MUSIC 1956: Teeners’ Hero Elvis Aaron Presley

Teeners’ Hero

Without preamble, the three-piece band cuts loose. In the spotlight, the lanky singer flails furious rhythms on his guitar, every now and then breaking a string. In a pivoting stance, his hips swing sensuously from side to side and his entire body takes on a frantic quiver, as if he had swallowed a jackhammer. Full-cut hair tousles over his forehead, and sideburns frame his petulant, full-lipped face. His style is partly hillbilly, partly socking rock ‘n’ roll. His loud baritone goes raw and whining in the high notes, but down low it is rich and round. As he throws himself into one of his specialties—Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes or Long Tall Sally—his throat seems full of desperate aspirates (“Hi want you, hi need you, hi luh-huh-huh-huv yew-hew”) or hiccuping glottis strokes, and his diction is poor. But his movements suggest, in a word, sex.

He is Elvis Aaron Presley, a drape-suited, tight-trousered young man of 21, and the sight and sound of him drive teen-age girls wild. All through the South and West, Elvis is packing theaters, fighting off shrieking admirers, disturbing parents, puckering the brows of psychologists, and filling letters-to-the-editor columns with cries of alarm and, from adolescents, counter-cries of adulation.