Presley Elvis - Elvis Presley: a southern life

People respond to Elvis Presley with some pretty powerful emotions. People love him for some things, laugh at him for others, feel almost desperately sad about his decline and wasted potential, and sometimes get angry at him or people close to him.

In the 1950s the main emotions seem to have been lust and also fear. From 1954 to 1958, Elvis Presleys music in sound, look, and movement so appealed to young women that by his early twenties he became the subject of extraordinary female sexual fascination. They (not Sam Phillips or Tom Parker or even Presley himself) made Elvis Presley a powerful cultural figure, and for four years his appearances in person and on television and, less importantly, his recordings made him the subject of unprecedented public lust as a figure of sexual desire for people who, by the standards of their day, were not supposed to express or even possess such sexual desires.

Elvis Presley responded to these fascinations by performing onstage for only four years, and then by taking advantage of numerous opportunities to make money through the movies and to pursue sexual experiences with lots of young women. He did virtually nothing creative from 1958 to 1968, the year of his comeback television special, and only rarely and perhaps accidentally made music of much consequence. His fans stayed with him, though he feared he was not gaining many new fans, and in the last decade of his life he performed to loving but aging crowds in Las Vegas and in second-tier settings in smaller cities. He and his managers, bodyguards, and other supporters made choices that kept him in an unappealing, aesthetically unimaginative state in which he made uninspiring movies and (with a few exceptions) uninspiring music that relied on the fact that he was already a sex symbol. He lived an unhappy adulthood, fearful of bad publicity, overweight, oversexed, and overprotected, and took far more pills than human beings should take. The pills killed him.

That is a quick and far from complete summary of Joel Williamsons biography of Elvis Presley. Any book on a well-studied individual is bound to say things most readers already know or address topics that will be familiar. Most books on Presley have at least mentioned his rising from Southern poverty and obscurity, confounding categories about musical genre, race, and class, disturbing television censors and the parents of young women with his music and movement, and displaying unique musical creativity and maybe losing it. Scholars have analyzed Presley and his relationships with music Williamsons book draws from all of those approaches, but above all it is a book about Presley and sexual desirethe desire young women had for Presley, his desires for them, how both affected his life as an artist, and how all of those became intertwined with efforts to keep desire alive into Presleys middle age and beyond his death. The book seriously studies things that now seem clichs or easy jokessquealing young women chasing performers into their dressing rooms, the phrase Elvis has left the building, wardrobe changes and handing out scarves, passing encounters with actresses, pageant winners, and other fans, and entourage members who attracted women by asking if theyd like to meet Elvis. The important female figures in Presleys life, Gladys Presley, Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Linda Thompson, Ginger Alden, and Lisa Marie Presley, all are crucial to the story. As Williamson argues, Presley loved being loved, and that craving did not always lead in creative or happy directions.

Historians of Elvis Presley see the mid-1950s as a time of impressive and creative musical experimentation as the young man and his friends made new music out of a fascinating mixture of other available, mostly Southern, forms of music. Williamson emphasizes that this period of Presleys life was dominated by young women who responded to his music. The music was in fact sometimes creative, but soon it hardly mattered, since in public appearances no one could hear it. What the author of Crucible of Race and William Faulkner and other important works brings to the topic is a lifetime of provocative scholarship on the relationships between race and sexuality in southern history.

In response both to the frenzy of young women fans and to his own performance style onstage, Presley, even more than most other popular musicians, had to defend himself against charges that he posed a threat to good morals. He found those charges amazing and troubling, but he took advantage of female sexual desire for him from 1954 to his death, had physical relationships with countless young women, and lived in fear that the nature of his lifestyle would undermine his public support. Presley wanted to walk a line between being the object of desire and being a decent, religious, and patriotic American, but he frequently failed. Williamson makes a great deal of Presleys fears that a book by some of the bodyguards he had fired would reveal him as lecherous and indulgent.

Williamson argues that the contours of Presleys life were set by 1958, when he was twenty-three years old. Presley got stuck as the star in a grand drama about desire, and he enjoyed its benefits too much to break away from its limitations. One turning point came in 1968, when Presley surprised many people with a television special that was far more creative in music, dance, and look than most expected from a standard Christmas musical television special. Making what many saw as a comeback, Presley tried some things that were new, accepted some clothing choices that led to the style that defined him in his final decade, and, as Williamson emphasizes, played some older music surrounded by female fans who were no longer girls but grown women. The show was a high point because it once again pointed to Presley as a creative figure and object of desire. After that, Presley played primarily to older, loving fans in live performances, and his final years were generally sad and painful for the performer, his family and friends, and his fans. In retrospect, most of Presleys shows in the 1970s represented a long swan song.