Who Was Elvis Presley the Hound Dog 004

Who Was Elvis Presley the Hound Dog
Elvis Presley had been performing live for some years when he booked an appearance on the Steve Allen show. It was 1956 and also the mainstream culture was barely able to contain the budding ######uality that his music was bursting with. This was before he was well known, but now 20 years later Elvis is so popular (to this day that Elvis Wigs are a massive seller on Halloween.)
It seems that there was a sense of containment that a lot of the older generations felt towards the new sounds and culture that was creating. Ed Sullivan agreed to have Elvis perform on his show, but only allowed him to be filmed from the waist up. It was understood that showing Elvis' dance moves and gyrations would mean that Ed Sullivan no longer had a "family" show.
Though it seems to us now a relatively tame dancing movement, pelvic gyrations, at that time, were considered extremely taboo, and totally inappropriate for mass viewing audiences. Parents of teenagers had been generally horrified at Elvis' performance style,cheap full lace wigs, and Frank Sinatra called it, "a rancid smelling aphrodisiac".
When Elvis scheduled and appearance on the Steve Allen show in July of 1956, it seemed yet one more fantastic chance for publicity and advancement of his career. He had been performing Hound Dog for audiences for a while at that point and had perfected his wiggling hips and dance movements. Just the prior month, he had appeared on the Milton Berle show. There,virgin remy full lace wigs, he performed "Hound Dog" to screaming fans and this recording might be found on a lot of internet sites. Although the song itself contains no explicit words or anything especially groundbreaking musically, it was Elvis' interpretation of it that persons found offensive.
The lyrics,lace wigs, originally performed as a blues song by a woman, sing about a lazy good-for-nothing husband who can't even put food on the table to feed his family. In Elvis' version the words and music are the same,full lace wigs, but adding his dancing to the music and the way his voice bumped and growled over the words suddenly gave it an electrically ######ual connotation. The line "they said you was high-classed" which in an earlier version meant the promise of a solid husband who was a stand up citizen, could now be interpreted as in reference to a woman, where high-classed has an immediately ######ual meaning.
For his appearance on the Steve Allen show, he participated in a comedy sketch and then appeared in a suit and tails with his hair flatter and additional slicked back for a rendition of his well-known "Hound Dog" song. Steve Allen was a composer and TV personality who generally mocked common recording artists by reading their lyrics as poems.
There are loads of well known music songs that can appear nonsense when read as poems, but when sung, the intention is clear. When he had Elvis on as a guest performer, he not merely had him dress up much more than was appropriate for his performance, but he had a live basset hound rolled out for Elvis to sing to. Whilst some parents and conservative types had been appeased and even entertained by this scenario, Elvis himself was humiliated. It was clear that the real version of "Hound Dog" required extra of a hipster style of dress, and a high pompadour which got shaken out by enthusiastic dancing and full gyrations of the hips.