My Old Elvis Manuscript Retrieved
In the late 1990s, as a little light relief from hard doctoral work on Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, I started to read on Elvis Presley, taking notes as I went. I wrote my PhD thesis with the music of Elvis in my ears. I had been an Elvis fanatic in my youth, but had slowly abandoned him in the aftermath of his death as his reputation came under assault. By the mid-1980s, Elvis had sunk to rock bottom in the estimation of the pop world. He was considered ‘plastic’ and ‘phoney,’ a derivative talent who owed his success to his whiteness and to his ‘appropriation’ of black music. He didn’t write his own songs, took the credit which properly belonged to others, took the royalties too. His films were awful and his concerts increasingly a joke as he degenerated into a big, bloated caricature of his former self.
That seemed to be the dominant view of Elvis from the early 1980s onwards. I didn’t care to contest the image. Elvis was no longer around issuing new music, so I felt no loyalty to the music. The excitement of following Elvis’ latest releases up the charts was no longer. I had moved on to other artists, particularly Queen, whose show-stealing performance at Live Aid in 1985 confirmed them as the new monarchs. The King is dead, long live the Queen!
In my years as an Elvis fan I was in denial of any flaws he may have had. I heard critics pan his movies, but would watch them anyway. Some of the films, I had to admit, amounted to little more than fun’n’sun. I heard about Elvis’ health problems, particularly the claims that he was ‘fat.’ I ignored them, too, claiming that Elvis looked as good as he had ever done. And then he died. As the years passed, I found that the rumours of Elvis’ drug taking, which I had also denied, were true, if in a rather complicated way. Elvis always insisted that he only took prescription drugs. The problem is that if you are rich and powerful you can find any doctor to give you what you want in America. The revelation of the extent of Elvis’ drug addiction really soured my admiration of the man. If his movies were often inane, they at least presented a pleasantly innocuous image, largely cheerful and pleasant. The music, too, seemed to stand for something good, decent, and honest. I couldn’t square any of this with drug taking. It was probably this more than anything that turned me away from Elvis Presley. But the whole period of cooling was perhaps the inevitable result of the shattering of illusions. Elvis Presley was ‘the King,’ this great icon who seemed to transcend everything. If death cut him down to mortal size, the revelations concerning his life cut him down further.
And then I heard all the accusations that Elvis was a racist. Not only did he steal black music, it was claimed that he held racist views. It was possibly this that reignited my interest in Elvis Presley. For the reason that these accusations didn’t strike me as being remotely true. I heard claims being made around ‘Hound Dog,’ contained in articles by esteemed writers of colour like Alice Walker, which I knew to be plain wrong, simply and demonstrably false. Critics tried to set this up in terms of a dominant white male exploiting poor and vulnerable black females. But this was garbage, not least on account of the fact that Elvis Presley came from a dirt poor background and was subjected to class-based abuse and denigration himself. Elvis didn’t ‘steal’ ‘Hound Dog,’ as was being alleged. It had been a big R&B #1 hit for Willie Mae Thornton in 1953, three years before Elvis recorded it. And ‘Hound Dog’ wasn’t Willie Mae Thornton’s song at all. The narrative of a ‘black woman’s song’ being stolen by a dominant white male was not merely wrong from first to last, it was the inversion of the truth. ‘Hound Dog’ was written by two Jewish white kids, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to become regular writers for Elvis. Leiber and Stoller had to sue Willie Mae Thornton and Johnny Otis when they attempted to claim song-writing credits and copyright.
I could see that Elvis was getting a bad rap, and that few were actually speaking up for him. I started to listen to my old Elvis records, and found that they had lost none of their magic. Through the long lonely hours of reading and writing on ethics and philosophy, I learned to love the music of Elvis again. I merely had to listen again to see why I had been so fanatical all those years earlier. I also started to read on Elvis, and take notes of things I considered to be important. As time went by, I started to write these notes up as essays on Elvis Presley.
I started to take stock of Elvis’ musical achievement, his cultural importance, his iconic status. In the process I found that Elvis raised important issues of race, class, and culture that were alive today. I was also confronted some blatant and baffling paradoxes. There was the sheer brilliance of the man, which millions responded to (and which was often dimmed by the gaudy golden lights surrounding him). And there was the appalling lapses of taste, the criminal career choices, the waste of time and talent. Elvis intrigues me all the more for being so sublimely good and yet so embarrassingly awful. He embodies the best of the USA and the worst. If you want proof that Elvis was the greatest thing ever, I can find it. If you want proof that he was the worst, I can find that just as easily. Just like the USA. I like complicated cases. They challenge you, they provoke you, they thrill you and yet always leave you wanting more.
In the end, my little side-line reading and writing on Elvis produced a vast and sprawling text. No sooner had I written the notes up into book form, my faithful old Amstrad computer, with impeccable timing, started to break down, threatening to take all this material with it. It wasn’t just the computer, either, but the floppy discs, which were corrupting as soon as filled them with documents. I was in danger of losing everything. In a race against time, I printed it all up. As I printed each sheet of text, I would be sat rewinding the now impossible to obtain printing ribbons in order to get another print run out of them. Eventually, I managed to print the entire document up, one thousand plus pages of often faint and very uneven text.
The salvage operation was far from being a complete victory. My computer was out of date and beyond repair, the corrupted floppy discs too. I had rescued the text but only in the form of sometimes barely legible pages of text. The text was too faint and too broken to be scanned, leaving me with no option but to type it all up manually. I did make the occasional effort but found it so hard and so boring that it wore me down. I did think to approach fellow Elvis fans with an appeal to go half with the credits, should any of them have the nerve – and the ability – to type it up. I did think to employ someone to type the manuscript up, pondering the cost. £500? But as I looked at the pages of text, lots of it was so faint and broken as to be barely readable.
The situation seemed hopeless. So I arranged the text by chapter in plastic sheets and tucked the entire manuscript away in a big box. And left it there for two decades, the occasional attempt to copy it out notwithstanding. And then in March I got the genius idea to write a book on Françoise Hardy. I bought books by and on her. At first I took notes, but soon hit a problem with the books that were written in French – I couldn’t be exactly sure which passages were the most relevant and so needed a full translation. I had long since lost my old scanning software with the loss of my old printer sometime around 2007. I thought to investigate possibilities on the Internet, and discovered free online scanning limited to fifteen pages a day. Would it possible to scan on my printer? Yes, of course, I had done it often with old photos. Basically, all you do is take an image of the text and then the software converts it to editable text. It worked with the Françoise Hardy books, and I was all set to start writing on her. Then in May the thought occurred to me: could my old manuscript on Elvis be scanned the same way? I tried only to find the text to be so faint that the software couldn’t pick it up. Nil desperandum! I thought to edit the images to see if I could enhance the text. This turned out to be quite an operation. I would first darken the image to make the text blacker. Since this would darken and hence blur the entire image I would then heighten the contrast. I would also heighten clarity. This rendered a number of the texts capable of being read. But many remained faint. So I repeated the above process until I had something like a legible text. I did this with each image, countless hundreds of them. The whole process took me a month and more of hard work. And even now, the text I have is riddled with spelling errors and cut-outs. I would say that 70% of the text is fine, leaving me to go over the whole thing and correct the errors and fill in the blanks. I have the image number written above each chunk of text making it easy for me to check the text according to its source.
But at long last I have my Elvis manuscript back in editable electronic form. I have a renewed determination to write this up and publish it. I maintain that Elvis Presley remains a vastly underrated, and unfairly maligned, figure.
I don’t actually have a title for my prospective book on Elvis. At the moment it is called 'Elvis,' just like all of his albums.
ELVIS BOOK
SET 1
Elvis Book Introduction 1 Introduction 4,389 2 Rationale 9,157 3 Humble Beginnings 7,346 4 Rags to Riches 3,458 Introduction 7,441 Elvis in Print 7,138 Old Green eyes is back (Sinatra) THE AMERICAN DREAM 5,459
Total 44,388
1 Orpheus Descending 4,828 2 The Impossible Identity 1,040 3 Overview 3a Overview 5,890 3b ELVIS IN PRINT 3,575 3c Myth and Image 3,788 3d THE MANY ELVISES 3,209 3e POPULAR AND CRITICAL ACCLAIM 4,120 3f STATUS AS A POP SINGER 1,794 4 The Fifties Moment 4a The Fifties Moment 2,206 4b AMERICAN DREAM - DEMOCRATIC INDIVIDUALISM 8,641 5 Sunrise 5,700 6 The Sun Collection THE SUN COLLECTION I 8,038 THE SUN COLLECTION II 11,247 7 Sun Originality 19,461 8 Ideal Vision 8a IDEAL VISION 9,628 8b Sept 54 3,967 8c In the Footsteps of Hank Williams 2,054 9 Race Mixing 9a ELVIS' RACE MIXING 1,089 9b The Louisiana Hayride 2,782 9c THE SEARCH FOR ELVIS ON BEALE 13,369 9d Mystery Train 2,615 10 The Elvis Revolution 10a THE ELVIS REVOLUTION 1,398 10b Selling Out or Sold Out 9,024 11 From Roots to Studio Rock 11a FROM ROOTS TO STUDIO ROCK 3,127 11b Elvis on Beale 714 11c Elvis in Cleveland 629 11d Studio Recording 9,312 11e TOM PARKER’S ROLE 580 12 The Dorsey Shows 12a THE DORSEY SHOWS 4,779 12b BLUE SUEDE SHOES 1,281 12c VEGAS 56 2,446 12d ELVIS ON BERLE 9,370 12e TV SHOWDOWN 6,933 13 Hound Dog 13a HOUND DOG 2,228 13b Hollywood Hillbilly 6,324 14 September 1956 14a HOWS THE WORLD TREATING YOU 2,295 14b TOAST OF THE TOWN 3,767 14c ON THE ROAD 1,906 15 Elvis 56 15a ELVIS 56 5,733 15b The Age of the Vernacular Artist 2,072 16 The Ideal Vision 16a THE IDEAL VISION 4,828 16b IMPACT 5,729 17 Art and entertainment 17a ART AND ENTERTAINMENT 3,837 17b FOLK PURITY 585 17c Locating Elvis in Musical History 4,855 17d ROCK, CLASSICAL AND JAZZ – ELITISM 4,666 17e THE AGE OF THE VERNACULAR ARTIST 6,392 18 Rock Utopia 18a ROCK UTOPIA 8,067 18b MERCHANDISING ELVIS 4,120 19 Working class hero 19a WORKING CLASS HERO 7,880 19b Parker removes Presley from public view 1,557 20 Farewell to Roots 1,918
Total 247,393
1960-1969
1 In the Army 2,652 2 The Sixties - an overview 10,121 3 The Sixties 2,845 4 Nashville 1960 7,848 5 Saving Sinatra 5,550 6 On Screen 1960 3,991 7 His Hand in Mine 1960 7a His Hand in Mine 778 7b Live in 61 3,029 8 Lost in Hollywood 2,340 9 Blue Hawaii 1961 2,968 10 The Nashville sound 14,192 11 Mid-Sixties Movies 11a VIVA LAS VEGAS 2,002 11b KISSIN COUSINS 928 11c ROUSTABOUT 1,067 11d Girl Happy 5,268 12 The Lost Album 1964 6,939 13 The Eclipse 3,525 14 Comeback? 1966 7,240 15 The Final Films 3,868 16 Guitar Man 1967 16a Guitar Man 5,642 16b Parker 833 17 Elvis is Back Again 7,962 18 Elvis 68 8,202 19 Elvis 68 II 5,194 20 American Sound 1969 20a AMERICAN SOUND 3,863 20b THE AMERICAN SESSION 9,541 21 American Aftermath 4,174 22 Change of Habit 953 23 Went to see the gypsy 11,586
Total 145,101
1970-1977
1 ELVIS IN THE 70s – the Shadow of the Past 16,367 2 Elvis on stage 4,931 3 From Memphis to Vegas to Nashville 1,842 4 That's the way it is 1970 14,442 5 The Folk Turn 1971 8,467 6 Vegas 71 6,008 7 Always on My Mind 2,266 8 New York 1972 2,991 9 Aloha from Hawaii 1973 4,621 10 The Elvis Catalogue 1,111 11 Fool 1972 1,970 12 Memphis Soul – Stax 197312,115 13 career 2,336 14 Lost Highway 14a Lost Highway 3746 14b A Democratic God? 2061 15 Today 1975 15a Today 4174 15b Has Anyone Here Seen Hank? 6466 16 Graceland 1976 10188 17 Comeback Special II 1977 TV Special 7,224 18 The Final Curtain 7,025 19 Why Elvis Matters 5400 20 After Death 8,623 21 Conclusion 25,011
Total 159,385
Folder 2 1 Influences 1a INFLUENCES 3,198 1b 930 2 To the future - happiness & heartaches 5,474 3 That's All Right 9,524 4 Live – first appearances 1,841 5 Sun Originality 3,599 6 Influences 6a INFLUENCES 774 6b ELVIS AND GOSPEL 3,887 6c ELVIS AND COUNTRY 822 6d THE WHITE APPROPRATION AND EXPLOITATION OF BLACK MUSIC? 11,589 6e IDEAL VISION 5,323 7 Good Rockin tonight 2,922 8 In the footsteps of Hank 1,743 9 Race mixing 10 The Louisiana Hayride 2,273 11 The Search for Elvis on Beale 2,692 12 Milkcow Blues Boogie 800 13 Elvis on Tour 7,792 14 Let's Play House Mystery Train 6,602 15 Setting Sun 3,333 16 The Elvis Revolution 16a THE ELVIS REVOLUTION 1,125 16b CLEVELAND 416 17 Selling out or sold out 6,578 18 RCA From Roots to Studio Rock 2,355 19 The 56 Sessions 972 20 FAREWELL TO ROOTS 474
Total 87,038
Folder 3
1 Who Am I? 2,753 1 the many elvises 1,618 1 Moondog Elvis' Timing 5,617 2 American Dream – Democratic Individualism 2,762 3 Status as a Pop singer 4,321 4 The Fifties Moment 4,675 5 Musical and Cultural Experience 1,920 6 Mississippi 1,008 7 Religious & Musical Roots 7,583 8 Memphis 7,756 9 Sun Collection 4,154 10 All Shook Up 10a All Snook Up 1,568 10b Loving You 5,252 10c On TOUR 3,917 10d JAILHOUSE ROCK 6,197 11 Elvis & Black Music 8,306 12 58 Draft King Creole Golden Years 12a The Draft 1,286 12b King Creole 5,325 12c GOLDEN YEARS 1,612 The Folk Turn
Total 77,630
Grand Total 760,988