The latest is Austin Butler, who rises from a minor role as Manson family member Tex Watson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (2019) to a starring role as Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s flashy biopic.
#Hillbilly rock dance tv#
Nearly two dozen actors have played Elvis on TV and in the movies since 1979, when Kurt Russell starred as the King in John Carpenter’s made-for-TV biopic. He was defanged by the white establishment, held back by old-fashioned management, and at turns romanticized and rejected by subsequent generations.
He was a pompadoured cipher onto whom people could project their racial, sexual, and generational anxieties during a period of rapid societal change. Up to and long after his death at the age of 42, Elvis became more symbol than musician. And the sparks that flew from that initial meeting lit a pop-cultural fire that still burns to this day. When Memphis radio station WHBQ played Elvis singing a sped-up version of Delta bluesman Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right” in July 1954, those wires crossed. But rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along.” At the same time, the 20th century would have looked much different if the “hillbilly cat” with the sensual lips and provocative dance moves had taken early advice and remained a truck driver.īefore Elvis, country-and-western and rhythm and blues were two crackling electrical lines running parallel to one another in the segregated South.
He never claimed to, telling Jet magazine in 1957, “A lot of people seem to think I started this business. Elvis Presley didn’t invent rock and roll.
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