The hips, the voice

Friday, 24th August 2007

As a belated postscript to the Coffee House video tributes to Elvis, I thought I'd point out that my good friend Martha Bayles, who has been Awol from her Serious Popcorn culture blog of late, has a very good piece in the Weekly Standard on the origins of the Presley phenomenon. She has some interesting thoughts on the inspiration for that infamous leg shake (it's said to have come from a gospel singer called Jim Wetherington) and she reproduces some analysis from the late Henry Pleasants, a CIA man who became one of the great classical and pop music critics of our time. (He spent his final days living in a flat near Victoria that was, as I recall, full of harpsichords.) Here's what Pleasants - a devotee of bel canto - had to say about the Pelvis's voice:

"Elvis has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary compass and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion. The voice covers about two octaves and a third, from the baritone's low G to the tenor's high B, with an upward extension of falsetto to at least a D flat."

Martha, by the way, has been travelling the world in order to write a book on America's public diplomacy. Or the lack of it, I suppose you could say. Judging by the way things are going on the PR front, she'll probably have enough material to fill several volumes. If you're interested, you can read more about this in the interview I did with her on my old blog.

[Photo: An Elvis impersonator enjoys time in a local pub during January's Elvis Festival in Parkes, Australia. For one weekend every year, the small country town is innundated with Elvis fans, impersonators and performers from around the world. Credit: Ian Waldie/Getty Images.]