Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (review)

The photograph on the front of Lost Revolutions captures what Pete Daniel’s book is about as well as any single image can. In Ellis Auditorium in Memphis in 1955, twenty-year-old Elvis Presley, one year removed from obscurity, stands with his arm around bluesman B. B. King. Race and class and the changing idea of culture all intersect in that one photograph. Sociologically speaking, Presley is undeniably poor white—that class of southerners in whom the most virulent brand of racial prejudice was said to reside. Yet, in embracing a black man he is doing something few “respectable” white southerners would have done at the height of post-Brown v. Board of Education “race-mixing” hysteria, particularly in a public place. In a deeper sense, in his music Presley always embraced elements of black culture that most genteel southerners—black as well as white—would not touch. Of course, Elvis was hardly representative of anything, and a great deal of racism did indeed reside in the poorest of white southerners, as it also did in betteroff, better-educated whites. That did not change in the 1950s, despite a number of opportunities for substantial change. What did begin to change—although the change wouldn’t be altogether apparent for a couple more decades—was the definition of southern culture itself. When Mencken, W.J. Cash, and other Southwatchers wrote of “culture” in the 1920s and 1930s and found Dixie culturally deficient, they had in mind high culture—the sort of thing measured by museums, libraries, and symphonies; or, they might have included, as a sort of footnote, “folk culture.” But they did not mean that mix of rural culture with working-class culture with mass culture that led to the creation of what Daniel calls (not disparagingly) “low-down” culture. That’s where Elvis belonged. That’s where rock ’n’ roll belonged, along with country music and stock car racing and other elements of the “wild” life that southerners brought into cities as they fled the farm during and just after World War II. It is in describing this rise of low-down culture that Daniel’s book is particularly effective.