Books, Arts & Manners: A Very Nice Boy

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown, 560 pp., $24.95)

ALL SLOPES are slippery. Forty years ago, columnists and clergymen were tearing their hair over Elvis Presley, whose televised hip-swiveling was contemptuously compared by the New York Times to “the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway”; today, MTV pumps gangsta rap and heavy metal into the homes of millions of teenage suburbanites, and nobody, least of all the Times, hoists an eyebrow. As for Elvis, I caught him on the Disney Channel just the other night, looking (and sounding) as innocent as Glenn Miller. The French, as usual, were wrong: the more things change, the worse they get.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

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Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, by Peter Guralnick (Little, Brown, 560 pp., $24.95)

ALL SLOPES are slippery. Forty years ago, columnists and clergymen were tearing their hair over Elvis Presley, whose televised hip-swiveling was contemptuously compared by the New York Times to “the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway”; today, MTV pumps gangsta rap and heavy metal into the homes of millions of teenage suburbanites, and nobody, least of all the Times, hoists an eyebrow. As for Elvis, I caught him on the Disney Channel just the other night, looking (and sounding) as innocent as Glenn Miller. The French, as usual, were wrong: the more things change, the worse they get.

About the Author

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.