A Bloody Sunday at Trafalgar Square was Victorian Class War

A popular British magazine illustration of the police charge on marchers in Trafalgar Square in 1887.

There sure are one hell of a lot of Bloody Sundays.  Could make your head spin.  A Wikipedia Disambiguation page lists 18 between 1873 and 1991 and I am not sure the list is definitive.  The first was a Reconstruction Era race riot in Colfax, Louisiana in which White Democrats attacked Black Republicans and Militia members trying to defend the ballot results of an election.  Between 50 and 160 Blacks were killed, most executed after surrendering and their bodies dumped in the river.  The most recent listed was on January 13, 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania when Soviet troops opened fire on civilians protesting rising prices in newly independent nation.  In between most of the incidents were cases of police, military, or armed security guards opening fire on protestors.  A handful like a 1939 massacre of civilians at Bydgoszcz, Poland by Nazi Germany were war crimes.

Most Americans associate Bloody Sunday with the attack on voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965 setting the stage for the historic Selma to Montgomery March on March 21.  They may also recall a Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 when British Army Paratroopers opened fire on unarmed Catholic demonstrators in Belfast, Northern Ireland leading to a twenty year-long guerilla war and bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA.  It is remembered as much for protest songs by Paul McCartney, Give Ireland Back to the Irish; John Lennon, Sunday Bloody Sunday; and U2’s song of the same name.

The events in London’s famed Trafalgar Square on November 13, 1887 are virtually unknown to Americans, but this particular Bloody Sunday was pivotal in British political, class, and labor history and helped shape a generation of struggle.

Times were hard in Britain in the 1880’s.  Had been since a crash in 1873 and would continue to be until the turn of the 20th Century.  The period is remembered as the Long Depression.  There were many contributing causes but among the most significant was a collapse in agricultural commodity prices that combined with the introduction of modern farming equipment displaced rural agricultural laborers and tenant farmers who with nowhere else to go flooded the cities.  The infusion of so many unskilled laborers into the cities led to a collapse of wages.  Unemployment skyrocketed and depressed wages led to widespread want.

Nowhere was the agricultural depression felt more strongly than in Ireland where despite huge losses in population due to starvation and disease in the Potato Famine decades earlier and mass emigration to the United States, Canada, and Australia, continuing consolidation of landed estates forced more peasants off the land, many of them piling into English cities when they could not raise fare for new worlds. 

Discontent was building in the cities where there were demonstrations of the unemployed and clashes with police for two years.  And in rural Ireland there were rent strikes, boycotts, rioting, and unrest which caused the Coercion Act of 1881 allowing for persons to be imprisoned without trial.  The act was introduced by the Liberal Government of William Gladstone and, along with continued harsh measures in Ireland, led to the abandonment by the radical wing of the Party.  With the old Whigs shattered, the Tories—now officially the Conservatives, swept to power and would remain in the saddle almost continually through the rest of the century.  Their hold was secured by the allocation of seats in Parliament that still vastly underrepresented urban and working class districts while preserving rural safe Ridings for the Conservatives.

The Conservatives ideologically refused to consider measures of domestic relief or economic reforms that might have interfered with a free market.  They were also most interested in the maintenance and extension of the Empire through which the vast wealth of the world settled into the hands of banks, corporations, and an entrenched elite who were thus insulated from the domestic economic crisis.

Starving men from London's East End slums line up for meal tickets from the Salvation Army.  Private charity was the only form of relief for the desperate.

These conditions gave rise to new movements—a small but growing socialist movement including the Marxists of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and Socialist League, and the middle class and intellectual Fabian Society of reformist socialists.  Discontented Liberals and former Liberals rallied around organizations like the National Secular Society, various free thought movements, and radical religious dissenters including the Unitarians.

There were also organizations of the Irish diaspora, increasingly radicalized by the Coercion Acts.  These were galvanized by the recent arrest of Irish nationalist Member of Parliament William O’Brien who was imprisoned for incitement as a result of an incident in the Irish Land War.  The Irish National League called for a mass demonstration to demand O’Brien’s release.

The SDF, led by William Morris, better known to American viewers of Antiques Road Show as the textile and furniture designer who was the father of the Arts and Crafts Movement, was eager to curry favor with the burgeoning Irish populations of the London slums and joined in the call for a demonstration.  They broadened demands to include unemployment relief.  They were able to attract fairly significant numbers of native English workers, many of them members of the struggling trade union movement.  The Fabians were not official sponsors, but most prominent members offered their support, including Irishman George Bernard Shaw, as did some of the radical Liberals and Freethinkers.

Artist and designer of furniture, wall paper, and domestic decorations, was also a leading radical and leader of the Social Democratic Federation which took the lead in organizing the Trafalgar march.

The march was well publicized in advance.  The Conservative government of Lord Salisbury vowed not to be intimidated and assigned infantry companies and cavalry troops in support of hundreds of massed Metropolitan Police who were armed only with their truncheons.

The flash point would be Trafalgar Square where the working class East End met the upper-class West End of London.  On that Sunday afternoon as many as 30,000 “respectable citizens” ringed the square in hopes of witnessing the suppression of the march as if it were a spectator sport.  Ironically, although many of the crowd probably hoped to see violence unleashed against the demonstrators, the presence of so many witnesses caused authorities to order that troops carry unloaded weapons and that the cavalry refrain from drawing their sabers.  There would be no repeat of the bloody military attacks on Chartist demonstrators 40 years before.

Annie Besant of the National Secularist League was the first speaker physically restrained from speaking but she was not beaten or arrested like other march leaders.

The march was well organized and coordinated.  Various feeder marches converged on the Square from different points in the East End.  Columns were led by Morris, fiery trade unionist and SDF leader John Burns, National Secularist League speaker Annie Besant, Scottish radical Liberal MP Robert Cunninghame-Graham, and the socialist feminist Elizabeth Reynolds.  Their prominence is an indication of how much of the leadership of the movement had slipped from the hands of the Irish nationalists to the socialists and radicals.

But the majority of the marchers, estimated at around 10,000 in numbers were Irish.  And they were plenty mad.  By all accounts many had come armed with clubs, iron bars, gas pipes, and knives.  They were met with a force of 2,000 police and 400 troops.  As soon as Annie Besant attempted to address the crowd, she was restrained by police, who despite her insistence declined to arrest her.  But police did attack other leaders including Burns and Cunninhame-Graham beating both men badly before dragging them away.

Police charged the crowd with truncheon’s swinging.  They were met and resisted by many of the armed Irish in a bloody melee in which dozens on both sides were seriously injured.  Perhaps biased press accounts claimed that the Police suffered greater injuries. Troops surged forward to disperse the crowd, the cavalry trampling many and some demonstrators were stabbed by bayonets.  Scores were injured and at least two demonstrators, Alfred Linnell, a young clerk and W. B. Curner died later of their wounds.

Burns, Cunninhame-Graham, and others who were arrested were sentenced to seven weeks in prison.  In Parliament most Liberal MPs supported the Conservative government’s use of force and its refusal to offer any concessions to the demonstrators.

One week later a second protest meeting was broken up by police.  Shortly after Linnell, who had not even been a participant in the march, but an unlucky spectator run down by a cavalry horse, died.  William Morris composed a memorial hymn which was published and widely disseminated.  Morris spoke at a memorial for Linnell telling thousands assembled that, “It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.”

When the prisoners were released in February an open meeting led to a breach between the radical Liberals, secularists, and reformist socialists and the more radical Marxists.   SDF leader Henry Hyndman violently denounced the Liberal party and singled out for criticism even radicals like Cunninghame-Graham for being insufficiently committed to the working class.  It represented a rejection of “respectable” middle class leadership leading eventually to a new strategy centering on the Trade Union movement and the creation of a working class-led social democratic Labour Party.

The British labor and socialist movements would look back on Bloody Sunday as an almost mythic event in their self-defined origin stories.

  

So It Goes--Skating on the Edge with Kurt Vonnegut

 

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He would become a veteran of another war, and the experience shaped him as a human being—one of the great iconoclasts of his time, and a confirmed pacifist.

His death on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)  He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling at his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.  

And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the announcement in Washington the same day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by another 120 days.  He despised the war and the men who started it.  Leaving behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him

.

Vonnuegut's complicated and sometimes contradictory views on religion were a natural reflection of his family's German Free Thinking tradition, childhood attendance in an Indianapolis Unitarian church, his wartime trials and disillusionment, and his disgust at the rise of the Religious Right as a thin cover for racism and bigotry.  Bible thumpers returned the disdain and are behind making his books among those most banned from school curricula and libraries.

Unitarians Universalists, in our insecurity, are always making lists of “greats.”  Having dominated 19th Century American literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in contemporary writers to keep up our cultural bona fides.  Vonnegut shows up on these lists.  

He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as Honorary Chair of the American Humanist Association. A Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in a world corrupted by fake Christianity.  It was largely assembled from his essays in the Chicago-based socialist magazine In These Times.  We all know that Humanism has also found a home in Unitarian Universalism.

Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and his family, wife Edith, eldest son Bernard, and daughter Alice.  Kurt, Jr. would arrive in 1922 shortly after this picture was taken.  The family came from a long line of German Free Thinkers and the family attended the Indianapolis Unitarian Church for which architect Kurt Sr. designed a building.

Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American Free Thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference at the turn of the 20th Century.  Vonnegut’s parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and the family belonged to the congregation in Indianapolis.  Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for the congregation.  Although not much of church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No Hell!” (surely a Universalist sentiment.)  He sometimes referred to himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly.  He was also asked to speak on the occasion of William Ellery Channing’s 200th birthday at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—an idealist and a cynic, a humorist whose satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the gravest savageries of the 20th Century.  He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.  Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the Depression, and his mother sink into mental illness and suicide. 

 

Vonnegut sans helmet was snapped with a column of GI POWS in 1944.  They young soldier looks frightened and by clasping his hands behind his head showed he was more compliant with orders than his companions.

Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s 3rd Army.  In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines before being captured.  As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment of his life, he survived the Allied firebombing of the historic city of Dresden and was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses in the old city.  This was the central event of one of his most famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm.  The incident also figures in at least 5 other novels.

In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York.  The job didn’t last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance lingered.  Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia.  The book was a publishing failure in 1952 but slowly gained a cult following as paperback editions followed.

 

A successful author at last--Vonnegut with some of his books.  Several had been initial failures but were reprinted after the huge success of Slaughter House Five. Almost all are now considered modern American classics that somehow escaped the science fiction pigeonhole and literary ghetto.

Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.  In Sirens of Titan gave us The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness, and kindness.  In it Eliot Rosewater says:

Hello, babies, welcome to Earth.  It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It’s round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you’ve go about a hundred years here.  There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it in his swan song A Man Without a Country.

 

He had his heroes.  His fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to both Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein.  He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech attacking the Mexican War he wrote “Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!” He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute native—Eugene V. Debs.  He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with the Beatitudes.  

 

Vonnegut in later life used variations of this to illustrate his books and to sign letters and autographs.

Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any war and all injustice.  He despised hypocrisy.  He despaired for humanity.  People like that are hard to come by.
 

Veteran's Day Long Ago and Far Away--Murfin Verse

 

This is a resurrection an old chestnut that I first read as a Chalice Lighting to open services at the old Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock, Illinois (now Tree of Life UU Congregation in Ridgefield. It was included in my 2004 Skinner House collection, We Build Temples in the Heart.

It was based on the memories of a boy from Cheyenne in the 1950s.  Reviewing it now, I am struck that the World War II is fast fading away.  In not too many years the last of them will be gone, just as I remember the passing of the last World War I vet at the age of 110 in 2011.  The cohort of their children, the so-called Baby Boomers are fast aging as well.  I am 77 and my friends with parents who served in what Studs Terkel called the Last Good War are about the same.

It occurs to me now that my grandchildren won’t understand much of what I wrote about.  They live in a different world.  World War II and post-war America are decades older for them than the Great War was for me.  Neither will they know or care about our Vietnam War choices obliquely referenced in the last lines.

 

                          

  One of those ubiquitous photos on the wall--First Lieutenant W. M. Murfin, U.S, Army Medical Corps on Leyte in the Philippines, 1943.

Pictures, Poppies, Stars and Generations

We knew war.

 

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man

            peered from a tinted photograph,

            overseas cap at a jaunty angle 

                        or the fifty-mission crush

                        or the crisp, square beanie of a gob.  

            usually someone’s Dad in some other life,

            but sometimes the ghost of someone frozen in time,

            caught in that picture like a fly in amber

            while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire

            ten feet from the high water on an anonymous beach,

            or splattered on the glass of the ball turret

            of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for an appointment

            with a German potato field,

            or bobbing in a sea of burning oil, naked and parboiled.

 

We knew pity.

 

                           

                                                             A  Buddy Poppy peddled on every street corner.
 

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,

            sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,

            noses burned off, faces twitching,

            fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand,

            shaking white cans for nickels with the other.

            on every street corner, May and November

            and no decent man or woman passed

            without emptying pockets of change,

            twisting flowers into buttonholes, on to purse straps,

            without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

 

                    

                                                A Gold Star Flag represented a family member lost in the War.

 

We knew death.

 

Inside scrapbooks with brittle pages and fading ink,

            kept far up in the front hall closet behind hatboxes,

            surrounded by last winter’s scarves and mittens,

            between the leatherette boards bound by black shoelaces,

            amid the rations coupons, V-mails,

            postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshots,

            campaign maps, and yellowed clippings,

                        a small fringed flag,

                        white edged in red and blue,

                        a gold star in the center.

 

                           

                                                     We raided our Dads' footlockers and haunted surplus stores for our play wars.

In the neighborhood we looted footlockers and duffel bags,

            saved our allowances for forays to the Army/Navy Store,

            outfitted ourselves in helmet liners, webbed belts,

            canteens and mess kits, cast–off khaki and drab,

                        and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,

                        between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,

                        on top of the car port, in the window wells,

                        every summer day we tried to sort glory from horror.

 

We knew war and pity and death—

            we thought.

 

And then—suddenly—it was our turn for real.

 

—Patrick Murfin

The Wayward Pedigree of that No Account Hound Dog

 

The sleeve of Elvis Presley's RCA single of Hound Dog featured a photo of him singing to a real dog on the Steve Allen show.

It was on this date in 1958 that Elvis Presley’s version of Hound Dog was certified as selling three million copies in the United States a little more than two years after it was released on July 12, 1956.  It was only the third record ever to hit that mark, and it did it in much shorter time than the others, both Christmas perennials—Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and Gene Autry’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  If there had ever been any doubt that the landscape of American popular music was made over by an epic earthquake, there was none anymore.

Presley's Gold Record for Hound Dog is on display at Graceland in Memphis.

Jazz based dance music had dominated the scene since the 1920s.  But times—and economics—were changing.  A long musician’s strike against the major record labels at the end of World War II taught popular singers to put out product without the backing of Big Bands.  The Bands themselves were enormously expensive to keep on the road.  During the late ‘40s hundreds folded leaving only a handful of big names and big draws still on the road.  Radio stations found it cheaper to play records than broadcast live programs from their studios or remotes from hotels and ballrooms.

After decades of Depression and war the public seemed to yearn for something simpler, sweet, even nostalgic.  It was an era of love songs and ballads where melody triumphed rhythm and of close harmony groups, both Black and White.

Around the edges of the culture, niche alternatives were on the rise.  The raw styles of country and urban blues were morphing into a new style, dubbed rhythm and blues or R&B which attracted wide Black audiences and appealed to daring whites.  Hillbilly and cowboy music were merging into a new style called Country and Western and stars like Hank Williams were beginning to attract fans all over the country.

Meanwhile with the Big Bands on the wane, Jazz musicians were freed from rigid charts and arrangements and a return to the form’s improvisational roots took startling new directions.  Be Bop combos were pushing the edge of music—but it was “listening” music, not dance numbers and was too complex and sophisticated for the new generation of teens who just wanted music they could party to.

It was in this post-war time that Rock & Roll began to emerge.  The origins of the style reach back—some blues recordings from as early as 1939 had elements of the new sound.  There are various candidates for the first true rock & roll song.  Among them That’s All Right Mama by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup in 1946 (Presley’s covered his first hit record in ’54); Wynonie Harris’s 1948 version of Ray Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight; Rock This Joint by Jimmie Preston and the Prestonians in 1949; Saturday Night Fish Fry by Louis Jordan and The Tympany Five the same year; and Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats in 1951.

All of those were by Black artists growing directly out of urban blues infused with a raucous style and driven my electric guitars and/or saxophones.  Others argue it wasn’t really rock & roll until it was done by White musicians and the introduction the Country and Western based Rockabilly.  For those folks, former country yodeler Bill Haley with his new band the Comets recorded Crazy Man Crazy in 1953 and the break-away hit Rock Around the Clock in ’54 represents the true birth of rock & roll.

The same year Sam Phillips was assembling his stable of young Rockabillies for his Sun Record Label in Memphis—Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, all of them familiar with call and response, blues, and Black gospel music.  And they mined those songs as covers or inspirations for original tunes.  They were shaking up music and getting air play from powerful disc jockeys with big teen age followings.  By ’55 the rock & roll revolution was on—but not yet won.

So how did a silly song about a dog become the cultural steamroller that made Pressley truly a mega star and make infant rock & roll the undisputed leviathan of pop music?  Well, to begin with it wasn’t about a dog….

Leiber and Stoller on the Tonight Show with Jack Parr.

The answer lies in the often overlooked “third root” of rock and roll—the largely Jewish New York based professional songwriters, most laboring for music publishers, who had been interpreting Black cultural for most of the 20th Century from Tin Pan Alley to the legendary Brill Building.  In the case of Hound Dog, the unlikely perpetrators were a pair of 19 year old upstarts, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller who already had some success peddling Hard Times for Charles Brown and Kansas City for Little Willie Littlefield recording as K. C. Loving, both moderate R&B hits in 1952.

In August of that year they were invited to meet Big Mama Thornton, a raw edged blues belter who was struggling to gain a foothold on Peacock Records.  They were introduced by band leader Johnny Otis.  They watched her rehearse and were impressed—and a little frightened, Leiber later said.

After casting about for ideas they came upon using some Black street slang for a pimp or a gigolo living off a woman.  The song was to be about her kicking him to the gutter.  Once the idea took shape, the song itself came quickly.  The pair reported jotting it down in ten or fifteen minutes on the car ride back to Stoller’s apartment.  They were so excited that they turned right around and came back to Otis’s place where Leiber rushed to the piano and pounded it out standing up singing:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Quit snoopin’ ‘round my door

You can wag your tail

But I ain’t gonna feed you no more.

 

Big Mama Thortons's down and dirty shout was an R&B hit but little heard by white audiences.

Stoller and Leiber took over from Otis in producing the recording session for Peacock after Otis had to sit in as drummer and couldn’t run the session.  The record was released in February 1953 to positive trade reviews and hit it big in Black urban areas.  It spent fourteen weeks on the Billboard R&B charts, seven of them at number one and was the #3 R&B hit of the whole year.

Although most White Americans never heard the record, its success spawned numerous “answer songs.”  These songs kept Peacock Records attorneys working overtime on copyright infringement cases.  The most notable of those actions was against Sam Phillips who claimed writing credits for an answer song Bear Cat performed by Rufus “Hound Dog” Thomas.  It was Sun Record’s first big hit.  But when the courts found Phillips guilty, the fines and court costs nearly bankrupted the label.  To save the company he had to sell the contract of his hottest property, Presley, to RCA Victor.

 Among the most unusual of several covers was a Western Swing version by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. 

 

Elvis got permission to use Freddie Bell and the Bellboys' sanitized lyrics and arrangement and even borrowed Bell's hip swiveling.

But the most influential was Philadelphia based Teen Records version by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a White group which had become an established Las Vegas lounge act.  Bell sanitized the lyrics for white audiences, just as the early songs of Little Richard and other Black acts were.  All the sexual innuendo was either removed and replaced by new lyrics or obscured.  Just having the song sung by a man muddied the original core metaphor.  The new version went:

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Cryin’ all the time.

You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog

Cryin’ all the time.

Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit

And you ain’t no friend of mine.

This sanitized version was now literally about a dog.  Unfortunately for Bell, tiny Teen Records did not have the muscle to make his recording anything more than a local Philadelphia hit.

While all of this was going on Leiber and Stoller themselves became hot commodities.  They established their own label, Spark Records producing hits like Smokey Joe’s Cafe for The Robins.  The label was later bought by Atlantic which left the boys in charge of their own division with the freedom to produce for other labels as well.  Now high-powered song writer/producers, they were soon churning out hit after hit in a legendary career.

In 1956 Presley was on the hunt for new material for RCA.  As an ardent blues fan he knew and admired Big Mama Thornton’s original and of course was very familiar with Rufus Thomas’s ill-fated Sun label answer.  Friends also reported that he liked to whistle and sing along with the Bob Wills version.  So, the song was on Presley’s mind when he and his backup band caught Bell’s act at the Silver Queen Bar and Cocktail Lounge in the Sands Casino.  Bell was doing it as a comedy change-up number, a virtual burlesque including gyrating choreography all to a three beat so called “Latin riff.”  Presley asked Bell for permission to record it, to which Bell eagerly agreed, hoping that it would hype sales of a planned LP that would include his own version.

Presley tried it out in live performances through the spring of ’56.  Like Bell, he used it as comic relief.  Audience reactions were strong.  But when he closed one of his biggest dates yet in front of 7000 hometown Memphis fans at the Cotton Festival the response was overwhelming.  It became his closing number for many years.

Elvis first performed Hound Dog on national television on the Milton Berle Show with the hip gyrations, not as legend has it on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Sullivan showcased Presley after Berle and Steve Allen but insisted he be shot only from the waist up to prevent his family audience from being scandalized.

He next tried it out on his first big national TV appearance on the Milton Berle Show on June 2.  On Berle’s advice he performed for the first time without his guitar and his hip swinging gyrations became a national sensation and scandal.  Appearing on the Steve Allen Show a few weeks later, Presley good naturedly let Allen turn the song into a parody of a parody crooning to a basset hound while in white tie and tails.

On July 2, 1956, the morning following the Allen show, Presley took it to RCA’s New York recording studios and it was released a scant two weeks later with Don’t Be Cruel on the B side. It was an immediate cross-genre hit.  It scored #1 on both the Country and Western and R&B Billboard charts and rose to #3 on the pop charts that year.  Radio stations around the country were blasting the tune and juke boxes were collecting nickels as never before.  The whole country was listening to Pressley and his Hound Dog.

Stoller was using some of his new wealth on a European vacation while all of this was going on and was unaware of it.  He returned to the States on the ill-fated liner Andrea Doria which sank after collision with another liner off of Nantucket.  Stoller was among the passengers rescued and Leiber was at the New York dock to greet him on July 26 with some startling news.

In their mutual memoirs, Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography they would recall that Leiber said:  “We got a smash hit on Hound Dog,” Stoller said, “Big Mama’s record?” And Leiber replied: “No. Some white guy named Elvis Presley.”  Stoller went on to comment, “I heard the record and I was disappointed. It just sounded terribly nervous, too fast, too white. But you know, after it sold seven or eight million records it started to sound better.”

Indeed.