h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anyone know the answer to this. If so any proof.

I very much doubt it, Elvis was, by the standards of the day, a veritable melting pot of ethnic groups. I've forgotten exactly what, but I'm sure there was some native american and Mexican in him, dammit, i wish I'd kept my A-Level English notes now.

Why is it that i have heard a lot of people and also reports calling him a racist. Is there some underlying reason.

No idea. All i know is what I just typed, which was information I got from a biography about him I did stylistic analysis of at A-Level English Language. I suppose he could have been racist towards the ethnic groups he wasn'tn part of, or maybe self-loathing of those he was, it just didn't strike me as extremely likely.

But hell, what do i know?

Being that all his influence *came* from other ethnicities, I really doubt that he was racist.

Oh, Snoop, don't suppose any of the reports you read are online are they? Could be worth a read.

There's some debunkings of 'Elvis was a racist' stories on www.snopes.com

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/presley.htm is interersting.

Elvis was born and raised in Mississippi - the deep south, an intensely rascist place until relatively recently. If some of that rubbed off on him it's only to be expected. If he rejected it and treated everyone with the same respect and courtesy then more power to his elbow

only got access to the bbc website in work. Anyone be able to tell me what the snopes website says.

I think I saw a programme some time ago that said Elvis was a white man with a black voice, and this made him more acceptable to some people who wouldn't buy songs by black artists.

Well, I don't want to quote enough tp infringe copyright, but here's some bits:

"Nearly as great as our need to elevate certain common folk to the status of heroes is the need of others to tear them down -- to show us that our heroes are possessed grievous flaws that make them unworthy of the praise and attention we lavish on them ... A poor white Southerner who had achieved unprecedented fame and success by co-opting the black man's music, surely Elvis must have been a racist at heart.

So it was believed at the height of Presley's popularity in early 1957, when the rumor began circulating that he had dismissively put down blacks by stating that "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." Never mind the rich rhythm and blues and gospel music heritage of Blacks that Elvis had so assiduously mined in becoming the most popular entertainer the world had ever seen; the only use he had for them was as servants and consumers of his products ... This alleged utterance of Elvis Presley's was so completely at odds with his true personality and beliefs that anyone who knew him found it hard to believe the rumor could be taken seriously."

And there's lots of other stuff about context, personality and quotes from friends and family

Here you go Snoop.

snopes.com says
Claim: Elvis Presley once said "The only thing a n****r can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes."
Status: False.

Origins: Nearly as great as our need to elevate certain common folk to the status of heroes is the need of others to tear them down -- to show us that our heroes are possessed grievous flaws that make them unworthy of the praise and attention we lavish on them.

Such was the case with the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. Although his public persona was that of the wild, rebellious, gyrating rock-n-roller, Elvis was actually a shy, humble, religious, polite, respectful young man. Surely this private Elvis was too good to be true. A poor white Southerner who had achieved unprecedented fame and success by co-opting the black man's music, surely Elvis must have been a racist at heart.

So it was believed at the height of Presley's popularity in early 1957, when the rumor began circulating that he had dismissively put down blacks by stating that "The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." Never mind the rich rhythm and blues and gospel music heritage of Blacks that Elvis had so assiduously mined in becoming the most popular entertainer the world had ever seen; the only use he had for them was as servants and consumers of his products.

This alleged utterance of Elvis Presley's was so completely at odds with his true personality and beliefs that anyone who knew him found it hard to believe the rumor could be taken seriously. As Elvis' father Vernon remarked shortly before his death, "There were times when we had nothing to eat but bread and water, but we always had compassion for people. Poor we were, I'll never deny that. But trash we weren't . . . We never had any prejudice. We never put anybody down. Neither did Elvis." Sam Phillips, the producer and head of Sun records who gave Elvis his start, noted that "The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to be one of the biggest things that happened to us . . ." Plenty of black musicians whom Elvis had encountered during his rise to fame testified to the respect and courtesy Elvis had always shown towards them.

But millions of people knew only the public Presley image and very few knew Elvis the man, so the rumor grew and spread throughout early 1957. It mattered not that the story came cloaked in impossible details, such as Elvis' supposedly making the statement in Boston (a city he had never visited) or on Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person TV program (on which Elvis had never appeared). Finally, Jet magazine, finding that "tracing the rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth," dispatched reporter Louie Robinson in search of the truth. Robinson went straight to the source, visiting Presley on the set of Jailhouse Rock where the singer told him, "I never said anything like that, and people who know me know I wouldn't have said it." Indeed, Robinson found, people (both black and white) who did know Presley told him the very same thing. "To Elvis," Robinson concluded in his August 1957 article, "people are people, regardless of race, color or creed."

Last updated: 14 February 1999

Seamus

top man seamus, ill read it now, discuss in a minute

Is this the real Elvis or is it propaganda from Elvis fans trying to clear his name, I personally can't make up my mind.

Do you really think Elvis could have been racist? Do you know anything *ABOUT* Elvis?

Cybil Shepherd asked Elvis to give her oral sex.
He replied that "white boys don't do that".
She taught him to do it.

He also believed that "Mommas don't have sex" which is what ended his marriage to Pricilla. After Lisa Marie's birth, he never went near his wife sexually again.

Elvis wasn't racist, he was deeply respectful.

Public Enemy lyrics from "Fight the power" say:

"Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant s**t to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother f**k him and John Wayne
...
Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps..."



Apart from whether Elvis treated people differently based on race, there's the issue of whether he exploited black people by ripping off their music. There used to be a lot of people angry about how Elvis and other performers like Led Zepplin essentially did their own versions of old blues songs and never passed royalties to the original songwriters. I used to feel that way too, like Elvis could never have gotten anywhere without ripping off dozens of other artists. However, he did have a style of his own, blending country elements with blues to make it something different.

Then when you dig down to another layer, listen to a lot of old blues and read about it, you'll notice that songs were passed around and copied. There might have been fights or arguments over people stealing each other's music, but who could afford to sue others for infringing on their copyrights? If these guys got recorded at all, their songwriting credits were often usurped by white record producers. Plus it's hard to tell where "traditional" songs (public domain, too old for copyright) end and where copyright wars ought to begin. Most of the biggest blues artists have excerpts or full songs that are taken from other people they heard. So accusing Elvis of plagiarising Black music would be rather ignorant of how often Black musicians copied each other.

Did Elvis benefit from racism that was prevalent in his day? Sure. There were many people who wouldn't listen to Big Mama Thornton sing Hound Dog, but they'd listen to Elvis sing it. Even after white people started listening to black music, you had cases like Pat Boone's "Tutti-Frutti" outselling Little Richard's original version of the same song. Maybe they liked Boone's subdued style, but I'm sure there were some people back then who simply would not bring themselves to buy any music performed by a black man.

I don't know whether we can really blame Elvis or Pat Boone for taking advantage of that.

>> ..don't know whether we can really blame Elvis or Pat Boone for taking advantage of that. <<

No we can't. In fact the white performers who performed black music were the bridge toward integration. In the mid-fifties America was completely segregated along racial lines. They were never to be crossed, in restaurants, drinking fountains, buses, hotels, ..everywhere.

But when Little Richard, his cousin Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis and yes even the fundamentalist right wing goody two shoes Pat Boone perfomed 'white' version of 'race' music (rock and roll) it became obvious that on record or radio you couldn't really tell what race the performer might be. White stations, often unknowingly, began playing black artists.

The teenage audience didn't care and when they went to rock and roll touring concerts and saw that many of their favourite chart toppers were black they didn't care. It was the music that bridged the gap and opened the first possibilities for a new generation to begin the integration (anti-segregation) marches of the 60s.

Jeryy Lee, Litte Richard and Elvis learned their art in black joints and chicken shacks. They had been sneaking out of their homes since the tender age of 12 to visit balck communities, hang out with black musicians and learn the rythms, the licks and the jive.

Compare for example Elvis' famous and outrageous hip gyrations on Ed Sullivan in 1956 and 57 with Muddy Waters' performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1960. Muddy was doing pelvic thrusts that would make Michael Jackson blush to show the hip white audience of Rhode Island what black folk music (Blues, R&B, Rock and Roll) really looked like. And it had many of the same overtly sexual moves that Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis were shocking white America with.

The white Christian establishment was appalled at the sexuality implicit in the moves of rock and roll and objected to that perhaps more than the threat of integration. The rumours about Elvis (1957) were part of a even larger smear campaign to discredit him on both sides of the racial lines that segregated America. They tried to tell white folkks he was 'n****** lover', they told black folks he was a racist, they told everyone he was an agent of the devil and his records should be burned.

When it became obvious that teenagers would not stop listening to rock and roll and didn't care if the performers were black or white, the religious fundamentalists spent a lot of tiume and money to promote good clean christian white boys who toned down the sexuality.

Pat Boone (who is/was an ordained minister) and a long conga-line of one and two hit wonders paraded before the cameras on American Bandstand, doing watered down white versions of all the huge Rhythm and Blues hits that everybody was already hearing on the black stations performed by balck musicians. Then Dick Clark finally featured a black group on his national tv show.

It is also rumoured that Dick and his producers didn't realise the group was black until they showed up for the live show. But the show went on! Many stations dropped Dick's show after that, and it thereafter became a cause for him too. He began to integrate his audience of dancers and feature more black performers. He showed what he had learned, that it's the music that matters and since you can't tell just from listening, how could anything else matter.

So anyway, if Elvis was a racist then I'm a girl.

jwf

You're right, john. If Elvis had been exploiting blacks so badly, then why were some racist whites attacking him for even singing black music in the first place? There's also this nagging feeling that if one followed this accusation to its logical conclusion, that whites shouldn't "rip-off" black music, then it boils down to segregation of music. At least Elvis popularized black music, and made people feel safe sampling it.

...or maybe you ARE a girl!