The cul­tur­al impact of Elvis Pres­ley is hard to over­state; when he explod­ed on the scene, the whole phe­nom­e­non of youth enter­tain­ment explod­ed with him. John Lennon said: “before Elvis, there was noth­ing”. Now, whilst this might be an over-egged point, giv­en that even in the ‘40s Frank Sina­tra was inspir­ing devo­tion from teenage “Bob­by sox­ers”, nonethe­less there’s no doubt­ing the cul­tur­al par­a­digm shift that Elvis launched. His records, his look, his moves, his duck­tail quiff, his clothing…these all became embod­i­ments of the new rock ‘n’ roll style, and, with eco­nom­ic pros­per­i­ty putting more mon­ey into Amer­i­can teenagers’ pock­ets, it spread like wild­fire.

This sen­sa­tion did­n’t occur overnight, how­ev­er. By the end of 1955, Elvis had already record­ed two dozen sin­gles, but these were only hits on the Coun­try and West­ern charts, not the main Bill­board charts. That changed with his debut sin­gle for his new label, RCA Vic­tor – Heart­break Hotel. This time, Elvis did shoot to the top of the pop charts and stayed there for sev­en weeks, turn­ing him into the dar­ling of radio and record stores up and down the coun­try. It was, how­ev­er, tele­vi­sion that tru­ly made him the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and if any one appear­ance might be called his coro­na­tion, it was this appear­ance on the Mil­ton Berle Show on 5^th June 1956, when he set his gui­tar aside and put his whole being into a scorch­ing and scan­dalous per­for­mance of Hound Dog.

Pre­vi­ous tele­vi­sion appear­ances had fea­tured Elvis either in close-up, singing a slow bal­lad, or of his full body but with his move­ments some­what restrict­ed by the acoustic gui­tar he was play­ing. But here, for the first time, the 21-year-old Elvis Pres­ley was seen from head to toe, gyrat­ing his soon-to-be-famous (or infa­mous) pelvis.

You can bet that the reac­tion to Elvis’ per­for­mance in the main­stream media was almost uni­form­ly neg­a­tive. The New York Dai­ly News described Presley’s per­for­mance as marked by “the kind of ani­mal­ism that should be con­fined to dives and bor­del­los”. The Jour­nal-Amer­i­can said that Elvis “can’t sing a lick and makes up for vocal short­com­ings with the weird­est sug­ges­tive ani­ma­tion short of an aborigine’s mat­ing dance”. The Catholic week­ly peri­od­i­cal, Amer­i­ca, got right to the point, mean­while, with its head­line: “Beware of Elvis Pres­ley”.

The com­plaints and con­cerns of these reac­tionar­ies, how­ev­er, was pret­ty much drowned out by the screams of young girls, and by the end of 1956, when the Wall Street Jour­nal was already com­ment­ing that “Elvis Pres­ley is today a busi­ness”, they had to accept that the times had changed.