ABSTRACT
When Elvis Presley (1935-1977) rocketed into the national spotlight in 1956 on the wings of the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon, his popularity and notoriety were aided in no small part by his numerous television appearances. Presley performed with his group six times on the Dorsey Brothers’ CBS Stage Show between January and March, helping to send his first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” to the top of the charts. But it was not until Presley’s June 5 appearance on NBC’s Milton Berle show that the young singer from Memphis drew the ire of incredulous and indignant television critics. Abandoning his guitar for the first time and engaging in a series of exaggerated motions and dance steps, Presley playfully gyrated his way through a burlesque version of “Hound Dog” that the band had worked up during a brief stint playing in Las Vegas. The reaction came swift from influential critics like John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune, who bemoaned both the faddish appeal of Presley’s music as well as the negative effects that his suggestive bodily movements were having on a nation of impressionable teenagers. Critics have voiced similar concerns throughout other eras of American history. From the ragtime and close-contact “animal dances” of the 1910s to the “freak dancing” and “grinding” of recent decades, youth dance crazes have long served as the very center of indecency debates. At their roots, all of these instances have arisen as responses to the importation of African American musical forms and dances into white society.
