Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley grew up poor in Tupelo, Mississippi and the public housing of Memphis, inside all three of this tree’s sibling musics at once: gospel in the Assembly of God church and the all-night quartet sings he attended obsessively; blues and R&B on Beale Street and Black radio (WDIA, Dewey Phillips’s shows); country as the white South’s default soundtrack (Guralnick 1994).

The synthesis happened at Sun Records in July 1954, when a ballad session with Sam Phillips was going nowhere and Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black started fooling around with Arthur Crudup’s blues “That’s All Right.” Phillips — who had recorded Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King, and who understood exactly what he was hearing — pressed it with Bill Monroe’s bluegrass waltz “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the flip side, recut in the same driving style. Country DJs called it too Black; R&B jocks called it too hillbilly; teenagers bought it (Guralnick 1994).

Presley’s significance in this genealogy is double-edged, and this site keeps both edges. He was a genuine artist of the fusion — the Sun sides are as organic a blend of blues, gospel and country as exists on record, and he named his debts plainly. He was also the proof of the market’s racial arithmetic: the sound Black artists had built sold incomparably better in a white performer, and the industry institutionalized that lesson. Both facts are true; the genre’s history requires holding them together.