Elvis Presley

Forty years ago in the United States, there were already many different kinds of popular music: black music, white music, and gospel, the music of the church.

America was rich. Young people had jobs. They had money to buy radios and to listen to the new records. They had money to buy electric guitars. They began to play the new music: R and B - rhythm and blues, and rock and roll.

Elvis Presley listened to these different kinds of music when he was a boy. Presley was born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi. He came from a poor white family. When he was a boy, he heard gospel music in his parents' church and he heard black people playing R and B. He made his first record in 1954 and in 1956 he had his first number one hit: Heartbreak Hotel. Suddenly he was famous and he was rich. He looked good, he was a great singer and he was different. Girls liked him. Boys wanted to be like him.

Before Elvis, most young people were like their mothers and fathers. They wore the same clothes, they did the same things. After Elvis, everything changed. Young people wanted to be different. They wanted different clothes. They had different music. Elvis was the first star of rock and roll, the first pop star.

Presley's later life was not so happy. He made some bad records and bad films. In the seventies he sang in Las Vegas, but he had problems with drugs and died in 1977. Today, millions still remember him and still call him the King - the King of Rock and Roll. Since the 1950s, there have been many stars of pop and many different kinds of music. But in the 1950s, one man more than any other changed pop music: Elvis. He was the man who, more than any other, started the story of pop.

Steve Flinders: Forty Years Of Pop; Oxford University Press, 1996 (2001), page 2 f.