and no one else will touch "Walking in Memphis"

B B King: "I liked Elvis a lot. I saw him as a fellow Mississippian and I was impressed by his sincerity," said King who toured Australia in May '97. "I thought he was honourable when he came to play The Goodwill Revue, a yearly benefit in our home town for needy black kids. When Elvis appeared he was already a big, big star," said the legendary bluesman. "Remember this was the fifties, so for a young white boy to show up at an all-black function took guts. I believe he was showing his roots. After the show, he made a point of posing for pictures with me, treating me like royalty. He'd tell people I was one of his influences."

The story continues that when Philips found a hillbilly cat named Elvis Presley, who successfully mixed the sound of black music with that of rural country music, rock’n’ roll was formed, and indeed, Philips did make a million dollars.

The problem with this great American musical myth lies partially in the alchemy of it all. "Add one part this to one part that and you get a million bucks" just doesn’t work primarily because there ain’t just one part of anything. The country music Presley sang wasn’t the country most people heard on the 1950s country charts. In fact the rockabilly up-tempo cat music Presley performed was a marginal country music amalgamation in and of itself; something that rarely made the country charts, and because of its emphasis on the "lectric" guitar and loud beats, it was scoffed at by "real" country artists of the time.

Similarly with the black music Presley supposedly mixed with this country music. The blues-laced countrified Memphis black music Presley (and Philips) heard was marginal at best in black culture. If one examines the black popular music charts between 1948 and 1959, the charts leaders were not the country blues artists recorded in Memphis or Chicago (the arena where Philips sent much of his black music to be distributed by Chess Records). What one does see on the charts is a music that addressed both lyrical sentiments and musical traditions different from that found in Memphis or the rural south in general. This chart-topping black music came from an ensemble tradition, that is, it emphasized vocal harmonies that came from urban rather than rural settings, traditions that had long been recorded and performed in the 1930s and ’40s on the urban stages of many of the important black centers in this country.

And instead of singing about sentiments of the rural Southern country found in the blues music of Memphis and later Chicago, sentiments that aligned themselves with issues of slavery, repression, and working-class issues, the urban black music heard most on the charts often addressed concerns much more middle class in nature.

...spend at least a few minutes remembering that this guy wasn't just a fat druggie who loved fried chicken, karate and young women in white cotton panties. At one time, he set the world on fire, he felt like an earthquake rumbling through the land, he opened white eyes to black music, he made Americans feel in their gut that everything had changed. And he did it all himself.