Elvis Shocks Nation: Hound Dog Rocks TV

Milton Berle told Elvis Presley to leave his guitar backstage, and that decision changed American popular culture. On June 5, 1956, Presley performed "Hound Dog" on The Milton Berle Show without an instrument to hide behind, free to move his entire body in front of forty million television viewers. He ground his hips, dropped to his knees, and thrust his pelvis at the camera with a grin that was equal parts joy and provocation. The studio audience of teenage girls screamed so loudly that the band was inaudible. Their parents reached for the telephone. The backlash was immediate and vicious. The New York Times called the performance "a rock-and-roll variation on one of the more standard acts in the pointless art of strip-teasing." The Catholic weekly America demanded that the networks ban Presley from the airwaves. A congressman from Florida wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warning that Presley was a menace to American youth. Jack Gould, the most influential television critic of the era, wrote that popular music had "reached its lowest depths" with the performance. The controversy made Presley more famous than any amount of positive press could have. "Hound Dog," backed with "Don’t Be Cruel," was released as a single the following month and became the best-selling record of 1956, spending eleven weeks at number one. Ed Sullivan, who had publicly declared he would never book Presley, reversed himself and signed a three-appearance deal for the then-unprecedented sum of $50,000. During the third appearance, in January 1957, CBS famously filmed Presley only from the waist up. The Berle Show performance marked the moment rock and roll moved from a musical genre to a cultural revolution. Presley did not invent the music. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino had been recording it for years. What Presley did, by performing Black musical traditions on mainstream white television with uninhibited physical abandon, was make the style impossible for America to ignore or contain.