VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: Elvis Was a Straight-Up Racist – Mary J. Blige, Quincy Jones, Chuck D Weigh In on a Persistent Controversy

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes young entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s entry inward our on-going serial publication originally ran on Jan. 20, 2023.

In 2002, hip-hop vocalizer Mary J. Blige sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” a Carl Perkins song popularized past Elvis Presley, during the “Divas Live” special on cable television web VH1.

She later told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I prayed well-nigh it because i know Elvis was a racist. But that was just now a strain VH1 asked me to sing. It meant zip to me. I didn’t wearing an Elvis flag. I didn’t correspond Elvis that day.”

In 2021, Grammy-winning producer Quincy Inigo Jones told the Hollywood Reporter that he refused to ever work on with Presley. Pressed to explain why, the 88-year-old flashed support to his days authorship for orchestra leader Tommy Dorsey inward the ’50s.

Elvis came in, and Tommy said: ‘I don’t need to spiel with him,’” John Paul Jones recalled. “He was a antiblack mother******.” Daniel Jones then said, “I’m going to shut upwardly now,” returning after a beat out to add: “But every time I saw Elvis, he was existence coached past Otis Blackwell, notification him how to sing.”

As noted by the Hollywood Reporter, Blackwell told Saint David Letterman on his exhibit in 1987 that he and Elvis Aron Presley had ne'er met.

Elvis, who would feature turned 88 on Jan 8, seemed to interpret a similar sore bit for Ray Jacques Alexandre Cesar Charles in a 1994 question with NBC’s Bob Costas. “To say that Elvis was so great and so outstanding, like he’s the world-beater … the king of what?” Charles II asked. “He was doing our form of music. So what the the pits am i supposed to get under one's skin so excited about?”

In 1989, Public Enemy recorded what is at present the soundtrack to the racialist Elvis rallying cry. The strike group’s song “Fight the Power” reaches its emotional pinnacle with Chuck D’s combative lyrics: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant s*** to me, you see, straight-up racist, the sucker was, simple and plain.”

Hate Me Tender

Elvis’ cultural appropriation of Shirley Temple Black musical rhythm & megrims strikes many people as an bit of racism.

Presley, who shares Las Vegas frequenter sainthood along with the Rat Pack, plundered from inkiness singers patch benefiting dear from something they could ne'er enjoy: whiteness privilege.

It’s what allowed Elvis to accomplish the variety of notoriety and wealth vocalizing pitch-black euphony that fatal singers such as Chester Alan Arthur Crudup, author and archetype singer of Elvis’ first-class honours degree hit, “That’s All Right, Mama,” were ever denied.

Crudup was credited as the composer on Elvis’ 1954 Sun Records single but had to waitress until the 1960s before receiving a paltry $60K inwards backward royalties for the song that made Elvis a star.

While Elvis didn’t go and run same a pitch-black vocalist as a gimmick to garner money – that’s how he by nature sounded and moved – he understood how it gave him a top runway to success. A snowy boy performing what was and then deemed “race music” gave white teenagers a inherent defending team for overwhelming it. And that’s wherefore he became the male monarch of stone n’ roll.

But was Elvis a anti-Semite(a) in any uglier signified of the concept?

Segregated Vegas Residency

It is extremely potential that Elvis played to whites-only crowds during his Las Vegas debut at the New Frontier from Apr 23 to May 9, 1956. While this asseveration can’t follow proven beyond all doubt, no more accounting of the engagement has ever so noted otherwise.

Not unless Elvis position (integration) into his contract, as Josephine Baker did,” said Claytee White, managing director of the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries.

Seen through the lens of Bodoni font morality, playing to unintegrated audiences also seems like a racist act. However, in 1956, it wasn’t seen that way. All crowds on the Las Vegas Strip, including those serenaded past Nat Billie Jean Moffitt King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Bellafonte, were white. African-Americans weren’t allowed to come in showrooms during shows unless they were headed to the stage, and fifty-fifty calamitous headliners were forced to way out the resorts after their sets.

It wasn’t until Mar 1960 that gambling casino bosses, during a meeting with the NAACP and urban center and say leaders at the shuttered Moulin Rouge cassino hotel, reluctantly in agreement(p) to earmark African-Americans to keep going their establishments. Inspired past the wafture of polite rights activism sweeping the country, the NAACP threatened a march on the Strip that would have deeply humiliated Las Vegas.

As for why he didn’t assert on desegregation inwards his contract, Elvis was noneffervescent a newcomer to the scene, with minuscule bargaining power. He wasn’t technically the headliner, but a third-billed “special guest” who sang four songs at the remnant of for each one show. Standing upward for equality at this point in time inward his career could feature ended it.

It’s a moot pointedness anyway, since his domineering manager, Col. Tom Parker, did all the negotiating and would never get entertained such a risky move.

The Racial Slur

In 1957, Elvis was accused of uttering a racist slur that noneffervescent occasionally gets attributed to him. In Apr of that year, Sepia, a white-owned sensationalist monthly for calamitous readers, published a story headlined: “How Negroes Feel About Elvis.”

“Some Negroes are unable to forget that Elvis was born inward Tupelo, Mississippi, the hometown of the foremost Dixie rush baiter, former Congressman Jon Rankin,” the author wrote. “Others trust a rumored crack past Elvis during a Boston coming into court in which he is alleged to hold said: ‘The only if thing Negroes canful make out for me is shine my shoes and buy my records.’”

Suppose anything nigh Quincy Jones’ calculate of his first-class honours degree encounter with Elvis is to follow believed. In that case, this journalistically irresponsible write up is to the highest degree potential what soured Tommy Dorsey, as well as many other musicians of the day, on Elvis.

Aware of Sepia‘s dubious reputation, the Negro tie in editor of the Black-owned JET cartridge sought-after(a) to investigate whether Elvis ever in reality uttered such an inexcusable statement.

“Tracing the rumored racial slur to its germ was similar running a pocket gopher to earth,” Louie Jackie Robinson wrote. “No matter what hollow it dived back in, it popped come out of another one.”

Some people interviewed by Lennox Robinson repeated Sepia‘s arrogate that Elvis Aron Presley had uttered the remark inward Boston, a metropolis Elvis had in time to call in at that point.

Others claimed he said it on Edward VII R. Murrow’s show, on which Elvis had never appeared.

Robinson then asked several Shirley Temple Black people who knew Elvis whether they believed he could say such a thing, still inwards private to another lily-white person. Not a single someone did.

In the summer of 1957, Edward Goldenberg Robinson finally landed an question with Elvis himself in his salad dressing elbow room on the Hollywood band of the motion-picture show “Jailhouse Rock.”

“I never said anything the likes of that,” he stated emphatically, “and people who live me know I wouldn’t have got said it. a lot of people seem to guess I started this business. But shake n’ tramp was hither a long time before i came along. Nobody canful sing that kind of euphony same coloured people.”

Robinson’s investigating non only if declared Elvis clean-handed of the charge, it went as far as stating: “To Elvis, people are people, no matter of race, color, or creed.”

While this should have cleared Elvis of voicing the anti-Semite(a) remark once and for all, the file ease survives as an urban fable all these decades later.

“Many whites in the 1950s, including celebrities, had used anti-black rhetoric,” wrote St. David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, in a 2006 statement published on Ferris State University’s website. “It was light to believe that Presley, the Mississippi-born, once-working class, former motortruck device driver had unappreciatively lambasted blacks.”

But Pilgrim continued, “There is no grounds that it happened … Moreover, at that place is grounds that Elvis Presley donated money to the NAACP and other civil rights organizations; (that) he publically lauded Shirley Temple musicians; and (that) he treated the Blacks he encountered with respect.”

Elvis’ Shirley Temple Roots

Elvis grew upward on the Joseph Black face of the railroad tracks in the segregated American South. Though none of his schools were integrated, to the highest degree of his well(p) puerility friends were Black. He learned his Gospels inflections and hip-shaking moves during the “sanctified meetings” he was invited to advert inward the all-Black churches of Tupelo, Miss.

In Memphis, the 2 African American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed Elvis for standing up to society’s rules of exclusion. In the summer of 1956, the World reported, “the shake n’ revolve phenomenon cracked Memphis’s separatism laws” past attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement common “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

A month later, Elvis tended to(p) a charity event sponsored by WDIA, Memphis’ Negroid radio station. Its all-Black roster of performers included B.B. King, who sang Presley’s praises. “What to the highest degree people don’t know,” Billie Jean King said, “is that this boy is serious about what he’s doing. He’s carried outside past it. When I was inwards Memphis with my band, he used to stand inwards the wings and look on us do … He’s been a gibe in the fortify to the business, and all i canful say is, ‘That’s my man!'”

’68 Comeback Special

Probably the topper refutation of Presley’s rumored racism is the story of what was supposed to live a ho-hum NBC Dec 25 special titled “Singer Presents … Elvis,” after the sewing simple machine company. The special was mark to snug with Elvis vocalizing the 1943 Bing Crosby standard, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Both NBC and Col. Dorothy Parker insisted on it.

But that just didn’t sit down right hand with Elvis. Henry Martyn Robert F. President Kennedy and Steve Martin Luther Riley B King had latterly been assassinated, and the reality seemed similar it was coming asunder at the seams. Elvis thought he should oddment the special with a voice communication promoting fraternity and unity. It’s said that this was the first-class honours degree time inwards his calling he cared passionately plenty around something to standstill upward to Parker over it.

But Elvis, who wasn’t a author – he sang songs written past others – simply couldn’t come in upwardly with the correct words. Luckily, the show’s director, Steve Binder, had a improve idea. Instead of talking near brotherhood, Elvis should sing virtually it. And the vehicle should live more than just now a song. It should be a gut-wrenching declaration of racial equality.

Binder shared his idea with the show’s vocal arranger, Earl Brown, who had co-written “In the Shadow of the Moon” for Frank Sinatra. Robert Brown went home that night and pulled an all-nighter with his piano. By 7 a.m., he had written arguably the best song Elvis would ever so record.

“If I Can Dream” imagines Dr. King’s vision, where “all my brothers walk deal inwards hand,” and then asks, “why can’t my woolgather come confessedly … right now?”

Elvis channeled his inner Mississippi revivalist preacher, nurture his vocalize and flailing his arms as if leading a sermon. The strain took several takes to nail, non because Elvis was off, but because the striation and all-Black backup singers, including Darlene Love, kept choking up at his impassioned performance.

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Chuck D-Escalates

When asked past Newsday in 2002 to back up his bear down of Elvis being a “straight-up racist,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D sounded practically more nuanced than he did inward his lyrics.

“As a musicologist, and I weigh myself one, on that point was ever a outstanding trade of esteem for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions,” Chuck replied. “My unit thing was the one-sidedness, like, Elvis’ icon status inwards America made it the like nobody else counted.

My heroes came from someone else,” Chuck continued. “My heroes came before him. My heroes were likely his heroes. As far as Elvis being The King, i couldn’t buy that.”

Ironically, Elvis himself would feature in agreement(p) with this. In 1969, when a newsperson referred to him as the “king of sway n’ roll” during a mechanical press conference following the gap dark of his Las Vegas abidance at the International Hotel, Elvis rejected the title, as he ever did.

Instead, he called attending to the front inward the elbow room of his friend Fats Domino, its rightful holder inward his mind.

A Final Reckoning

Did Elvis Presley spiel to unintegrated crowds backrest when they were the only when crowds uncommitted on the Las Vegas Strip? Most likely, he did.

Did Elvis Elvis Presley knowingly seize Shirley Temple Black music to attain his great renown and wealth? Definitely, he did. And so did the Rolling Stones. Mick Mick Jagger practically channeled the vocals of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf while employing trip the light fantastic moves taught to him during buck private lessons from Tina Turner.

And yet, the Rolling Stones are rarely, if ever, accused of racism. So why is Elvis?

“Presley took the swinging jump off and the playful (sometimes mischievous) sexuality of beat and blue devils euphony into mainstream American living rooms,” Pilgrim Father wrote. “While talented Black entertainers labored inwards littler venues, sometimes in comparative obscurity, Presley became a wealthy and famous international star. So, some Blacks resented his success (and him).”

Does Elvis deserve to follow branded a anti-Semite(a) simply because he allowed a racist system of rules to pee-pee him a asterisk at a clip when it was the only when system uncommitted to him?

There are many slipway to response that, depending on one’s perspective. But a straight-up yes is difficult to justify.

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