The rock ’n’ roll revolution in our ideas about manhood begins—as so much in rock begins—with Elvis Presley. Presley released his first single, “That’s All Right, Mama,” a cover of an Arthur Crudup blues side, in July of 1954. Just two months earlier, the Supreme Court had handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a ruling that would begin to transform America’s racial landscape. The two events have become symbolically linked: imagine the legal and emotional surge of change that rippled through the Bible Belt. Blacks and whites didn’t even go to school together yet in the preintegrated South, making it doubly shocking for people to see Elvis swivel his hips and moan in direct imitation of male and female R&B shouters like Wynonie Harris and Big Mama Thornton. Initially, Presley’s race stylings and class come-uppance upstaged his gender mingling. The very idea that a white boy could sing a black man’s song, or adopt a black woman’s sexual bravado, with such gusto, cracked the fifties—maybe the whole of twentieth-century American life—in half.
