Bertrand — Race, Rock, and Elvis

Author: Michael T. Bertrand
Title: Race, Rock, and Elvis
Year: 2000
Publisher: University of Illinois Press (Music in American Life)
Type: Academic book

Race, Rock, and Elvis is a book by the historian Michael T. Bertrand, of Tennessee State University, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2000. It asks how postwar popular culture bore on the racial attitudes of white Southerners. The period’s commercial music and culture, it argues, could do only so much for lasting racial change, but rock ‘n’ roll put Black and white Southerners in contact in ways the region’s customs had kept them from. Against scholars who read Elvis Presley as a white man performing blackness, Bertrand insists on differences of class, region and experience among white people, and he tests the stories told about Presley against the record, from a rumor about shoe-shining to Alice Walker’s story “Nineteen Fifty-Five.”

The book appeared in the Illinois press’s Music in American Life series.¹ It won the Shelby County Historical Commission’s Annual Book and Essay Award in 2001, and a paperback followed in 2004.²

The book, in Bertrand’s description, is neither a history of early rock ‘n’ roll nor a biography of Presley, though it contains elements of each.³ The incentives behind postwar popular music, he writes, “involved profit and entertainment rather than social protest or upheaval,” yet the music’s rituals and vehicles of communication “did challenge the region’s customs and notions about racial relationships.” Black and white Southerners “had occupied the same land for centuries yet hardly knew each other,” and rock ‘n’ roll did “disrupt routine by opening new and important lines of interaction and communication.”⁴ His evidence runs from period newspapers and magazines to the words of participants and eyewitnesses,⁵ and he reads Billboard’s rhythm and blues retail charts as showing “that youth gradually replaced race and class as the chief quality of performers who became popular.”⁶

For Eric Lott, Bertrand writes in his first chapter, “there was no discernible difference between the Beats, Elvis Presley, and Mailer’s White Negro,” the hipster of Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay; together they represented “the indisputable ‘genealogical legacy’ of ‘antebellum racial cross-dressing.‘”⁷ Bertrand calls this “a limited paradigm.” A question by the scholar Kobena Mercer, which Bertrand gives as “What is it about their whiteness that made them want to be black?”, is important, he argues, but makes no reference to “the class, regional, and experiential diversity of the various appropriators” and “tacitly assumes that ‘whiteness’ is synonymous with homogeneity.” Presley and Pat Boone, both white, Southern and about the same age, “differed immensely in their approach to rhythm and blues,” and many appropriators, Bertrand suggests, were forsaking “not their whiteness but rather a bourgeois or middle-class ethic that they considered repressive.”⁸

The seventh chapter opens on Walker’s 1981 story, in which a young white singer, Traynor, buys an older blues singer’s signature tune. The story is fiction, Bertrand writes, but Traynor’s resemblance to Presley “is unmistakable,” and the song is “undoubtedly” Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (1953), which preceded Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956). No evidence exists, he writes, of a relationship between Thornton and Presley, and a careful comparison of the two versions “clearly indicates that they were literally different songs.” Thornton, who had claimed to have written it, said when questioned further that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had composed it: “They gave me the words, but I changed it around and did it my way.” Walker’s story “does not pretend to be history or biography,” Bertrand writes, but for many its elements “have passed into fact.”⁹

Jet wrote in August 1957 that tracing the rumor that Presley had said the only thing Black people could do for him was buy his records and shine his shoes “was like running a gopher to earth.”¹⁰ Its origins, Bertrand replies, “were not as difficult to locate as Jet claimed”: the rumor first appeared in print that April, unsourced, in “How Negroes Feel about Elvis,” a story in Sepia, a Fort Worth magazine he describes as white-owned. The claim “lacked corroboration,” he writes; “it also seemed a handy hammer for those with an ax to grind.”¹¹

The conclusion asks whether the music changed how white Southerners saw Black people and whether “the rock ‘n’ roll experience” helped teach a generation to overcome prejudice. “The answer to those questions is maybe,” Bertrand writes, and he sets beside it the historian David Roediger’s reflection on loving popular music while growing up in the St. Louis area: the rituals of rock ‘n’ roll did not eliminate racism but, in Roediger’s words, “did open the possibility of antiracism.”¹² Brian Ward, in a line from his Journal of American History review that the publisher quotes, wrote that Bertrand had argued “more cogently and with more evidential authority than any previous commentator” that the music Presley and his rockabilly cousins made threatened social conventions, particularly those of race, class and gender.¹³ Craig Morrison, in the Journal of American Folklore, noted that “less than a dozen songs are mentioned in the text,”⁵ and Maurice Bottomley, in a review printed by the fan site Elvis Australia, found the case for class over race “very convincing” but thought the certainty of Presley’s non-imitativeness and antiracism “less secure than Bertrand’s case suggests.”¹⁴

Key contributions

• An account of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll as a new channel of contact between Black and white Southerners, though the period’s commercial music and culture could do only so much for lasting racial change.
• A critique of Eric Lott’s reading of Presley as heir to antebellum racial cross-dressing, and a qualification of Kobena Mercer’s question about whiteness, which Bertrand finds blind to differences of class, region and experience among white people.
• The tracing of the shoe-shine remark attributed to Presley to an unsourced line in Sepia in 1957.
• A test of Alice Walker’s “Nineteen Fifty-Five” against the history of “Hound Dog”: no evidence of a relationship between Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley, and two recordings that were “literally different songs.”
• A hedged conclusion: whether the music helped teach a generation to overcome prejudice is “maybe.”

See also

• Love and Theft — Eric Lott’s 1993 study of blackface minstrelsy, which Bertrand cites
• The color line in pop — the debate over race and the categories of popular music