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Black artists licenced by elvis4/22/2024 ![]() ![]() There’s also Presley’s rendition of “Trouble” - performed in the 1958 film King Creole - that’s built on top of Bo Diddley's iconic blues riff from “ I’m a Man ” that was released three years earlier on his self-titled album. It’s well known that one of the best loved hits in his catalog, “You Ain’t Nothin But a Hound Dog,'' was a cover originally performed by Big Momma Thornton. Getting his start with Sun Records (a label that largely worked with Black musicians), a trend that Presley would rely on throughout his career was covering - as well as collaborating with - Black artists and songwriters. Still, the film doesn’t do much to critique Presley’s appropriation, with his racial education presented as a superhero origin story - literally transforming vulturism into a superpower as he bounces between juke joints and Pentacostal churches soaking up Black art. (He was, for instance, effusive in his praise of Fats Domino and B.B. But it’s pretty apparent that Presley had real reverence for the Black artists he grew up modeling his music after and borrowing from. As the film outlines, the violent upheaval of the late ‘60s, and threats against Presley’s life, transformed the already conservative Southerner into a paranoid crime and punishment Republican who buddied up to Nixon. ![]() ![]() Elvis presents the late singer and actor (played by Austin Butler) as a compassionate and politically aware individual that was forced to treat selling music the way Michael Jordan viewed selling shoes, cowed into neutrality by his domineering, parasitic manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). ![]()
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