Mixed Music for a Mixed People, or, Why Elvis Was Not a Cultural Appropriator

Genealogists use documents, oral histories (and latterly DNA) to trace family lines backward in time.

Tracing the origins of musical styles and genres is a lot more complicated.

Sound recording is only just over a century old.

This means if we want to know what music in a certain place, among a certain community, sounded like before the 1900s, we have to rely on educated guesswork.

Musicologists are pretty good at mapping the evolution of musical forms when historical printed lyrics or musical notation exists.

For example, an old Appalachian ballad such as “The Hangman’s Tree” can be traced back to the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) by comparing its similarities to ballads known from as early as the 1600s such as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows“.

An elderly slaveholding women named Elizabeth Shepherd [nee Yerby], born in 1778, had her throat slit by an enslaved girl named Pheriba in Alabama in 1848.  Unusually for the time, the enslaved girl was not immediately hanged, but languished in jail for two years before “justice” ran its course, and she was taken to a large oak tree near the county courthouse for her public execution.

Hundreds travelled from far and wide to witness the spectacle, dressed in their Sunday best and laying-out their picnic blankets while peddlars and musicians worked the crowd.

It is said that people sang “The Hangman’s Tree” while a fiddler played, until a preacher stepped up to offer a final prayer and sermon.

The awful deed was then done.

“The Hangman’s Tree” ballad lived on in various forms, being eventually recorded under other names such as “The Gallows Pole” by artists from Odetta to Led Zeppelin.

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People born after the 1960s have a hard time imagining a social, cultural and political world overtly segregated <in law> by skin color.

And in terms of music – in a modern world where blues, rock, soul, jazz, and rap music have completely crossed “racial” and class lines – it is also easy to forget just how dangerous and alien these musical forms once seemed to white, “respectable” America.

In the 1930s and 1940s, “respectable” white folks in cities and towns mostly listened to popular music or crooners.

The less conservative among them listened to big band music, which sneaked its Black origins in through the back door (often quite literally).

In rural areas, there was still no such thing as “country music” per se – that name would only be coined by record companies a little later.

Rural white folks who “didn’t mix” tended to listen to ballads, “old-timey” or gospel music.

Anything which included drums or a heavy beat was not considered “white music”.  Or to put it even more bluntly, the sound of drums and a rocking beat was The Devil’s Music.

Drums made folks want to dance in a way nothing like the formal square-dancing of country tents and barns.

Drums were for loose, lascivious people.

These color lines within music were consciously enforced – in the first instance, by the newly emerging commercial recording industry.

On one side, Bob Wills‘ western swing and hillbilly, on the other side, the jump blues of Junior Parker and the boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis.

And things might have remained so, except for one pesky fact which has remained true throughout the centuries.

Poor and marginalized people have always had more in common with each other than with the people who keep them down.

This is why musical color divisions created by the privileged were never observed or respected by the people who got called “poor white trash” by ignorant outsiders.

And there is more…

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Only a certain class of so-called “white trash” was comfortable planting a foot firmly on both sides of this fence.

People with no high social reputation to protect, people who weren’t even “fully white” to begin with.

Enter the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia and other similar or related mixed-ethnic groups.

In almost every instance where later social commentators have pointed a finger, accusing “white folks” of appropriating “Black music” during the mid-20th century, we find a far more complex and nuanced situation, in which poor mixed-ethnic people “presenting as white” WERE MERELY PARTICIPATING IN THE MUSIC THEY ALREADY SHARED WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY.

One of the earliest points where musical segregation was non-existent between the poor Black and White communities was in the genre called “the blues”.

Two or three decades later, poor Black and White (OR MIXED) communities were at it again – this time with new and exciting genres like rhythm & blues and rockabilly.

Of course, the people who first played it didn’t call it “rockabilly”.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, anything faintly reminiscent of “hillbilly” was seen as a slur.

“Hillbillies”, or people with complicated ethnic roots, just called it “good-time music”.

Only bigots and racists from outside these marginalized communities tried to police a line between “Black” and “White” music.

This cross-ethnic, cross-fertilization reached perhaps its ultimate station in commercial terms with the early Sun Records Memphis recordings of Elvis Presley.

In 2024, it is easy to forget that Elvis Presley‘s recording of “That’s Alright, Mama” was banned outright from airplay on “white” radio stations, for being “n***** music“.

BUT ELVIS WAS NOT CONSCIOUSLY SINGING “BLACK MUSIC”.  HE WAS SIMPLY SINGING THE MUSIC WHICH SURROUNDED HIM GROWING-UP DIRT POOR IN RURAL MISSISSIPPI.

Anyone doubting this should read some old interviews with B. B. King, who was always quick to defend Presley against accusations of cultural appropriation.

Many early record companies treated Black musical contemporaries of Elvis disgracefully, that is certain.

But how Presley was marketed by record companies (and his grifter of a manager) is another argument altogether, separate from his own love of the music he grew up with.

Trace a line from the Maddox Brothers and Rose in the 1930s.  Folks from northern Alabama who slept on the ground as they made their way to the fruit-picking valleys of California via Oklahoma.  Singing songs about scantily-clad women named Sally who let their bangs hang down low enough to protect their modesty.

On until the 1950s, with music from Carl Perkins, Lorrie Collins and The Collins Kids, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and the singular talent of Wanda Jackson.

A short blog offers insufficient space to give a genealogical breakdown of every “white” person involved in the genesis of R & B, rockabilly, and rock & roll.

But as one of my favorite writers on music and culture, Ted Gioia, constantly points out, if you want to understand the history of musical innovation, you have to look to the margins of society.

It is no coincidence that some of the most innovative and durable music in American history came out of places like New Orleans and Southern Appalachia – places where the marginalized of all colors made music together.