Elvis
August 12, 2007, 2:19 pm
Posted by Eduardo Peñalver
I can’t dream up a plausible Catholic link to this, but this op-ed on Elvis’s racial views is an interesting one, especially for those of us whose opinions on the subject may have been influenced by Chuck D.
Hoo boy, this gets me going in so many directions I may end up making myself dizzy.
But I’ll give it a try with many thanks to Eduardo for posting this!
I’ve used Dead Elvis in my class many times as an example of how history can be news.
I ask students to find the inevitable retrospectives about Elvis on the anniversary of his death and we talk about what’s newsworthy about them given the time they were written.
(I use Elvis because he’s the one pop icon who spans the generation gap between me and the students, and whom the international students also recognize.)
We’ve seen Elvis reviled and rehabilitated several times over the years. Different aspects of his life have been selected as angles–drug use, obesity and Southern White Trash cooking, Elvis as Oedipus, Elvis’ contribution to fashion (he wore pink!), Elvis’ attachment to tacky opulence, Elvis’ sense of humor, Elvis and sex addiction.
Sometimes I think I should write “A Short History of Elvis Retrospectives,” because these things reveal our own preoccupations as seen through Elvis’ life. But I’m always too eager to see what we’ll do with Elvis on the next anniversary, so it seems like a never-ending project.
In fact, Elvis retrospectives are not unlike medieval hagiographies (there’s your Catholic connection!), in which the character of the saint seems radically different, depending in which hagiographer handling the material over time and what aspect of the saint he wants to emphaize for his audience.
The “Elvis stole black music” has been a fairly frequent claim in these retrospectives, but this is a nicely focused new look at that claim and one that revolves around the virtue of humility.
Many retrospectives seem to be put together by people looking through Life Magazine photo shots of Elvis in different life phases. Just as a lot of the more uninspired hagiographies are embellished with stock elements like, “St. Tiffany was fair of face and form, but shaved her head and wore widows weeds that her true beauty, her soul-beauty, would shine through.”
But in the Times retrospective, we see a moving, talking, thinking Elvis.The Times piece is also one of the few retrospectives that attempts to record things Elvis actually said and did–one is reminded of Bede, who tried to be so careful in pulling together his sources for his famous Historia Ecclesia.
It is one of the shortest retrospectives–and one of the most human. A wonderful addition to my growing collection!
The first 45 rpm record I ever owned was “Hound Dog.” I was 9 years old, and if I remember correctly, I persuaded my father to get it for me when I accompanied him to the A&P to shop for groceries. (My father, rather than my mother, did most of the grocery shopping.)
I wish I could pinpoint the year, but it was not too long after Elvis died that I was in the now-gone B. Dalton bookstore on Fifth Avenue at an event featuring five or six people who were close to Elvis, some of whom were with him during his final days. I don’t remember whether whether Priscilla Presley was there or not. There were some blood relatives–cousins or half brothers. I rember people wanting to know why they didn’t make him take better care of himself, and their answer was, if you had been there with them, you would have known how impossible that was.
What I find interesting about the memory is I was one of only about fifteen or twenty people in the audience. The Elvis phenomenon had not exploded. I am sure if the event had taken place five years later, there would have been a huge crowd.