The black artists that inspired Elvis Presley

My mother loved Elvis Presley. Growing up, Elvis was always playing in the house or on long car rides, along with The Beatles and a variety of other huge pop acts of the '50s and '60s. I wasn’t a music historian (I’m still not, as far as I know) — I didn’t know who copied from whom or what the lives of any of these people were like. I just knew that the music was great.

That music is the primary focus of the new documentary Elvis Presley: The Searchers. It follows the evolution of Elvis’s sound from mixing up gospel, blues and country in the '50s through to the movie musicals and Vegas crooning in the '60s. And while the question of whether Elvis was a cultural appropriator of black music or merely its champion/messenger may have been settled in the minds of many, the doco goes to great lengths to show us that neither are really true.

“He was a light for all of us. We all owe him for going first into battle,” Tom Petty says. “He had no road map, and he forged a path of what to do and what not to do. We shouldn’t make the mistake of writing off a great artist by all the clatter that came later. We should dwell in what he did that was so beautiful and everlasting. Which was that great, great music.”

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