Ignored upon release, it is now considered a classic. Initial neglect as a sign of greatness is a powerful myth and governs much of modern criticism of the arts.

 

According to Self-Styled Siren (critic and film historian Farran Smith Nehme), whose knowledge of silent era Hollywood is nothing short of encyclopedic, the practice of critical overcomprehension is currently being applied to Babylon (2022), a box-office failure upon release last year that also divided critics (“Bye, bye Babylon,” August 23, 2023). While the Siren believes it is a “lousy movie,” nonetheless she has noticed that there are “ongoing attempts to enshrine last year's Babylon as some kind of masterwork,” which is to say, for some, the movie's initial rejection is a surefire guarantee of its ultimate value. The myth serves to shield such movies from negative reviews.

In addition, the Siren refers to a recent New York Times article about the new phenomenon of “MovieTok” influencers. The Times calls them “the new school of film critic,” observing that “some tenets of the profession—such as rendering judgments or making claims that go beyond one’s personal taste—are now considered antiquated and objectionable.” Critics of the new school are never going to make an egregious mistake like Jack Gould made with Elvis Presley. More than that, by insisting that the tenets of a previous generation of critics have become antiquated—meaning they are too old to get what’s really going on—the new school of film critics seeks to shield itself, not simply certain films, but from criticism as well. The new school influencers have little concern for the movie itself. Instead, they are far more interested in the multiple ways they can attribute significance to the movie, e.g., “outrageous,” “extravagant,” “over the top,” “mind-blowing,” “thought-provoking,” on and on. Criticism is simply a form of publicity, and the film itself a commodity.

Elvis at 80

Note: This blog is an amalgam of observations I've made previously, with a few additional remarks added. It seemed appropriate to (re)publish some of these observations given the occasion of Elvis's birthday.

Today would have been Elvis Presley’s 80th birthday. His death occurred over 37 years ago, but he lives on, and not only in the form of impersonators. Greil Marcus calls the image of Elvis who lives with us now the dead Elvis, and even wrote a book about it with just that title: Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991). Marcus called this Elvis “an emptied, triumphantly vague symbol of displaced identity” (p. 33), but it also happens to be the condition of the android, the experience of the ghost having left the building. You can find this Elvis on coffee mugs, ashtrays, crushed black velvet, ties, T-shirts, scarfs, wine labels, billboards, Pez dispensers, limited edition dinner plates, clock faces, and appropriated for album covers. You can find it all over. The image is ubiquitous. Elvis’s meteoric rise to fame roughly coincided with the new technology of television, so in a sense Elvis has always been an image.

For those who may care that today would have been his 80th birthday, Elvis Presley will always be a daunting, elusive mystery. In Dead Elvis, Greil Marcus calls the invention of dead Elvis “a great common art project, the work of scores of people operating independently of each other, linked only by their determination to solve the same problem: who was he, and why do I still care?” Because dead Elvis is a collective representation, it both legitimizes and subverts “Elvis” the man. Perhaps the whole issue is irrelevant, except that Marcus can’t get past the vast amount of cultural expenditure invested in constructing dead Elvis. Nor can I. For now, dead Elvis is largely perceived as an exemplar of tastelessness and an example of what comedian Tom Arnold once said about his marriage to Roseanne Barr, “We’re America’s worst nightmare—white trash with money.” What are the reasons behind this cultural perception of dead Elvis?

The reasons underlying these perceptions are astutely explored in an essay by Linda Ray Pratt, “Elvis, or the Ironies of a Southern Identity,” which can be found in Kevin Quain, Ed., The Elvis Reader (St. Martin's Press, 1992). In one of the very best pieces ever written about Elvis, Dr. Pratt, writing as a Southerner herself, discusses Elvis with the kind of understanding and empathy that those outside the culture often lack. She makes so many acute insights that it is impossible to list them all here, but here are a few insights that may help explain why Elvis is held in such contempt by so many. Writing about Elvis in the context of Southern culture, she says:

C. Vann Woodward has said that the South's experience is atypical of the American experience, that where the rest of America has known innocence, success, affluence, and an abstract and disconnected sense of place, the South has known guilt, poverty, failure, and a concrete sense of roots and place.... These myths collide in Elvis. His American success story was always acted out within its Southern limitations. No matter how successful Elvis became in terms of fame and money, he remained fundamentally disreputable in the minds of many Americans. Elvis had rooms full of gold records earned by million-copy sales, but his best rock and roll records were not formally honored by the people who control, if not the public taste, the rewarding of public taste.... His movies made millions but could not be defended on artistic grounds. The New York Times view of his fans was “the men favoring leisure suits and sideburns, the women beehive hairdos, purple eyelids and tight stretch pants”.... (96-97)

Observing that Elvis “remained an outsider in the American culture that adopted his music,” she goes on to say:

Although he was the world's most popular entertainer, to like Elvis a lot was suspect, a lapse of taste.... The inability of Elvis to transcend his lack of reputability despite a history-making success story confirms the Southern sense that the world outside thinks Southerners are freaks, illiterates . . . sexual perverts, lynchers. I cannot call this sense a Southern “paranoia” because ten years outside the South has all too often confirmed the frequency with which non-Southerners express such views. Not even the presidency would free LBJ and Jimmy Carter from the ridicule.... And Elvis was truly different, in all those tacky Southern ways one is supposed to rise above with money and sophistication. (97)

Regarding the deification of the dead Elvis, she observes:

[H]is death confirmed the tragic frailty, the violence, the intellectual poverty, the extravagance of emotion, the loneliness, the suffering, the sense of loss. Almost everything about his death, including the enterprising cousin who sold the casket pictures to National Enquirer, dismays, but nothing can detract from Elvis himself.... Greil Marcus wrote in his book Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music that Elvis created a beautiful illusion, a fantasy that shut nothing out. The opposite was true. The fascination was the reality always showing through the illusion--the illusion of wealth and the psyche of poverty; the illusion of success and the pinch of ridicule; the illusion of invincibility and the tragedy of frailty; the illusion of complete control and the reality of inner chaos.... Elvis had all the freedom the world can offer and could escape nothing. (103)

Her final, acute insight is painfully true: by saying that Elvis could escape nothing, she means escape the Southern mythology, both what he inherited as a Southerner by birth, and what someone from the South is perceived to be by non-Southerners. The contempt for his Southern cracker origins may have been why he was never allowed to be the great actor he could have been. Even Jimmy Carter as president couldn’t escape the stigma of being from the South: the mass media was brutal on him, his brother Billy, and even his daughter Amy.

Because societies can suffer from amnesia just as an individuals can, the specific meanings of “Elvis” no longer exist. Many young people today know Elvis is a rock star only because they have read that he was one. For Robert Ray (also from the South), writing in The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, dead Elvis is a grand example of a celebrity “whose fame, even at its its peak, is inseparable from camp.” He doesn't write that with glee.

History And Myth

According to This Day In Rock, on 15 April 1955 CBS talent scout Arthur Godfrey turned down the chance to sign Elvis Presley. However, according to several biographical sources, April 15 is not the date Elvis, Scotty, and Bill actually auditioned for the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts show in New York City; the actual date was March 23. The April 15 date therefore may represent the date they received formal notification of their rejection. It would turn out that the audition for Arthur Godfrey was not an insignificant moment in Elvis Presley's career, primarily because of the widespread misperceptions of Elvis's career to which it later gave rise. For the March 1955 trip Elvis made to New York City later was used by Eileen Southern as evidence that Bo Diddley was the inspiration for Elvis's "diluted versions" of black music (The Music of Black Americans: A History, 1971). Southern claims that Elvis copied Diddley upon "many hours listening to and watching [his] stage shows produced at the Apollo Theater in Harlem" (p. 499). And yet, if the information over at On-This-Day.com is correct, it would have been impossible for Elvis to have seen Bo Diddley at the Apollo Theater in March 1955, as Diddley did not make his first appearance at the Apollo until August 20. That date may be incorrect, of course, just as This Day in Rock's date of April 15 inaccurately suggests the actual date of Elvis's audition for Arthur Godfrey. It is true that Diddley had recorded his first single, the eponymously titled “Bo Diddley,” early in March 1955, and it may have been released by the end of March (some sources indicate April), but it was Ed Sullivan who saw Diddley perform at the Apollo and booked him for his popular television show on November 20. I have been unable to determine precisely the date(s) when Sullivan saw him perform at the Apollo. Still, Eileen Southern's assertion that Elvis - who did not leave the South until achieving notice for his singular performance style - was merely an imitator of Bo Diddley has remained such a powerful myth that it was mentioned in this 2008 Bo Diddley obituary notice. Michael T. Bertrand, in his excellent book Race, Rock, and Elvis (University of Illinois Press, 2005), argues it may have been Bo Diddley himself who disseminated the story that Elvis had "appropriated his performance style."

"I think maybe Presley copied my dance steps," he said in [October] 1956. "I met him once about a year ago. He was just like any other kid coming backstage at the Apollo. I don't remember much about that meeting except that he asked me a few funny questions, but what the hell they were I don't remember. He said something about sitting out front for a bunch of shows. If he copied me, I don't care - more power to him. I'm not starving." (qtd. in Bertrand 192).

Assuming Bo Diddley was interviewed by Charles Gruenberg (for the 4 October 1956 New York Post story in which the above comment appeared) in September 1956, then Diddley's recollection that he'd met Presley "about a year ago" would seem to suggest that he was indeed performing at the Apollo in September 1955, that is, the August 20 date marking his first appearance may be correct. (The date could be determined by simply researching the archive; I haven't yet had the chance to do so. I'll get around to it; in the meantime, be my guest.) And yet, as Bertrand observes, Diddley's description is vague enough ("like any other kid," "I don't remember") to make it easily adaptable "to the subsequent conviction held by Bo Diddley and many others that Presley 'stole his act' from black artists, Diddley included" (192). It's possible that Elvis could have seen Bo Diddley in late August 1955, as this list of Elvis's live performances in 1955 reveals, but he would have had to make the drive to New York City on his own dime, not as a consequence of his concert schedule taking him there.

The factual accuracy of the matter is important, for to adhere to what might be called the "minstrelsy interpretation" of Elvis's career is really an attempt to undermine his legitimacy. The attempt to discredit and distort his accomplishment is not especially difficult to understand: to depict him as an uneducated white Southern redneck usurping black culture is to suggest his "crime" was becoming financially successful while performing, as Bertrand observes, "a music associated with working-class black culture. . . . He became rich and famous while more qualified black contemporaries remained poor and obscure" (195). Of course, the truth is far more interesting and complex than the one offered by the minstrelsy interpretation. Bertrand suggests that by examining Elvis's early life and career, "it is possible to see how rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll became a shared vehicle of expression for various groups the mainstream had ignored, maligned, or rejected" (195). Bertrand's fine book explores how Elvis was drawn to black musical forms in order to forge an identity within an unfamiliar, post-war urban world, a far more interesting story than the Elvis-in-blackface myth.

Fame And Fortune

Among the many nice gifts I received for Christmas this year were two Elvis CDs containing rare outtakes, one titled '60-'61 Sessions and the other Elvis Presley - Vol. 3: Blue Hawaii Outtakes. I'll report on the CD containing the Blue Hawaii outtakes later (it's been around awhile, indicating a copyright of 1991), as I haven't yet had a chance to listen to it, being preoccupied by the '60-'61 Sessions disc containing 33 alternate takes from the years 1960 and 1961 that, according to the disc packaging, have not been released on the Follow That Dream (FTD) collector's label. More on this later.

The tracklisting on the '60-'61 Sessions is as follows:


01. Fame And Fortune (take 3)
02. Fame And Fortune (take 5)
03. Blue Suede Shoes (take 1)

04. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 21, 22, and 23)

05. Surrender (take 3, 4)

06. Sentimental Me (take 3)

07. Swing Down Sweet Chariot (take 4)
08. There's Always Me (take 3, 4)

09. Fame And Fortune (take 9)
10. He Knows Just What I Need (take 9)
11. He Knows Just What I Need (take 10)
12. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 24)
13. Put The Blame On Me (take 3, 4 and 5)
14. Starting Today (take 3)

15. Flaming Star (vocal overdub)

16. Summer Kisses, Winter Tears (take 26)

17, In My Father's House (work part, take 1)

18. Fame And Fortune (take 10)

19. Fame And Fortune (take 11)

20. Fame And Fortune (take 12)
The Complete Sessions:
21. - 27. Britches (take 1, 2 & 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, insert 1, take 1)

28. - 30. Milky White Way (take 1, 2, 3, take 4 & 5, take 6 & 7)

29. Wooden Heart (take 1, 2 & 3, 4)

Obviously the majority of the tracks are from 1960, confined to the first RCA Studio B Nashville session from March 20-21, 1960 ("Fame and Fortune"), soundtrack sessions for Paramount's G. I. Blues (April 27-28, 1960) and 20th Century-Fox's Flaming Star (August 8, 1960), and the His Hand In Mine Studio B Nashville session from October 30-31, 1960. The remaining four tracks are from the March 12-13, 1961 Studio B Nashville session that formed the basis of 1961's Something For Everybody ("Sentimental Me," "There's Always Me," "Put the Blame On Me," and "Starting Today"). Hence the contents of the disc are rather nicely confined to material recorded from March 1960 through March 1961, with the emphasis on material recorded March - October 1960. If one were to combine the outtakes on the '60-'61 Sessions with those on the FTD releases Fame and Fortune (2002) and Long Lonely Highway (2000) and those on the FTDs of Elvis Is Back! (2005) and Something For Everybody (2006) (excluding the singles), as well as most of the tracks on Such A Night: Essential Elvis Volume 6 (2000) and the first few tracks found on disc 2 of Collector's Gold (1991), you'd have an excellent representation of the first calendar year (March '60 - March ' 61) of the post-Army Elvis, a very good musical period indeed. To fill out the recordings for this year, one would also have to add the FTD releases of Wild in the Country and Blue Hawaii as well as the 1997 RCA Europe import CD of G. I. Blues, which includes several alternate takes. The unused "Black Star" as well as other soundtrack recordings from this period can be found on disc 1 of the aforementioned 3-CD box Collector's Gold. While the so-called "smoother" sound of Sixties Elvis starts to emerge with songs such as "Fame and Fortune," the excellence of the Elvis Is Back! (produced by Steve Sholes and Chet Atkins) and Something For Everybody (Steve Sholes) sessions is undeniable. (For a discussion of the Chet Atkins' "smooth" or "Nashville sound" emerging at this time which influenced the production of the music Elvis recorded during this period, I'll refer readers to an earlier post found here.) Obviously the "journey" of the Sixties Elvis begins with these fine 1960-61 recordings, but the excellence of his non-soundtrack recordings diminished in the mid-60s as the movies (and their soundtracks) began to take more and more of his time and energy: notice that he made four movies the first year after he was discharged from the Army. However, the worst of the movies Elvis made in the 1960s--in my opinion, Kissin' Cousins, released in 1964--was yet to be made, but unfortunately it was released the month following the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the biggest hit record Elvis had from 1964 to 1967 was "Crying in the Chapel," recorded in 1960.

Elvis And His Colon

According to a Fox News exclusive published today, Elvis may not have died in 1977 from cardiac arrhythmia, as has been widely reported, but rather, according to Elvis’s attending physician, Dr. George “Nick” Nichopoulos, he possibly died from the effects of chronic constipation. According to the Fox News article,

“After he died we weren’t sure (of the exact cause of death) so I continued to do some research and I had some doctors call me from different places and different med schools that were doing research on constipation and different problems you can get into with it. I just want to get the story straight — it all made sense with the new research that was done,” the now retired Memphis M.D told Pop Tarts. “Dr. Nick” was by Presley’s side for the last twelve years of his life and tried to resuscitate him the day he died. He recently released the book “The King and Dr. Nick” about his time with The King, and his theory on the death that shocked America. “We didn’t realize until the autopsy that his constipation was as bad – we knew it was bad because it was hard for us to treat, but we didn’t realize what it had done," the doctor explains of Elvis’ condition. "We just assumed that the constipation was secondary to the meds that he was taking for his arthritic pain and for his insomnia.”

Astonishingly, according to Dr. Nichopoulous, the autopsy revealed that Elvis’s colon was 5 to 6 inches in diameter (in contrast to the normal width of 2-3 inches) and instead of being the standard 4 to 5 feet long, his colon was 8-9 feet long.

“The constipation upset him quite a bit because Elvis thought that he could handle almost anything, he thought he was really a man’s man and he wasn’t going to let something like this . . . he thought that this was a sign of weakness and he wasn’t going to be weak,” Nichopoulos said. “And it’s not the kind of thing you table talk. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s you didn’t talk about constipation much, you didn’t hear people complaining about it, or saying what they did or how much trouble they had with it.”

Actually, the issue of Elvis’s dietary and bathroom habits was explored about twenty years by the enormously unpopular (at least to Elvis fans) Albert Goldman, in his book, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours (1990). Goldman discussed in detail how drug intake would have led to chronic constipation. The full Fox News article is available here.

Domestication

Today I screened for my students Elvis ’56, a documentary about Elvis’s emergence as a national figure in 1956. While I was aware of how quickly Elvis became a controversial figure, I hadn’t realized until watching the film today how swiftly Elvis was domesticated, by which I mean how swiftly his “wildness” was controlled, overcome, tamed, made tractable, “hemmed in.” Humiliation was a key strategy in Elvis’s domestication, as revealed when, properly attired in a nicely-fitted tuxedo, he sang “Hound Dog” to a basset hound on The Steve Allen Show on 1 July 1956. It was Jacques Ellul who introduced the concept of the “propaganda of integration” in his book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. By integrative propaganda, Ellul means the sort of propaganda that promotes acceptance of the status quo, conformity, and passivity, and by the use of the word domestication in this context I mean to invoke the idea of integrative propaganda, that is, made to conform and the diminishment of a threat. Elvis’s national humiliation—being required to sing “Hound Dog” to a dog on the nationally-televised Steve Allen Show on 1 July—took place a mere five months and three days after his first appearance—his first exposure to a national audience—on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on 28 January. It is often claimed that Elvis’s crucial period took place from January 1956 through September 1958 (not even three years), but arguably it was a much shorter period than is commonly understood. According to Elvis.com, Elvis appeared on American national television in 1956 on the following dates. His performance of the ballad, “Love Me Tender,” and the gospel tune, “Peace in the Valley,” represent further stages of his domestication, the final step being his military career. After the following dates, he would appear on television just three more times during his lifetime.

·      1.28 Stage Show

·      2.4 Stage Show

·      2.11 Stage Show

·      2.18 Stage Show

·      3.17 Stage Show

·      3.24 Stage Show

·      4.3 Milton Berle Show

·      6.5 Milton Berle Show

·      7.1 Steve Allen Show

·      9.9 Ed Sullivan Show (“Love Me Tender”)

·      10.28 Ed Sullivan Show

·      1.6.57 Ed Sullivan Show (“Peace in the Valley”)

The Gospel Elvis

There’s a fine essay by Charles Wolfe, titled “Presley and the Gospel Tradition,” in the now somewhat aged but excellent book edited by Kevin Quain, The Elvis Reader (1992). A typical discussion of Elvis’s music inevitably, and certainly correctly, cites country and blues influences, but as Wolfe points out, “these sources . . . account for only a part of his music” (13). Indeed, it was primarily only the 50s in which Elvis was a rock singer. In the 1960s and 70s, Elvis would surpass his narrow classification as a rock singer and became one of the central figures of American popular music. In my own estimation, From Elvis in Memphis (1969), recorded more than a decade after his first singles for RCA in 1956, is not only one of Elvis’s greatest records, but one of the greatest records of American popular music. But it's not a rock album. Wolfe is no doubt correct when he observes that one of the reasons why the influence of white gospel music on Elvis has been unaccountably neglected is because there is so little research on the subject. He writes (this in 1992, remember):

No one has yet written a serious history of the genre, and most of the information currently available has to be drawn from original research or from various self-serving press releases and fan newspapers. Numerous gospel performers, such as the Blackwood Brothers, the Speer Family, and Jimmy Swaggert, have written “biographies,” and while these are useful to an extent, they are more often than not designed as “inspirational” reading rather than factual accounts. The very term gospel music has become confusing to the average reader; in recent years the term (which originated in white “revivalist” hymns of the 1890s) has been appropriated by scholars to describe black religious singing, though it is still generally used by the public (and the musicians) to refer to white singing. (14)

Elvis’s discography, of course, contains some excellent gospel records, even if those records were never among his biggest sellers. The LP, His Hand in Mine (1960), was the follow-up to the Peace in the Valley EP (1957). How Great Thou Art (1967) appeared a few years later, and the gospel album that won Elvis a second Grammy, He Touched Me, appeared in 1972. Peter Guralnick (Last Train to Memphis) observes that Gladys Presley’s favorite quartet was the Blackwood Brothers; according to Wolfe, the Blackwood Brothers were “the most highly visible and exciting musical group in the Memphis area” before and after Elvis moved to that city (16). Elvis was a fan of the Blackwoods in the years prior to his own rise to fame; he would ask the Blackwood Brothers to sing at his mother’s funeral in 1958. Moreover, during the twenty-one years that Elvis was a national figure, he used three different gospel groups as back-up singers: the Jordanaires (1956-67), who were providing back-up vocals for him when he sang “Peace in the Valley” during his 6 January 1957 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show; the Imperials (1969-71)—they appeared in 1970’s That’s the Way It Is and backed him on 72’s He Touched Me; and J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet (1972-77)—Elvis had known J. D. Sumner since he’d joined the Blackwood Brothers after the disastrous plane crash that killed the group’s original bass singer in late June 1954.

Perhaps the more important issue regarding Elvis and gospel music, though, is to identify the precise nature of the genre’s influence. Charles Wolfe argues that the influence “was not in the content of his songs,” but rather “in Presley’s singing style and performing style” (25). I’ve blogged previously about the influence of Dean Martin on Elvis’s vocal style, but Wolfe, citing Jerry Hopkins’ Elvis: A Biography, argues for recognition of the important influence of Jake Hess of the Statesmen Quartet. Hopkins cites Johnny Rivers, who revealingly said, “If you’ll listen to some of their [the Statesmen Quartet’s] recordings, you’ll hear some of that style that is now Elvis Presley’s style, especially in his ballad singing style. He was playing some of their records one day and he said, ‘Now you know where I got my style from. Caught—a hundred million records too late.’ It was really funny. I think he idolized Jake. Jake and the Statesmen and the Blackwoods” (qtd. in Wolfe 26).

I’m not entirely happy with the following juxtapositions, but this video, identified as being from a 1950s airing of the Nabisco TV show, contains a lively performance by the Statesmen (with Jake Hess in the lead), singing “Move That Mountain,” a song Elvis would have certainly liked. This second video is Elvis singing “By And By,” a song in the same vein. In the years since Wolfe published his article, more emphasis has been placed on Elvis’s gospel recordings, such as the He Touched Me set, available here. In any case, I strongly recommend Charles Wolfe's fine article to anyone interested in this dimension of Elvis’s music.

Altered Chords

The sequence in Jailhouse Rock (1957) showing a dirty, sweaty Elvis Presley (playing Vince Everett) in the prison coal yard is the closest the actor ever got to blackface. The practice had largely disappeared by 1952 (that year’s twenty-fifth anniversary remake of The Jazz Singer, starring Danny Thomas, did not include it, surprising given the fact that Al Jolson often used it early on in his career). But according to Krin Gabbard, in Black Magic (2004), Marlon Brando had appropriated black masculinity for his performances in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and in The Wild One (1953). Gabbard observes, “…the makers of The Wild One seemed . . . willing to create a part for Brando that drew upon African American experience. In Wild One, Johnny/Brando does after all ride with the “Black Rebels Motorcycle Club,” and when Johnny and his gang arrive in the small town of Carbondale, “their contempt for its bourgeois culture is entirely consistent with early 1950s bebop ideology and its opaque white Negro jive talk” (45). Curiously, when Johnny/Brando opts to play a jukebox, it plays “the big band arrangements that Leith Stevens wrote for the film” (45).

Brando reportedly had wanted popular cool jazz trumpeter-composer Shorty Rogers to write the music used on the soundtrack for The Wild One, and indeed, the music Rogers wrote for the film was later issued on the RCA Victor label, performed by Shorty Rogers and His Giants. Besides Rogers, the cool jazz style was associated with the Brubeck Quartet and the MJQ, as well as (for a time) Miles Davis and the orchestrations of Gil Evans, but it never displaced bop as the main style of post-war jazz in America. Coded as “white,” it was modern, cerebral, and arranged, and by the mid-50s, was associated with a white, college-educated audience. For by the time The Wild One was released, late in 1953, the Brubeck Quartet had already released Jazz at the College of the Pacific (1953) and Jazz at Oberlin (1953), and was about to release Jazz Goes to College (1954). Hence, in Jailhouse Rock (filmed late April through June 1957, released later that year), a crucial scene takes place in the home of a jazz-loving college professor. Perhaps borrowing a story element from The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Elvis/Vince has been released from prison with the hope of starting over as a musician. He purchases a guitar and seeks out the “Club La Florita,” where he happens to meet Peggy Van Alden (Judy Tyler) during the performance of a burlesque number (pictured). The two strike up a friendship based on a mutual interest in music, and Peggy eventually invites Elvis/Vince to the home of her parents, where her aforementioned college professor father is having a party. Fortunately, the dialogue of the scene has been recorded by Krin Gabbard in his important work on jazz and the American cinema, Jammin’ at the Margins (1996). Soon after Peggy’s and Vince’s arrival, the conversation turns to jazz music and a jazz figure named “Stubby Ritemeyer,” a fictional musician whom Gabbard believes is based on Shorty Rogers.

“I think Stubby’s gone overboard with those altered chords,” says one of the pompous guests. “I agree,” says another, “I think Brubeck and Desmond have gone just as far with dissonance as I care to go.” “Oh, nonsense,” says a man, “have you heard Lennie Tristano’s latest recording? He reached outer space.” A young woman adds, “Some day they’ll make the cycle and go back to pure old Dixieland.” A well-dressed, older woman says, “I say atonality is just a passing phase in jazz music.” Turning to Presley, she asks, “What do you think, Mr. Everett?” He answers, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and storms out of the house. Followed and scolded by Peggy, Everett protests that he was being forced into a corner by a stupid question from “some old broad” (124-25).

As I mentioned earlier, given the release of albums such as Jazz at Oberlin and Jazz Goes to College, Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond would have been strongly associated with the (white) educated college crowd by the time of Jailhouse Rock. I suspect the “latest recording” by Lennie Tristano referred to by one of the party-goers is probably the now legendary Lennie Tristano, released on Atlantic in 1956, while the most recent releases by Shorty Rogers and His Giants were Martians Come Back! and Way Up There, both released in 1956 on Atlantic as well. Interestingly, RCA Victor—Elvis’s label since late in 1955—had made the corporate decision to issue what at the time were referred to “modern jazz records” in the fall of 1953, beginning with two 10” records, Cool and Crazy (LPM 3138) and Shorty Rogers and His Giants (LPM 3137). Early in 1957, just a few months before Jailhouse Rock began filming, RCA issued The Big Shorty Rogers Express (LPM 1350), an LP-sized reissue of 1953’s Cool and Crazy with four additional tracks. Hence the model for the fictional “Stubby Ritemeyer,” as well as Elvis himself, both would have had albums available the same year (1957) on the RCA label. Of course, the actual identity of these records hardly matters, since the more important point, as Gabbard observes, is that in Jailhouse Rock “bop-inflected cool jazz has become emblematic of bourgeois superficiality” (126). If, as Michael Jarrett has observed, the coding of cool jazz is white, or, as he calls it, “soul inverted” (Sound Tracks 24), then Elvis’s rejection of it in this film suggests he was far more comfortable, like his idol Marlon Brando, with acting out black male sexuality, even if that desire occasionally elicited in him the behavior more strongly associated with children and adolescents, as well as the demonstration of more “manly” pursuits like collecting expensive automobiles.

High Fidelity

The long-playing (“LP”) microgroove record, what is commonly referred to as the vinyl LP, which in its final form held about 20 minutes of music per side, makes sense, as David Morton has observed, only “in the context of the long passages typical of classical music” (Off the Record 38-39). Peter Goldmark and Edward Wallerstein—the CBS employees who after the end of World War II pushed the invention of the “LP” record in that company’s laboratories—had found that the vast majority of classical compositions could fit on two sides of a single record if the storage capacity on each side was around seventeen minutes. Prior to the invention of the long-playing microgroove record, classical recordings were packaged in “albums,” that is, bundles of 78-rpm discs. In their pursuit of a storage medium that could hold 90 percent of all classical music (Morton 38), Goldmark and Wallerstein, perhaps intentionally, linked “high fidelity” with “high brow.” But as Morton points out, while the term fidelity (truth, accuracy) “remains central in the technical vocabulary of music recording and reproduction” (15), an understanding of common music recording practices reveals that sounds are not captured, but made. Nonetheless, companies which issued jazz records, such as Prestige, were formed after CBS' introduction of the long-playing record medium (Prestige, for instance, in 1949).

In contrast, RCA’s introduction in 1948 of the 7” 45-rpm single (which was able to exploit the technical improvements of the LP with the inexpensiveness of the 78-rpm single) was, as Morton observes, “aimed squarely at the largest market in the country,” popular music (155). Serendipitously, jazz music, with its extended improvisations, lent itself to the high fidelity LP format, and so, somewhat improbably, jazz became “high brow.” By 1957, in Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, jazz music lovers are portrayed as snobs and elitists. Conveniently, a crucial scene in Jailhouse Rock has been recorded by Krin Gabbard in his important work on jazz and the American cinema, Jammin’ at the Margins (1996). The scene takes place at the home of Peggy’s (Judy Tyler’s) parents. Her father, a college professor, is having a party, during which the conversation has turned to jazz music and a jazz figure named “Stubby Ritemeyer,” a fictional musician whom Gabbard indicates is based on West Coast trumpeter-composer Shorty Rogers.

“I think Stubby’s gone overboard with those altered chords,” says one of the pompous guests. “I agree,” says another, “I think Brubeck and Desmond have gone just as far with dissonance as I care to go.” “Oh, nonsense,” says a man, “have you heard Lennie Tristano’s latest recording? He reached outer space.” A young woman adds, “Some day they’ll make the cycle and go back to pure old Dixieland.” A well-dressed, older woman says, “I say atonality is just a passing phase in jazz music.” Turning to Presley, she asks, “What do you think, Mr. Everett?” He answers, “Lady, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” and storms out of the house. (124)

While Gabbard observes in the scene (and movie) a “dizzy mix of black and white music and their imitations” (125), the scene also is about high (jazz) and low (popular) culture, high fidelity—the extradiegetic jazz recording playing the background—and “low” fidelity—the 45-rpm singles Vince Everett (Elvis) wants to record (“Treat Me Nice”). David Morton observes that “high fidelity became a mass market phenomenon after 1952” (39), and that sales of phonographs and high-fidelity equipment grew throughout the 1950s, one consequence of high-fidelity promotional “fairs” that began in 1949. By 1957, of course, Elvis had been signed to RCA, which had made the corporate decision almost a decade earlier to back and heavily to market inexpensive 7” 45-rpm singles to a popular music audience. Elvis, of course, was signed by RCA to produce singles, not LPs.

Blue Moon

Roughly every four weeks, or about every twenty-eight days, a full moon rises, which normally means there are twelve full moons a year. But last month, there was a full moon on December 2—and another last night, on December 31. The second full moon in the same month is conventionally referred to as a “blue moon,” the source of the expression, “Once in a blue moon.” Since a blue moon occurs only every two to three years, there are therefore only forty or so blue moons in any given century. It also means that the year that features a blue moon has thirteen moons, as did 2009, for instance. Has the association of the number thirteen with the blue moon led to the popular superstition that a blue moon is a sign of bad luck, or at least some sort of misfortune?

Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” released by Columbia Records in 1947, is a conventional country (hillbilly) ballad that speaks of the sorrow of heartbreak:

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and proved untrue.

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.

It was on a moonlight night, the stars were shining bright,

And they whispered from on high, your love had said goodbye.

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining,

Shine on the one that’s gone and said goodbye.

As is clear, the song isn’t about a blue moon in the conventional sense—rather, it puns on the conventional meaning of a blue moon—but is an instance of the so-called pathetic fallacy, the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that attributes to them human emotions, sensations, and feelings. John Ruskin coined the term “pathetic fallacy,” and used as an example of it the lines from Kingsley’s Alton Locke:

They rowed her in across the rolling foam —

The cruel, crawling foam.

George P. Landow explains:

According to Ruskin, grief has so affected this speaker’s mind, so distorted his vision of the world, that he attributes to the foam the characteristics of a living being. In so doing he tells us more about his state of mind, his interior world, than he does about the world which exists outside his mind, and it is this psychological truth that moves and delights the reader. The distorted version of reality does not itself please us, but we can ignore it, for “so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow.”

But when Elvis got hold of the song, he read it aberrantly, no longer as a ballad. He transformed “Blue Moon of Kentucky” into a song, not of loss, but of love regained. In the process, he also invented rockabilly, which, as Michael Jarrett observes, “was to country music as bebop was to swing.” For rockabilly “signaled a paradigm shift: not harmony and melody, but rhythm and sound—echo from a twangy guitar, slapped bass, pounding piano, or a dixie-fried voice—became the raison d'être of popular music” (Sound Tracks, p. 162).