Tim Riley at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
The further we get from Elvis Presley’s death, the more a crude music industry frame takes hold: the blinding flash of his Sun Records youth, the snowballing Hollywood banality, and the celebrity pill junkie slumped on his toilet, dead at 42. Praise Allah for recent documentaries like Elvis Presley: The Searcher (Thom Zimny, 2018), and the Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback (John Scheinfeld, 2023), where the performer’s radical charisma speaks for itself. In the same way that historic recreations always comment on their contemporary context, the Elvis Presley of Sun Studios and early RCA singles between 1954 and 1958 will always sound tantalizingly out of reach to 21st-century ears—another 80 years of laissez-faire racism will do that.
Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, the latest title from music scholar Preston Lauterbach, gives this story a major course correction. In a voice both confident and wry—without ever talking down to the reader—Lauterbach portrays a lively and complicated Memphis scene during the pre-Elvis era: regional radio personalities, Black churches where whites gathered to hear gospel quartets, and a series of progressive-minded figures that pressed against the hard lines drawn by figures like E. H. “Boss” Crump, the local segregationist enforcer.
More here.
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