The Jazz Press on the Rise of Elvis Presley
Jazz—writers, critics, aficionados, many musicians—was in a self-conscious period in the early 1950s. With a transition from swing bands and changing audience tastes, jazz journalism began to survey the broader musical and cultural scene. But the press began to note a growing figure on the scene: Elvis Presley. Even after his hit “Heartbreak Hotel” sold more than a million records, the jazz press barely noted it. But with his career expanding into Hollywood, he and his music begins to be noticed, as here in Down Beat.
Mary English. “Presley invades H’wood with impact of a Brando” Down Beat, Vol. 23 no. 11 (30 May 1956): 39
While Down Beat continued to keep Elvis’s music at arms length, its spinoff publication Record Whirl covered Elvis in greater depth and provided a five star review to “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”. The jazz world began to reckon with rock ‘n’ roll in different ways.
“Recommended from the turntable” Record Whirl, Vol. 2, no. 3 (July 1956): Page 29
The R&B press, which aimed at a more African-American readership, also took note of Elvis: “Rock ‘n’ Roll, country-style”. The connections between Carl Perkins, son of a southern sharecropper; Elvis; and musical traditions of southern gospel and culture are of note to readers of Rhythm and Blues.
“Hip hillbillies hot on the wail trail: Elvis Presley & Carl Perkins” Rhythm and Blues, Vol. 1, no. 24 (July 1956): Page 13
Meanwhile, Down Beat, wrestling with Elvis and the new “fad” of rock ‘n’ roll, confronts the issue squarely: “It can be said, however, that 50,000,000 Americans have shallow and undeveloped tastes.” Down Beat’s writers and editors tried to dismiss rock ‘n’ roll in haughty terms or, as Barry Ulanov would do a year later, also in Down Beat, as a critique of mass culture in terms reminiscent of Frankfurt School philosophy.
Les Brown. “Elvis Presley. Can 50 million Americans be wrong?” Down Beat, Vol. 23, no. 19 (19 September 1956): Page 41
The short-lived Jazz World thought the debate sufficiently salient to launch a new magazine: it put the debate on the cover of its first issue: “Music vs. Elvis Presley.” Was Elvis like Frank Sinatra, a genuine talent? Or like Liberace, an “odd talent”? According to the editor, Chester Whitehorn, Elvis would be a short-lived phenomenon, because “he’s not music” – rock ‘n’ roll is merely “more bad toilet training.”
C.W.. “Fair comment: Music vs. Elvis Presley” Jazz World, Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1957): Page 27, 26
For Tynan, a regular Down Beat writer of the era, the movie Jailhouse Rock may have been the “straw that broke Elvis’s back”. Certainly, a hopeful projection can be found in those words … but Elvis, and rock ‘n’ roll, were going to stick around, and the jazz press would increasingly come around to the new genre in the 1960s.
John Tynan. "Farewell, Elvis?" Down Beat, Vol. 25, no. 1 (9 January 1958): Page 21