Did Elvis get the fame that Black musicians had earned first?

There is no single answer, and the people who lived through it did not agree. Elvis Presley became the leading figure of rock and roll with a style that owed much to Black musicians, and he won the recognition and commercial success largely denied to his Black peers. Some saw that as taking what others had earned, yet some of those Black artists praised him for opening a door that had been shut.

Take "Hound Dog". Big Mama Thornton was the first to record it, in 1952, in a song written for her by two songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. It became her biggest hit, seven weeks at number one on the R&B chart in 1953. Presley's version was based mainly on a pop band's later recording and sounded very different from her blues shout. It sold about 10 million copies worldwide. Thornton, meanwhile, was a huge influence on early blues and rock and roll, but she rarely received proper credit and compensation. Later recordings of her songs sold millions, and she was denied royalties because she did not hold the publishing copyrights.

Her story fits a pattern. Many of the earliest white rock and roll hits were covers or partial rewrites of earlier Black songs. The reasons given include that white audiences found the covers more familiar, that prejudice may have played a part, and that labels aimed at white buyers had much better distribution and were more profitable. Songwriting credits were also unreliable: many publishers, record executives and managers, both white and Black, added their own names to collect royalties.

Presley's own record is mixed. Sam Phillips of Sun Records wanted to bring the sound of Black musicians to a broader audience, and a session at Sun took off when Presley launched into Arthur Crudup's blues number "That's All Right". Many callers who first heard it on the radio assumed he was Black. He spoke with respect of Black performers. Little Richard called him "an integrator" and said he "opened the door for black music", while Al Green said "He broke the ice for all of us." Into the twenty-first century, though, the view that he had "stolen" Black music still had supporters.