The Fifties

by David Halberstam

“No,” Bernstein insisted, and Clurman could tell that he was deadly serious, “it’s Elvis. He introduced the beat to everything and he changed everything—music, language, clothes, it’s a whole new social revolution—the Sixties comes from it. Because of him a man like me barely knows his musical grammar anymore.” Or, as John Lennon, one of Elvis’s admirers, once said, “Before Elvis there was nothing.” If he was a revolutionary, then he was an accidental one, an innately talented young man who arrived at the right place at the right time. He had no political interests at all, and though his music symbolized the coming together of black and white cultures into the mainstream in a way that had never happened before, that seemed to hold little interest for him. Though much of his music had its roots among blacks, he, unlike many young white musicians, seemed to have little interest in the black world and the dramatic changes then taking place there.