It was 1955. Elvis Presley was 20 years old, and almost nobody outside the South knew his name yet. He was riding around in a car with two other musicians, playing in high school gyms, at county fairs, and at little country music shows. Most nights the crowd came to see somebody else, not Elvis.
Then the screaming started.
Elvis would finish a song, and the girls in the crowd would go wild. Loud. Really loud. And when he came off stage, he was confused. He asked the guys in his band what he had done wrong.
His drummer was D.J. Fontana. Fontana had played behind hundreds of acts at the Louisiana Hayride, a big radio show in Shreveport, Louisiana, so he had seen just about everything. He gave Elvis a simple answer. You’re dancing, he said. You’re moving around up there.
Elvis was honestly surprised. He said something like, “Oh, am I?”
He really didn’t know. He was a shy, nervous kid holding a guitar, and when the music started, his legs just went. Nobody taught him. Nobody wrote it down for him. His body was answering the beat, and he wasn’t paying attention to it.
Watch him move, and the girls go crazy right here!
Elvis Presley at Milton Berle Show (Live TV 5th June 1956) Full Appearance Remastered HD
But after that night, he did pay attention. He started noticing which moves made the noise get louder. Then he did those moves again. And, after each performance, the crowd showed him what worked.
Other singers saw what was coming. In 1955, Bill Haley had the biggest song in the country with “Rock Around the Clock.” He was the face of rock and roll. Then he got a look at this kid from Memphis. Haley reportedly said just two words about it: “We’re finished.” He had the hit records. Elvis had the face, the hair and the hips. Haley could see which one teenagers would pick.
Then television got involved, and everything blew up.
On June 5, 1956, Elvis sang “Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show. He put the guitar down. He slowed the ending way down and moved his hips in front of the whole country. Newspapers called it disgusting. Preachers gave sermons about him. Parents were furious. Elvis was suddenly the most talked-about young man in America, and not in a nice way.
The pressure kept building. When he returned to The Ed Sullivan Show on January 6, 1957, the cameras were told to show him only from the waist up. Millions of people watched a rock-and-roll star and were not allowed to see half of him.
Here’s the sad part. Elvis didn’t understand why people were so angry. He never thought he was leading kids astray. He said so, and by all accounts, it really bothered him. To him, he was singing songs the only way he knew how.
And it all started because a nervous 20-year-old had no idea his legs were moving.