Greil Marcus uses Elvis Presley's stage presence, lyrics, and the King's varying approaches to audiences to help us understand what his songs meant to those who heard them.  Marcus talks here about a song by black singer Arthur Gunter that Elvis reworked to his own ends.  Notice how Marcus weaves together music, social class and performance for his analysis.  

To hear a selection from the Elvis tune "Baby Let's Play House," Click here.  (Warning: this 1.2 meg file will take time to download on a slow modem.) 

Arthur Gunter, a black singer working for the Excello label in Nashville, wrote and recorded "Baby, Let's Play House," and got a hit with the black market in early 1955. He used a tight acoustic band and walked right through, vaguely interested in telling his girl that she might think she's hot stuff, but she'd better come on back and get down to it, or there'd be, you know, trouble. It was all very low-key . . . ; Gunter's lack of concern was his charm. Still, he didn't sound very convincing. 

Elvis wailed. He turned the song into a correspondence course in rock 'n' roll, and it was by far the most imitated of his first records. For pure excitement, he may never have matched it. 
 
The rhythm was heavy, the syncopation astonishing -- a fast, ominous bass tromping over a cottonmouth guitar -- the band drove hard into every chorus and cut out for all the best lines. "Aw, let's play house," Elvis shouted, and Scotty punched out a few riffs; "HIT IT!" Elvis cried, and Moore and Black rammed home music so tough it wasn't touched until Elvis pushed them into the earthquake that was "Hound Dog." 

Elvis made one crucial change in the lyrics. The girl he's after in this song is high-class stuff: she might go to college, he sings, she might go to school, but she'll never really get away, never be so sure of herself she can get along without the loving only he can give her. She might even get religion, Gunter had added, which won't help her either; but Elvis threw in a faster, flashier image that was more to his own point: "You may have a pink Cadillac/ But dontcha be nobody's fool!" Elvis had just bought one for himself. 

. . . But when Elvis left Memphis to confront a national audience as mysterious to him as he was to it, he had to define himself fully, and he did so by presenting his authentic multiplicity in music. I am, he announced, a house rocker, a boy steeped in mother-love, a true son of the church, a matinee idol who's only kidding, a man with too many rough edges for anyone ever to smooth away. 

. . . The Pink Cadillac was at the heart of the contradiction that powered Elvis's early music; a perfect symbol of the glamour of his ambition and the resentments that drove it on. When he faced his girl in "Baby, Let's Play House" . . ., Elvis sang with contempt for a world that had always excluded him; he sang with a wish for its pleasures and status. Most of all he sang with delight at the power that fame and musical force gave him: power to escape the humiliating obscurity of the life he knew, and power to sneer at the classy world that was now ready to flatter him. Not the real upper class, of course; it would be years before socialites set out in pursuit of the Rolling Stones and academics began to fawn over the Beatles. Still, the jump Elvis made from the woods and welfare to simple respectability was far more epic. Girls who had turned up their noses in high school were now waiting in line, just as today men and women who are barely hanging on to the edge of the middle class wait in line to see a man who has achieved an eminence class can never bring. 
 
Elvis sang out his song with a monumental disdain for all those folk who moved easily through a world that had never been easy for him (anyone who had ever shown the Presleys exactly who they were); he grinned at the big car he had dreamed about, because finally it was within reach, and he could take it, on his terms. 

A bit farther into the image of the Pink Cadillac, something more interesting was going on. If Elvis was looking down on his smart girl's Caddy from the vantage point of his own, he was implicitly presenting his new successful self as a target for his own resentments, and singing with more than enough emotion to hit the bullseye. He was the Star; not asserting, in the conventional Uriah Heep country style, that all his wealth don't buy him happiness (it does, it does), but burlesquing and damning the complacency, of the rich and powerful by flaunting his power and riches, and getting away with it. Somehow taking both sides, Elvis could show his listeners just how much, and how little, that Pink Cadillac was worth: more and less than anyone would have guessed. 

-- Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock'n'Roll Music. 3rd ed., New York: Plume, 1990, pp. 158-161.

 
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