Race, Rock, and Elvis.

By Michael T. Bertrand. Music in American Life. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2000. Pp. xii, 327. $32.95, ISBN 0-252-02586-5.)

In his ambitious Race, Rock, and Elvis Michael Bertrand poses a central question: "Did rock `n' roll represent an experience capable of affecting the ideology of race?" (p. 47). The black influence on rock `n' roll was no secret, yet becoming a fan rarely signaled support for integration. Many white southern youth growing up in the 1950s embraced rhythm and blues and rock `n' roll music--and segregation. The black roots of this music and the accompanying style invaded all levels of southern society, provoking both adoration and condemnation. Bertrand has examined ideology, politics, and consumerism in seeking the connection between music and social change.

While African American music had exerted enormous influence on U.S. culture earlier, after World War II rhythm and blues and rock `n' roll infiltrated white society through the radio, jukeboxes, and recordings. Rock `n' roll, which incorporated both rhythm and blues and country music, emerged from the working class and exerted a powerful influence on the younger generation. Elvis Presley was the messenger. "In Elvis Presley," Bertrand argues, "the complex issues of race, class, age, region, and commerce intersected" (p. 27). Bertrand also observes the impact of migration, as rural youth adjusted to city pulses and adopted the vocabulary, wardrobe, hairstyle, and music that redefined them as urban.

Southern musicians, black and white, lived under different rules from other southerners. They sometimes privately played music together and borrowed each others' licks. Black musicians often played for white audiences but always remained on stage as performers. While allowing black performers such proximity to white dancers was embedded in regional custom, southern whites performing emotional music with black style raised complex questions of both race and class. Bertrand searches for the elements that could have swayed white ideology. Whites attended rhythm and blues and rock `n' roll concerts, listened to late-night clear channel radio programs or to local black stations, played their favorite records on jukeboxes, bought records, and talked about popular tunes. Black culture thus moved into new spaces where attitudes could be changed. Yet rock `n' roll turned on one axis and civil rights on another. Rock `n' roll attracted opposition from segregationists and from preachers who saw in the music the horrors of amalgamation. Yet southern white religion also contained the power to undermine segregation, and Bertrand might have found significant insights by examining white religious ideology.

Bertrand points out that the white elite in the 1950s had difficulty finding anything positive about rock `n' roll. He explores the conflict between rival music associations ASCAP and BMI that clearly revealed class divisions in the music business. For Tin Pan Alley songwriters, it was difficult to accept struggling white musicians as their peers, so they dismissed rock `n' roll. Producers, seeing promise in de-tuning rock `n' roll--that is, taming its spontaneity for the mass market--covered these records with mainstream artists. By the same token, some African Americans condemned Presley for appropriating and shaping black music to make it palatable to white audiences. Ultimately, the wildness of rock `n' roll yielded to the pop market. Bertrand's juxtaposition of working-class whites who rode the rock `n' roll wave and Tin Pan Alley composers effectively accentuates the class tension contained in rock `n' roll. Composers did not understand that working-class white musicians unselfconsciously adapted black music and style as a vehicle of upward mobility.

When Bertrand argues that the generation of whites who reached adolescence after World War II lacked a context to analyze rock `n' roll and "had to confront the social and racial issues attached to rock `n' roll before they could endorse the music itself," he reaches too far (p. 95). Had this been so, rock `n' roll might never have gained popularity, for confronting racial issues had never been the strong suit of either old or young southern whites. The country's intellectual elite who attempted to control taste in the 1950s, Bertrand argues, stared past rock `n' roll. Middle-class adults sought respectability at the symphony, the theater, and in classical recordings. Elvis Presley, Bertrand suggests, personified the generational and class friction created by rock `n' roll. Presley was poor, white, southern, tasteless, untalented, and lewd, according to his detractors. Those who focus on Presley's debt to black music, enormous popularity, and wealth, Bertrand explains, lose sight of "the singer's estranged position in relation to the mainstream and how that contributed to his music" (p. 215).

Bertrand covers a wide band of material searching for the link between music and race relations, and, although he concludes that such a connection remains nebulous, in the process he explores crucial issues that defined the post-World War II South.

PETE DANIEL
National Museum of American History