I’ll get to Elvis, but first let me tell you about my grandfather, who died when I was an adolescent. He had a very gentle nature for a guy who was pretty physical, and he was startlingly competent at anything working with his hands. People often say “you never heard a bad word about that man” but I have literally never heard a bad word about him.
After working as a Greyhound bus driver and raising a family, Grandpa retired to a small farm in rural Washington. Having a farm had been his dream since he was a child in Idaho. He loved animals. My grandmother would often tell me about how he used to do rodeos, and even took a dogsled to school in the winter. On the farm he had cows and chickens, and he raised quarter horses. Crucially, he had an Australian Blue Heeler named Gretchen that seemed to keep the other animals in line, but didn’t like grandchildren very much. But grandpa loved that dog.
Anyway, after my grandfather had been retired to the farm for a number of years, he had a debilitating stroke. He couldn’t move half his body very well, and mentally he was a shadow of his former self. My grandmother moved with him off the farm to be closer to my mother because he needed around the clock care. I was often dropped off at my grandmother’s house for an hour or two to keep an eye on grandpa so my grandmother could run errands. This was invariably a depressing affair; he was often in pain. When he didn’t ask me to sneak pulls from a bottle of Peach Schnapps that he kept in the cupboard, he would ask me to play music. This I didn’t mind. Grandpa had pretty good taste in music. He liked Johnny Cash, but his real favorite was Charley Pride. And yes, he liked Elvis a lot, especially his spirituals.
But I didn’t like listening to Elvis with Grandpa. That’s because eventually he would ask me to play Presley’s rendition of “Old Shep.” It’s a first person account of man who’s given a puppy as a boy, and the two are inseparable. Old Shep saves him from drowning, but eventually the dog gets old and is suffering so the local doc tells the man he’s got to put the dog down with a rifle. My grandfather often asked me to play the song several times in a row, and he’d cry and cry as he listened. He really loved animals that much, and I think the awareness of his own mortality didn’t help. I just listened to the song for the first time in years, and I’d be lying if I said hearing Elvis croon “Old Shep, he has gone where the good doggies go” doesn’t make me feel real grief.
So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the email from the Washington Post this morning: “Is Trump sending a message by awarding the Medal of Freedom to Elvis? Yes.” It turns out the message in question is not that, for all of Presley’s outsize flaws, millions of Americans have an almost reverent appreciation of the man. Rather predictably, it turns out that recognizing Elvis as one of the most beloved Americans of the 20th century is racist. Or something:
Yes, this overture looks ugly to anyone who feels antagonism and regression radiating from Trump’s promise to “make America great again.” And yes, it all feels especially absurd to members of the hip-hop generation—its eldest citizens now past middle-aged—who learned how to feel about the legacy of Presley the moment they first heard Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” blasting a hole through our national mood in the summer of 1989. Yeah, you know the Chuck D line I’m talking about: “Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant s— to me.” (Yes, Chuck D deserves his own Medal of Freedom, but nearly three decades after “Fight the Power,” America is still afraid of a black planet, so he’ll likely receive his award posthumously, too.)
I graduated high school in 1994 and I was literally listening to a dubbed cassette of Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back at the same age I was spinning old Elvis records for my grandpa. Being provocative is Chuck D’s stock-in-trade, and while I salute the rapper for making a lily white junior high kid in Oregon more race conscious in a positive way, I didn’t see having musical tastes that encompassed Chuck D and Elvis as a problem then, and I don’t now. I get the Chuck D line about Elvis, and in the late ‘80s the debate over white guys ripping off black music—financially as well as musically—was a little more raw than today. On the other hand, the initial objections about Elvis flaunting his sexuality were pretty clearly rooted in racial overtones. The perception was that Elvis, in the way he danced, appeared a little too fond of black culture.
Even if Elvis popularized an art form that people of another race largely invented, it’s hard to argue that a lots and lots of successful black artists didn’t walk right through the doors he opened. Presley was initially a hero among black musicians in Memphis for that reason, and there’s no reason to think Elvis himself was racist. Quite the opposite, in fact. In 1956, it was reported the ‘“the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”’ Elvis’s personal reputation for being opposed to racism is marred only by one damnable lie that he never said.
Rock ‘n’ roll has been around for the better part of a century. If you’re invested in making Elvis an avatar for racial resentments more than 40 years after his death, you’re, perhaps unwittingly, making the problems of contemporary divisions worse. Music is one of a precious few cultural forces still holding us together. It’s not zero sum; we can acknowledge that more credit is owed to black musical pioneers and acknowledge that Elvis was remarkably talented man a who made a singular connection with tens of millions of Americans that went well beyond race. Recognizing Elvis doesn’t negate the fact that Chuck D deserves credit for, say, powerfully calling out Arizona for initially refusing to recognize MLK Day.
I’m quite certain that race had nothing to with what music my grandfather enjoyed (I suggest younger readers Google ‘Charley Pride’). And as a testament to Elvis being deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, I would like to submit my dying grandfather’s deep appreciation.
