Elvis Presley

He was born in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935, into white poverty close enough to Black poverty that the two shared streets, storefronts, and churches within earshot of one another. The family moved to Memphis when he was thirteen and lived for a time in public housing. He absorbed Pentecostal gospel, the Opry on the radio, and the rhythm and blues coming off Beale Street and out of stations that programmed Black records. None of that was unusual for a poor Memphis teenager in 1950. What happened next was.

In July 1954, in a Sun Records session that had produced nothing usable, he began fooling with Arthur Crudup's That's All Right during a break, and Sam Phillips rolled tape. A local station played the record on repeat and listeners telephoned to ask whether the singer was Black. The disc paired a blues on one side with a bluegrass tune on the other, which was precisely the point. Over eighteen months at Sun he cut a small body of work that set the template, before Phillips sold his contract to RCA at the end of 1955 for thirty-five thousand dollars.

National television made him a scandal. Movement that had worked fine in Southern roadhouses read on camera as sexual provocation, and clergy, columnists, and civic groups said so at length, a number of them objecting in the same breath to the Black origin of the sound. Ed Sullivan, who had announced he would never book him, booked him in 1956 and took roughly eighty percent of the viewing audience. The army drafted him in 1958, Hollywood absorbed him through most of the 1960s, and the Las Vegas years ended in prescription drug dependency and death at forty-two.

What he owed and what he took has never been settled, and both readings carry weight. He recorded songs by Black writers in styles Black musicians had created, and earned sums those musicians never saw, in a market that would not have bought the same records from them directly — the working definition of appropriation for many critics, and Chuck D and others have argued it in exactly those terms. Against that, he credited his sources publicly all his life, Black contemporaries including Little Richard and B.B. King spoke of him warmly, and the industry that underpaid Black artists long preceded him.