“Pervert”: The 1956 Elvis Presley single that sparked riots across America
It’s easy to forget that, once upon a time, at the dawn of rock and roll, Elvis Presley stood as a thorn in the side of conservative America.
Not that it lasted long. Soon enough, whatever rebellion and provocation radiated from the King’s pop cultural whirlwind was quickly snuffed out by enlisting for service in 1958, followed by a steady gloop of tired Hollywood pictures fantastically out of touch with the shifting rock trends around him.
While enjoying a brief spike in standing with the ’68 Comeback Special, Presley’s lapse into Las Vegas residencies and increasingly moribund live shows spelt a dreary ebb of Presley’s former glories, playing to those same conservatives who now embraced the rock and roll veteran as an emblem of tradition and patriotism.
Back in 1956, however, church groups and authorities up and down the States were aghast at the new Mississippi kid’s corrupting force. His first sin was defying the Jim Crow mores of the day. Not only was Presley a conduit between the Black man’s music and pumping such degeneracy into the bedroom radios of white suburbia, but a quiet disregard for segregation took a hatchet to the strenuously upheld racial divisions in both society and culture enforced by the South’s strict supremacist code.
It was the hips that truly twisted conservative knickers, though. ‘Elvis the Pelvis’ thrust his way into the nightmares of every moral puritan in the aftermath of his second appearance on The Milton Berle Show in June 1956. The previous slot flew by with little fanfare, Presley’s hips constrained by the acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder and the audience comprised of sailors from the USS Hancock docked at San Diego.
The next time around, Presley was able to gyrate, hip-swing, and generally beam suggestive sexuality all over the crowd and broadcast into middle America, busting out a physically charged rendition of Big Mama Thornton’s ‘Hound Dog’ with wild abandon. Such frenzy was caught on camera, shots eagerly capturing the teen girls in near-hysterical fits, then during a skit with the comedian host, Presley quipping candidly about girls “always tearing your clothes off.”
“Beware of Elvis Presley” read the headline of the Catholic America magazine. Such lascivious embellishments in the prurient minds of conservative crusaders made their way to the heights of the FBI, when the paranoid director J Edgar Hoover waged a top-down war on any remote suspicion of ‘reds under the bed’ communism, Civil Rights activists, and political dissent of any kind. Keeping a file on Presley, one report from a former Army Intelligence Service officer who’d caught a live show illustrated just how much a threat many thought the ‘Hound Dog’ singer posed to impressionable young minds.
“[His] actions and motions were such as to arouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. One eye-witness described his actions as ‘sexual self-gratification on stage,’ – another as ‘a strip-tease with clothes on.’”
Later, the horrified grass concludes, “From eye-witness reports about Presley, I would judge that he may possibly be a drug addict and a sexual pervert.”
The comic twist to all this was that, aside from some quiet defying of segregation, the old Tupelo country boy was a lifelong conservative, a traditional streak shaped by the Pentecostal church and his southern genteel manners that only grew more apparent as the 1960s counterculture both alienated his values and sparked an enragement at his irrelevance.
By 1970, Presley was offering his services to President Richard Nixon personally as an undercover agent to fight ‘anti-Americanism’ and the drug culture, a far cry from the ‘Hound Dog’ terror that rocked the establishment only 14 years earlier.
