The Identity of Elvis
Tracing Elvis’ ethnicity is like platting plat fog. You know something is there, but you can't quite get your hands on it to make the connections.
In the constant politicking and controversializing over Elvis Presley’ music roots and debts, the nature of Elvis’ ethnicity is seldom, if ever, addressed. In the simple racist narrative, Elvis is ‘white,’ and therefore ‘bad,’ a plain appropriator of black music and culture from the outside. That is a crude view, perfectly tailored to the political bear-pit. Nothing is ever so simple in real life. In the first instance, Elvis was born right in the middle of the music and culture he was supposed to have appropriated, a place where the boundaries were porous. The Presleys were dirt poor, lived close by black neighbourhoods in Shakerag, picked cotton. You cannot steal something that is in your own background. It was all around Elvis. Critics talk as if Elvis was born on the other side of the world and helped himself from the outside. He was on the inside.
Here, I am more interested in the question of Elvis’ ethnicity. Elvis’ identification as ‘white’ may make for facile controversy in a divisive political narrative, but may conceal some interesting ancestry on Elvis’ part. The possibility that Elvis had Native American heritage is not widely known. It has been claimed for some time now that Elvis had Cherokee blood. I first came across the claim in Elaine Dundy’s book, Elvis and Gladys, (2004, originally 1985, 13-14, 17). Whilst I found the claims to be plausible, the mere fact that a story seems to be true, isn’t remotely conclusive evidence of its truth. There’s evidence enough for the claim to be made and entertained, but not enough for it to be proven. In the absence of hard evidence, the claim can only be established by contacting living blood relatives for tests. In the absence of that, it is a judgement call.
I see claims of truth in this post, a plausible story, but not actual evidence. Elvis's ethnicity is said to include English, Scottish, along with some German and French, remote Dutch and Danish and ‘possibly other.’
It is that ‘possibly other’ that interests me. That ‘other’ could include Cherokee, but may well go wider.
To take the Cherokee interpretation first. It is stated in several places that Elvis has Native American ancestry through his mother. Elvis’ maternal great-great-great grandmother was a “full-blooded Cherokee” woman by the name of Morning Dove White, who married a William Mansell, a man of French-Norman ancestry. As a teenager, Mansell fought alongside future president Andrew Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814.
Mansell and Morning White Dove had three children who survived to adulthood, including Elvis’ great-great-grandfather, John Mansell. John Mansell was the father of a son named White, who married a Jewish woman named Martha Tackett, who had a daughter Doll Mansell, the mother of Gladys Presley. And in no time, we come to Elvis himselvis. Gladys has a Star of David on her gravestone.
So here it is:
Morning Dove White – ‘full blooded cherokee’
John Mansell – French Norman
White Mansell + Martha Tackett - Jewish ancestry
Doll Mansell
Gladys
Elvis
Others question the claim that Morning Dove was a Cherokee. Genealogy researcher Julian Riley emphasises the importance that Morning Dove would have had when it came to ensuring survival on the frontier: “In 1818, Alabama is still a wild country, there’s no hospitals, service stations and road maps. If you had a local Indian living with you, it could be a tremendous help, just telling you where things are located, where are the creeks, the rivers, where are the salt deposits, where do you get the right type of vegetation for whatever you might be needing it for. How do you do certain things? She would know the native way of doing things, plus she would know how to speak the language, so she could be an interpreter.”
But was Morning Dove a Cherokee? But the closer that Riley examined the Morning Dove claim, the more it seemed anomalous. For starters, the name ‘Morning Dove’ is an English name, not a Cherokee name. ‘Morning’ was Mansell’s mother’s first name, and ‘White’ was the name of nearby neighbors. That in itself doesn’t mean that she wasn’t a Cherokee. It may be that Mansell either renamed her or that she chose an anglicized name. But Riley has other reasons to doubt that she was a Cherokee: “There were no Cherokees in south Alabama,” and it is “very unlikely” that William Mansell would have ridden 900 miles [1450 kilometers] to North Carolina to get a Cherokee Indian woman when native Indian women were all around him in south Alabama. Riley also says that it is “impossible” that William Mansell ever married Morning Dove for a couple of reasons: marrying was not an Indian custom and William Mansell was already married. Riley points out further that Mansell fought with General Andrew Jackson, later president Jackson, a well known Indian fighter. One way in which soldiers like Mansell would have been rewarded would have been with land and captured Indians. It is likely, Riley argues, that Mansell, like most European Americans of the time, would have regarded Native Americans as second-class citizens. “The most likely thing that happened,” Riley argues, “is that Morning White Dove was a refugee from one of the Creek Indian Villages that were being destroyed in Alabama. And for whatever reason – he liked the way she looked, wanted some domestic help – he just took her and took her home.”
Whilst there is no record that William Mansell ever married Morning Dove, they did have four children, three of whom survived. Which is a kind of native ancestry, I suppose.
Morning Dove White’s great great great grandson Mike Palmer admits to having doubts about the facts surrounding an ancestor who seems to belong to the realm of myth and legend. She exists, but who, exactly, is she? “Who wouldn’t want to claim her as kin?” he asks. “She’s such a mystical figure. There are so few known facts that you can almost create her as you want, she can become whatever you want because so little is known about her and a lot of people I’m sure do that.”
Creating identities as you want so that people become whatever you want them to be – good or ill – is the vice of the age, and of little substantive value. There are no conclusive facts here. There are a few facts that we have no option but to evaluate and judge, trying hard not to create Elvis’ ancestry according to wish and fantasy. The facts indicate that Elvis’ ancestry might well include a Native American heritage, just not necessarily Cherokee.
In 1960, Elvis starred in “Flaming Star,” playing a ‘half-breed’ torn between two warring sides, trying to keep the peace between both, choosing neither side and hence having to contend with both. It was a serious and demanding role, and the movie, directed by Don Siegel, was good. It didn’t generate anything like the interest at the box office that the ‘sun’n’fun’ Elvis films did, so is not well known.
Native Americans responded warmly to Elvis’ sympathetic portrayal. The Los Angeles Tribal Indian Community liked Elvis’ performance so much that the community inducted him into their tribe.
Just to complicate matters further, there have been claims that Elvis had Melungeon roots, a term which designates numerous groups of people of the Southeastern United States who descend from European and Sub-Saharan African settlers. The Melungeons are people of mixed ethnicity, claiming varying degrees of Portuguese, Turkish, Moorish, Arabic, Jewish, American Indian and African descent. Typically, the term refers to people from eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee and southern West Virginia, according to the Melungeon Heritage Association (MHA), but “related mixed-ancestry populations also include the Carmel Indians of southern Ohio; the Brown People of Kentucky; the Guineas of West Virginia; the We-Sorts of Maryland; the Nanticoke-Moors of Delaware; the Cubans and Portuguese of North Carolina; the Turks and Brass Ankles of South Carolina; and the Creoles and Redbones of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.”
The Melungeans comprise a distinct ethnic group living primarily in the Upper American South in part descended from Portuguese and Turkish adventurers. Some researchers maintain that the group's origins lie in the intermarriage of freed slaves with European indentured servants to create an Atlantic Creole mix in the 17th and 18th centuries. A limited DNA sampling of people who consider themselves Melungeons reveals that they are mostly of European ancestry but possess small percentages of African American and Native American DNA. Other limited samplings of different self-identified Melungeons contain some Eurasian or Middle Eastern DNA.
After suffering from Anglo-American racism, many families buried their Melungeon ancestry, to such an extent that genealogical research is difficult. As Carol Huff, a Kentucky native who discovered her Melungeon heritage a few years ago, writes: “It’s ironic that our families went to such pains to cover up their heritage and now, 150 years later, we’re going to such pains to uncover it.”
If true, then Elvis has multiracial ancestry. The evidence with respect to Elvis?
In The Melungeons: The Resurrection of A Proud People: An Untold Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America, Dr. N. Brent Kennedy suggests that Elvis had Melungeon roots. Here is an extract from the book (1994 second edition, page 140). “Yes, Elvis Presley had North Carolina roots; his mother’s family left western North Carolina in the early 1800s, taking with them their legend of a Cherokee and Jewish heritage. His maternal great-great-great grandmother was supposedly “a full blooded Cherokee” from Tennessee named Morning Dove White. However, White is a far more common Lumbee, Melungeon, and Powhatan than Cherokee surname, and Morning Dove is an uncommon Cherokee given name. Also, the man she married, William Mansell, had been something of a renowned Indian fighter, making his choice of a “full-blooded Cherokee” questionable. Mansell’s family was also native South Carolinian since the 1700s, placing them more in Lumbee than Cherokee territory. In any event, William Mansell and Morning Dove White settled in Alabama around 1820, and had several children, including John Mansell, Elvis’s great-great grandfather. John later abandoned his family to run off with a younger woman named Mandy Bennett (another Lumbee surname). In 1870, John’s son White Mansell married a woman named Martha Tackett from Tennessee. Martha also possessed a common Melungeon surname and, even more appropriately, claimed to be Jewish.
Elaine Dundy’s excellent biography of Elvis provides fascinating genealogical background and unintentionally paints a rather convincing Melungeon heritage for the “King of Rock and Roll.”
Interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln is also considered to have descended from Melungeon roots. Elvis is a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln’s second great grandfather Isaiah Harrison. Harrison was born in 1666 and died in 1738. He was born in England and came to America in 1687. Both the Lincoln and Presley family trees sprouted from this “root.”
According to a DNA study published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy, Presley’s molecule encoding falls right in line with the “Melungeons.” Ironically, Presley’s early music was routinely denounced for its “jungle” rhythm and “African” beats. Those critics may have been closer to the truth than they ever dreamed of.
Was Elvis a Melungeon? The more I read on this, the more I have the impression of substance running into the ether. ‘Some believe Elvis Presley was one,’ is a frequent claim, followed by exotic tales woven around the bare facts stated above. I read that Melungeon identity is not defined by genetics alone and that a person may believe they are Melungeon because of oral tradition, genealogy or family history. “Melungeons are a self-defining population,” I read. And Elvis? He pretty much defined himself, making the point that a person’s character and worth is a matter of a lot more than genetic inheritance and identity.