Elvis Shakes America: The Night Sullivan Surrendered

On September ninth, nineteen fifty six, Elvis Presley made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it became one of the most talked about moments in the history of American television and popular music. What makes this especially delicious is that Ed Sullivan himself had originally sworn he would never book Elvis, calling him unfit for a family audience after watching him wiggle his way through a performance on a rival program. But when a competing show scored huge ratings with the young singer from Memphis, Sullivan changed his tune fast, and he ended up paying Presley an enormous sum for three appearances, something like fifty thousand dollars total, which was a jaw dropping number for television at the time. On this particular night, Sullivan himself was not even there. He was recovering from a car accident, so the actor Charles Laughton hosted in his place, reading off cue cards and clearly a bit bewildered by all the fuss surrounding this hip swiveling newcomer. Elvis sang a handful of songs including Don't Be Cruel and Love Me Tender, and the studio audience, packed with screaming teenage girls, nearly lost their minds. Reports from the time describe a level of hysteria that older viewers found utterly baffling, a sound of pure teenage devotion that the country had never quite heard directed at a performer before. An estimated sixty million people tuned in that night, which was something like eighty percent of the entire American television viewing audience at the time. That kind of shared cultural moment is almost unimaginable now in our world of a thousand streaming choices, but back then nearly everyone in the country was watching the same flickering black and white screen at the same time, and what they saw was a twenty one year old truck driver turned singer redefining what a performer could be. Contrary to popular legend, Sullivan did not actually ban the cameras from showing Elvis below the waist during this first appearance. That famous restriction came later, during his third appearance in January of the following year, after network and sponsor anxieties about his gyrating hips had fully caught up with the controversy he was stirring. On this September night, the cameras showed plenty, and the swiveling hips were very much part of the broadcast, sending shockwaves through living rooms across the nation. This appearance is often cited by historians as a genuine turning point, a moment when rock and roll fully announced itself to mainstream America through the biggest media platform of the era. It cemented Elvis as a national phenomenon rather than just a regional sensation, and it showed television executives and record labels alike that this new sound and this new kind of performer had a hold on young audiences that older forms of entertainment simply could not match. Sullivan, ever the showman, would go on to famously host the Beatles for their own earth shaking American debut less than eight years later, but it was Elvis who first proved that a single television night could reshape the culture. Some great Deals https://amzn.to/49SJ3Qs For more check out http://www.quietplease.ai