I would like to point out a couple of obvious self-explanatory things about this list on The Atlantic of The 100 Most Influential Figures in American History (it’s an old list but I just came across it):
1. There are some entries here that are a surprise. Some names you would expect to be on the list. Some that I think should be there are missing altogether. Not a lot of entertainers or music producers. One movie mogul. But how about Sam Cooke? Ray Charles? Aretha? Barbra? Or the SNL team? Only one sports figure, Jackie Robinson, which is expected but still I thought: Muhammad Ali? But in such a list, of course you’re going to have politicians and inventors and social activists dominate. “Influential” does not mean positive or negative. Creating/starting change is what influential means. So who would be on it? You wonder. It keeps you clicking (through 100 separate slides – really, Atlantic?). But even as I started to click from slide 1 to slide 2, I knew Elvis would be on there. It wasn’t even a question. There are some figures where it would be a question. (For example, I hoped against hope that my dead boyfriend, Alexander Hamilton, would be on the list, to take his proper place in the Pantheon. He’s there, by the way, near the top of the list. GOOD.) But Elvis? Unquestioned place in the firmament. I didn’t even have to click through to discover whether or not he would be there. Of course he would be there.
2. Each slide boils down the influential person into one sentence. What that person did, and why it was influential. Hard to boil down some of these folks into one sentence but that’s the format. Thoreau: “The original American dropout, he has inspired seekers of authenticity for 150 years.” Samuel Gompers: “The country’s greatest labor organizer, he made the golden age of unions possible.” Now these are somewhat ridiculous because each life here is so huge that to turn it into a sentence is reductive. Like Melville. How do you boil that man down? But that’s the format. It’s consistent with each entry. Elvis’ entry, however, is different. Here is what his slide says: “The king of rock and roll. Enough said.” That’s it. It doesn’t look like the other entries. If it looked like the other entries, it would have said: “The boy from Tupelo wiggled his way to superstardom and created rock and roll” or whatever. “The humble-roots truck driver revolutionized music.” Or even, if you want to get mythic about it, “He brought rock and roll to the masses and changed American culture forever”, blah blah. But no. For Elvis, they decide they have nothing else to say about him, because it’s all been said, and his importance is so self-evident and obvious that why even bother trying to put it into words. Even George Washington gets a sentence about why he’s important, which seems so silly, because it, too, is patently obvious. But Elvis gets the “Enough said,” not George. It’s like trying to describe why the sun is important. Nobody else, not presidents, not explorers, not famous inventors (I mean, you could just have easily have said, for the Jonas Salk entry: “He saved our lives. Enough said.” and it would have fit), not social activists, get that kind of “Well, you know why he’s here, of course he’s here” kind of language. ”
But what exactly does “Enough said” signify? Isn’t it extraordinary? Isn’t “enough said” so eloquent and mysterious?
Elvis. Even with all the language thrown around about him, libraries full of books about him, a figure so omnipresent in our culture that you see pictures of him more often than you do the current President, he’s still too vast to encompass, express. He sits there, in the middle of the 20th century, gigantic. He won’t BE boiled down.
“Enough said” will have to do.
Kind of a close call between Elvis and Sam Phillips for me– I could make a case either way.
Bill – yes, I thought Sam Phillips might be on there too. In terms of creating the space where an Elvis (or a Rufus Thomas or whoever) could flourish – Sam Phillips changed everything.
Have you read the new bio of Phillips yet? I just finished it.
It is on my bedside stack.
I knew a woman once who had just come back from a conference in Memphis. One of the highlights of the trip for her was seeing Phillips walk in when she was having breakfast. I nearly fell in love with her when she told me that story, or maybe I did fall in love, for a moment. She recognized the man, first of all; and she knew that I would be nearly as excited as she was when she told me about it. The thing that has always seemed amazing to me about Phillips is that he knew he was in a watershed moment– he recognized exactly what was happening around him even as he was midwifing the second half of the 20th century.
I love that story about the woman seeing Phillips!
// I nearly fell in love with her when she told me that story, or maybe I did fall in love, for a moment. //
Beautiful.
I agree with your feeling about Phillips. He was aware of it. It seems incomprehensible but he was. And it doesn’t seem to have just been retrospect talking – although maybe that was part of it, since his statements in the last 20 years of his life had that Biblical-prophet kind of tone. But reading the biography, you really do sense that he felt he was onto something – early on – and he just needed to create the space where – whatever it was – could flourish.
AND his feelings about Memphis. That is where I need to be. At least according to the biography, he and his brothers drove through Memphis on their way to Texas to listen to a famous preacher. Phillips got one glimpse of Beale Street and felt: “Well. This is where I will eventually live. Obviously.”
I love the story about the telephone ringing during a recording session – I think it was for Carl Perkins? I’d have to go check or maybe you know the one I mean. Any other producer would obviously have gone for another take since the telephone ring should not be on the album, of course. But not Phillips – that was the take that went out there into the world – because it captured the MOMENT and that was all he cared about.