Thank you, Elvis! Thank you very much!

The King of
Rock 'n' Roll

Wednesday, August 16, 2017: Today marks the 40th anniversary of the day Elvis Presley died, much too young, at age 42.

Elvis was not the first white performer to have a number one record on the Billboard R&B charts — that honor seems to have gone to, of all things, the record "White Christmas," sung by Bing Crosby in 1942 — but Mr. Presley placed fully 35 records on those R&B charts. Most of the artists on those charts, down through the years, have been African American.

Elvis's five #1 R&B records were legendary: "Hound Dog," "Don't Be Cruel," "All Shook Up," "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear," "Jailhouse Rock," "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck."

Elvis was the first white man to come reasonably close to singing in the soulful manner a black man always could. He bridged the racial divide in a way few others could back in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

In 1968 he sang "If I Can Dream":



In 1969 came "In the Ghetto":



In today's Washington Post is an op-ed by Gary Abernathy, publisher and editor of the Times-Gazette in Hillsboro, Ohio. The piece is titled "Elvis’s death was a perfect example: The media doesn’t understand Middle America." In the American Heartland, back then in 1977, the passing of the King of Rock 'n' Roll was stunning news, Mr. Abernathy says. But to most of the editors and commentators in big-city news outlets, no.

One TV network led off its August 16, 1977, evening news program with a story about President Gerald Ford’s endorsement of the Panama Canal treaty, for instance. Today, I ask you, which story seems more epochal, Elvis's death (and the way the news media missed its importance to millions of Americans back then) ... or the Panama Canal? Mr. Abernathy sees the answer as pretty obvious.

Mr. Abernathy's approach strikes me as, in spirit, quite a Christian one. He wants to show what the memory of Elvis means to us now: a help in healing differences between the bulk of Americans on the two coasts, on the one hand, and many in the South and the Heartland on the other. I think there's nothing more Christian than to work to settle human differences in a just manner. And how interesting it is that Mr. Abernathy's current effort to build needed bridges in America echoes the bridge-building between whites and blacks that Elvis himself did, way back in his day 40 years ago!