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by Sha Frasier.the Continuing Education Project.New York.

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Bertrand — Race, Rock, and Elvis

Cited in 2 notes
Changelog, The color line in pop

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Author: Michael T. Bertrand
Title: Race, Rock, and Elvis
Year: 2000
Publisher: University of Illinois Press (Music in American Life)
Type: Academic book

Race, Rock, and Elvis is a book by the historian Michael T. Bertrand, of Tennessee State University, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2000. It asks how postwar popular culture bore on the racial attitudes of white Southerners. Drawing on period newspapers and magazines, the words of participants and eyewitnesses and Billboard’s rhythm and blues charts, it argues that, though the period’s commercial music and culture were limited as a force for lasting racial change, rock ‘n’ roll opened new lines of interaction and communication between Black and white Southerners. Bertrand answers Eric Lott, whom he reads as placing Elvis Presley with the Beats and Norman Mailer’s “White Negro,” the hipster of Mailer’s 1957 essay, as heirs of what Lott calls “antebellum racial cross-dressing”; Bertrand calls that paradigm limited. He calls a question the scholar Kobena Mercer asked, what it was about whiteness that made such figures “want to be black,” important but in need of qualification, in part because it ignores differences of class, region and experience among white people. He traces to the magazine Sepia, in April 1957, the unsourced rumor that Presley had said the only thing Black people could do for him was shine his shoes and buy his records. Alice Walker’s story “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” in which a young white singer seeks songs from an older blues singer, “does not pretend to be history or biography,” Bertrand writes, but for many its elements “have passed into fact.” He sets it against the history of “Hound Dog” and Big Mama Thornton’s and Presley’s recordings of it, and writes that no evidence exists of a relationship between Thornton and Presley and that the two recordings were “literally different songs.” In his conclusion he asks whether rock ‘n’ roll helped teach a generation to overcome prejudice, and answers “maybe.” Brian Ward, in a review the publisher quotes, judged it the most cogent and best-evidenced case yet that the music of Presley and his rockabilly cousins threatened social conventions, particularly of race, class and gender. Craig Morrison and Maurice Bottomley praised it with reservations: Morrison wrote that it mentions fewer than a dozen songs, and Bottomley that the certainty of Presley’s non-imitativeness and antiracism is “less secure than Bertrand’s case suggests.”

Bertrand, a historian at Tennessee State University, published the book in the University of Illinois Press’s Music in American Life series.1 It won the Shelby County Historical Commission’s Annual Book and Essay Award in 2001, and a paperback followed in 2004.2

The book, in Bertrand’s description, is an investigation of “how popular culture affected the racial attitudes of white southerners who lived during a period of unprecedented possibilities,” neither a history of early rock ‘n’ roll nor a biography of Presley, though it contains elements of each.3 The incentives behind postwar popular music, he writes, “involved profit and entertainment rather than social protest or upheaval.” The music’s associated rituals and vehicles of communication, he continues, “did challenge the region’s customs and notions about racial relationships.” As forces for “substantive and lasting change in the racial realm,” the period’s commercial music and culture “were limited.” The emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, in his account, did “disrupt routine by opening new and important lines of interaction and communication.” Black and white Southerners, he writes, “had occupied the same land for centuries yet hardly knew each other.”4 His sources include period newspapers and magazines and the words of participants and eyewitnesses,5 and he reads Billboard’s rhythm and blues retail charts as showing “that youth gradually replaced race and class as the chief quality of performers who became popular.”6 In the fourth chapter he writes that Presley, who broke the South’s racial customs, was not, as Joel Williamson had described earlier violators, “flung out of his society”: “On the contrary, he became extremely popular in his native region.”7

In his first chapter Bertrand answers the scholars who read Presley as a white man performing blackness. He quotes a passage of Jack Kerouac’s that ends “not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night,” and reads its sentiment as a glimpse of how lower-middle-class white intellectuals who had disavowed their culture’s materialism and conformity could project their aspirations onto African Americans. He then asks whether “the same longing necessarily motivate[d] southern working-class whites such as Presley.” For Lott, he writes, “there was no discernible difference between the Beats, Elvis Presley, and Mailer’s White Negro,” the hipster of Mailer’s 1957 essay; together, in Bertrand’s words, they represented “the indisputable ‘genealogical legacy’ of ‘antebellum racial cross-dressing.‘”8 Bertrand calls this “a limited paradigm,” and he quotes, without naming him, a question by the scholar Kobena Mercer, which he gives as “What is it about their whiteness that made them want to be black?” Bertrand calls it an important question that demands qualification. The question, he argues, makes no reference to “the class, regional, and experiential diversity of the various appropriators,” so that any answer “would be superficial at best,” and “tacitly assumes that ‘whiteness’ is synonymous with homogeneity.” Presley and Pat Boone, he writes, both white, Southern and about the same age, “differed immensely in their approach to rhythm and blues,” and Boone, an English major at Columbia, said of recording rock ‘n’ roll, “I was afraid my Shakespeare professor might find out.”9 Bertrand’s second objection is that the question seems to overlook the possibility that many appropriators were trying to forsake “not their whiteness but rather a bourgeois or middle-class ethic that they considered repressive.”9

Alice Walker’s 1981 story “Nineteen Fifty-Five” opens the seventh chapter, “The King of Rock as Hillbilly Cat: Myth and Southern History Revisited.” In the story a young white singer, Traynor, seeks out an older blues singer, Gracie Mae Still, for songs, and he and his manager, after some haggling, buy her signature tune. “‘Nineteen Fifty-five’ is a work of fiction,” Bertrand writes, “but the less than subtle resemblance of Traynor to Elvis Presley is unmistakable.” Gracie Mae Still, he writes, is apparently based on Big Mama Thornton, and the nameless song is “undoubtedly” her “Hound Dog” (1953), which preceded Presley’s (1956). No evidence exists, Bertrand writes, of a relationship between Thornton and Presley, and a careful comparison of the two versions “clearly indicates that they were literally different songs.” Thornton, he writes, created much of the controversy herself when she “emphatically claimed to have written ‘Hound Dog’ and that it was stolen from her.” Questioned further, she said that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had composed it: “They gave me the words, but I changed it around and did it my way.” Ironically, Bertrand writes, her explanation “ingenuously stresses artist interpretation as the sole yardstick with which to measure authenticity.” Walker’s story, he writes, “does not pretend to be history or biography,” but for many its elements “have passed into fact.”10 Antonio Gramsci, Bertrand writes, held that a music’s “historical origin” need not be what preoccupies scholars, and that they should ask why certain groups embraced a cultural form not of their own creation, one that, in a phrase Bertrand quotes, “conceives the world and life in contrast with official society.” Bertrand applies Gramsci’s notion that people adopt songs because “they conform to their [own] way of thinking and feeling” to Presley’s early life and career, and writes that it makes it possible to see how rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll became “a shared vehicle of expression for various groups the mainstream had ignored, maligned, or rejected.”11

In August 1957 Jet wrote that tracing the rumor that Presley had said the only thing Black people could do for him was buy his records and shine his shoes “was like running a gopher to earth.”12 Its origins, Bertrand writes, “were not as difficult to locate as Jet claimed.” The rumor first appeared in print in April 1957 in “How Negroes Feel about Elvis,” a story in Sepia that printed it without a source: “The only thing Negroes can do for me is shine my shoes and buy my records.” Bertrand describes Sepia, based in Fort Worth, as white-owned. “Presented under anonymous and illusive conditions,” Bertrand writes, “the assertion lacked corroboration; it also seemed a handy hammer for those with an ax to grind.”13

In his conclusion Bertrand restates the book’s subject: “In the end, this undertaking was not about Elvis Presley but about a generation that came of age during a pivotal period in the South’s history.”14 Bertrand asks whether “this musical and social process” altered white Southerners’ perceptions of Black people, whether the new context made it possible for white youths “to look at blacks as equal,” and whether “the rock ‘n’ roll experience” helped teach a generation to overcome prejudice. “The answer to those questions is maybe,” he writes. He sets beside it the historian David Roediger’s reflection on loving popular music while growing up in the St. Louis area, and writes that the rituals of rock ‘n’ roll did not eliminate racism but, in Roediger’s words, “did open the possibility of antiracism.”15 Bertrand then asks whether rock ‘n’ roll was “subterranean resistance to dominant racial ideology” or whether historians have merely romanticized the working-class culture that produced it. The questions he has raised are unsettling, he writes, because they suggest that culture is “inherently separate from power” and imply that true social change is political change. Citing two historians for whom history, when it transcends chronicle, romance and ideology, is “primarily the story of who rides whom and how,” he writes that this analysis “forces one to assess the extent to which popular culture is political,” and he points to a study of the English punk subculture as a model.16

Craig Morrison and Maurice Bottomley praised the book with reservations,5, 17 and Brian Ward, in a line from his Journal of American History review that the publisher quotes, wrote that Bertrand had managed to argue “more cogently and with more evidential authority than any previous commentator” that the music Presley and his rockabilly cousins made in the South in the 1950s seriously threatened social conventions, national and regional, particularly those of race, class and gender.18 Morrison, in the Journal of American Folklore in 2004, wrote that “less than a dozen songs are mentioned in the text,” but that Bertrand goes “a long way toward explaining” why so much rock and roll and most of its great artists come from the South.5 Bottomley, in a review printed on the fan site Elvis Australia, found Bertrand’s case for the importance of class over race “very convincing.” He thought it open to doubt, though, whether the changes in perception and consciousness “were as great as the book suggests.” He wrote that the certainty of Presley’s non-imitativeness and antiracism is “less secure than Bertrand’s case suggests,” but that on the whole Bertrand gives “enough evidence to give most advocates of reductive readings pause to think.” Presley’s success, he suggested, may have let white listeners “enjoy the music without having to have a black figure as a hero.”17

Key contributions

  • An account of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll as having opened new lines of interaction and communication between Black and white Southerners, though the period’s commercial music and culture were limited as a force for lasting racial change.
  • A critique of Eric Lott’s reading of Presley as heir to antebellum racial cross-dressing, which Bertrand calls a limited paradigm, and of a question Kobena Mercer asked, which he calls important but in need of qualification, in part because it ignores differences of class, region and experience among white people.
  • The tracing of the shoe-shine remark attributed to Presley to an unsourced line in Sepia in 1957.
  • A test of the story many took from Alice Walker’s “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” in which a young white singer buys an older blues singer’s signature song, against the history of “Hound Dog” and Big Mama Thornton’s and Elvis Presley’s recordings of it: it finds no evidence of a relationship between the two singers, and it finds the two recordings “literally different songs.”
  • A hedged conclusion: whether the music helped teach a generation to overcome prejudice is “maybe.”

See also

Footnotes

  1. University of Illinois Press’s page for the paperback, its series and “About the Author” (accessed October 26, 2026). ↩

  2. The same page, its details and “Awards” (accessed October 26, 2026); the first edition’s date per Craig Morrison’s review (see note 5), which gives “University of Illinois Press, 2000.” ↩

  3. Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (University of Illinois Press, 2000), Introduction, read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy, a later paperback printing, ISBN 978-0-252-07270-3 (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  4. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 2, pp. 54–55, read through Open Library’s search inside, the pages per Craig Morrison’s review (see note 5); the “profit and entertainment” sentence, which the scan garbles, as Morrison quotes it from p. 54; in the “did challenge” sentence the word or words before “music’s” are illegible in the scan; verbatim. ↩

  5. Craig Morrison, review of Race, Rock, and Elvis, Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 463 (2004): 117, read in the Wayback Machine’s copy of the Project MUSE page (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 3, p. 83, read through Open Library’s search inside; the page per Craig Morrison’s review (see note 5); verbatim. ↩

  7. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 4, p. 115, read through Open Library’s search inside; the passage gives only the surname, and the book’s index names him as Joel Williamson; verbatim. ↩

  8. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 1, pp. 29–30, read through Open Library’s search inside; the date and subject of Mailer’s essay per Wikipedia’s article on “The White Negro” (accessed October 26, 2026); the inner phrases are Lott’s, from “White Like Me,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke University Press, 1993), p. 482 (Bertrand’s note cites p. 483), read the same way in the Internet Archive’s copy; verbatim. ↩

  9. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 1, p. 30 (the second objection may run onto p. 31), read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. Bertrand’s note cites Mercer’s “1968” essay, p. 432, with “emphasis in the original”; the essay is Kobena Mercer, “‘1968’: Periodizing Postmodern Politics and Identity,” in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992) (Bertrand’s Works Cited drops “Postmodern”), where, read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy, the question reads “What is it about whiteness that made them want to be black?”, without “their.” Bertrand prints the question with Mercer’s emphasis, which is not reproduced here. ↩ ↩2

  10. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 7, pp. 189–91, read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. The years of the two records per the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry essay on Thornton’s “Hound Dog” and Apple Music’s listing of Presley’s recording (on Elvis 30 #1 Hits (Expanded Edition)), which dates it to July 1956 (both accessed October 26, 2026). ↩

  11. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 7, p. 195, read through Open Library’s search inside; the words “they conform to their [own] way of thinking and feeling” are themselves a quotation in the book, with the brackets as printed, and his note naming their source was not read; verbatim. ↩

  12. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 7, p. 220 or 221 (page not confirmed; the book’s index gives “Robinson, Louie, 220”), quoting Jet, whose article the book dates to August 1957 (p. 219); the book’s Works Cited gives Louie Robinson, “The Truth about That Elvis Presley Rumour,” Jet, August 1, 1957, pp. 58–61, and its notes very probably cite that article’s p. 58 here (note 180; the note marker itself is illegible in the scan), read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. ↩

  13. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, chapter 7, p. 221 or earlier (page not confirmed; the notes page after the book’s note 181 is headed “Notes to pages 221–28”), read through Open Library’s search inside; the book’s note 181 cites “How Negroes Feel about Elvis,” 19, given in full in its note 166 as Sepia, April 1957; verbatim. ↩

  14. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, Conclusion, p. 231 (the page per a student précis by Preston M. Wells III for History 579 at California State University, Northridge, accessed October 27, 2026), read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. ↩

  15. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, Conclusion, p. 235, read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. Roediger’s own sentence, in The Wages of Whiteness (Verso, 1991), “On Autobiography and Theory,” is about his tastes in music (“These tastes did not supplant racism”), read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (accessed October 27, 2026). ↩

  16. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis, Conclusion, pp. 237–38, read through Open Library’s search inside; verbatim. ↩

  17. Maurice Bottomley, review of Race, Rock, and Elvis, printed by Elvis Australia (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  18. Brian Ward, Journal of American History 88, no. 4 (2002), as quoted on the University of Illinois Press’s page; the journal’s details per Crossref’s metadata for the review (both accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

Published October 27, 2026