ShareThisWASHINGTON - News coverage of Elvis Presley's rise from third-tier country singer to superstar is the subject of a Newseum exhibit opening Friday at journalism's national showcase.
"Elvis! His Groundbreaking, Hip-Shaking, Newsmaking Story" displays news clippings and artifacts of a career chronicled from his first mention in newsprint, in July 1954, to the present day. It is a new tourist destination just in time for spring break.
The exhibit contains some items never made public, even at Graceland, including Caroline Kennedy's signature in the guest book of his memorial service in 1977, an invoice from Memphis jeweler Harry Levitch for Priscilla's $3,639 engagement ring and a telegram to his manager, Col.Tom Parker, asking that he be allowed to return home from the Army without "ceremony or fanfare."
"He was obviously a man who generated a lot of coverage," said Newseum president Kenneth A. Paulson. "The most remarkable thing we've learned here at the Newseum is how negative that early press coverage was.
"There's something about the press in the mid-50s where they wanted to be arbiters of social values, and this man looked like a menace to many," Paulson said.
That sentiment is illustrated by a police officer quoted in Time Magazine on June 16, 1956: "If he did that in the street, we'd arrest him."
A look inside the exhibit earlier this week revealed other aspects of a seismic shift in the popular culture, some catalogued on the front pages of The Memphis Commercial Appeal and the defunct Memphis Press Scimitar, as well as regional and national newspaper across the country.
Elvis' January 1957 appearance on The Ed Sullivan is showcased as proof that television "censored" the electro-jolt dance moves characteristic of his act after complaints from preachers and the public. "T.V. Ignores Elvis' Pelvis" reads the headline in the late New York Journal American.
When Elvis sang of urban poverty at the height of the Vietnam War, a June 18, 1969, headline in Variety read: " 'In the Ghetto," Presley's First Protest Song, Stirs Singer's Younger Fans."
The exhibit also displays a video of Elvis being asked at a press conference about his position on war protests. "I want to keep my own personal opinions about that to myself," he says. In addition to strictly journalistic lore, the exhibit displays the front door keys to Graceland and a 1957 Harley Davidson motorcycle Paulson likened to "a jukebox on wheels."
Jimmy Carter's tribute the Presley, in an Associated Press story torn from a teletype machine, said his death "deprives our country of a part of itself."
Peter Guralnick, the American music historian who wrote a two-volume biography of Elvis ("Last Train to Memphis," in 1994. and "Careless Love," in 1999), said there's no question that Elvis had a "global impact."
Guralnick said initial assessments of Elvis' talent in press coverage placed it "beneath contempt." Fifty years ago, the idea of considering Elvis or other groundbreaking musicians of the 1950s as serious creative artists simply wasn't done in mainstream media, he said. Elvis' place in American vernacular culture is now clearly established, he said.
"Society has finally caught up with some of its most significant contributors who for many years it dismissed for reasons of either racial or class or social or (regional) snobbery," he said.
Paulson said press coverage shows Elvis' "push back" from that kind of coverage transformed him from a mid-South phenomenon to a national star.
"They really turned him into the king of rock 'n' roll with their negative coverage," Paulson said.
Elvis was not just a pop star but a cause, almost a movement, said former Los Angeles Times pop culture critic Robert Hilburn, who has written extensively on Elvis, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and others.
"Buying an Elvis record was almost like voting for president," Hilburn said. "It was like saying, 'Here, this is the guy we want to follow. We believe in this.' "
Elvis Facebook page, with 528,287 "friends," indicates he's still being followed.
The exhibit runs through February 2011.
With video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLiPqHjrJag
Break out box: Elvis in Washington, D.C.
Newseum promotional video of "Elvis! His Groundbreaking, Hip-Shaking, Newsmaking Story" -- http://www.newseum.org/exhibits_th/elvis/
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery: "One Life: Echoes of Elvis" --http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/exhelvis.html
The National Archives: "When Nixon Met Elvis." -- http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/nixon-met-elvis/
(Contact The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., at XX(at)xxx.com.)
Also moved cat. W
