Overrated On September 9, 1956, Elvis Presley performed on “Toast of the Town,” a variety program hosted by Ed Sullivan. He opened with “Don’t Be Cruel,” then introduced the title song of his new movie, Love Me Tender . Later in the show Presley sang Little Richard’s hit “Reddy Teddy.” As he began to move and dance, the camera pulled in, so that the television audience saw him only from the waist up. The incident has become a legendary moment in the history of American culture, cited often as evidence of the dominance of sexual censors in the 1950s.

Their power has been vastly overrated. Elvis’s appearance in fact demonstrates that rock ’n’ roll had put the prudes on the defensive. Sullivan, who had said earlier that Elvis “is not my cup of tea,” booked him for the then astronomical fee of $50,000 when the popularity of the rock ’n’ roll singer soared. His investment paid off: The September 9 show got a Trendex rating of 43.7, which meant that 82.6 percent of the television audience had tuned in. Even from the waist up, Elvis retained his erotic appeal, especially when viewers heard eruptions of emotion from the studio audience each time the singer sneered, swayed, or sighed.

Jack Gould, the television critic for The New York Times , recognized what had happened. The overstimulation of the physical impulses of young boys and girls was “a national disgrace,” he wrote. On the Sullivan show, Presley had “injected movements of the tongue and indulged in wordless singing that were singularly distasteful.” But the businessmen of television, Gould predicted, would continue to capitalize on the desire of a mass audience for “highly tempting yet forbidden fruit.” As Gould threw in the towel, Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, put an exclamation point on the episode by announcing that his client’s price for two guest appearances and an hourlong television special was now $300,000.

The repeal of reticence, then, was well under way. Thanks in no small measure to rock ’n’ roll, the sexual genie was climbing out of the bottle in the fifties, the decade of Elvis, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, a time when there was “a whole lotta shakin’ going on.”

Underrated Rock ’n’ roll got its name in the fall of 1954. Thomas Louis Hardin, a blind street musician, composer, and beggar, claimed that the disc jockey Alan Freed had stolen the name Moondog from him for a radio program, “Moondog House.” When it turned out that Freed had played Hardin’s recording “Moondog Symphony” on his show, Judge Carroll Walter awarded Hardin $5,700 and forbade Freed to use the moniker. Although initially “very angry and shocked,” Freed quickly changed the name of the show to “Rock ’n’ Roll Party.” A black euphemism for sexual intercourse, rock ’n’ roll appeared often in the lyrics of rhythm and blues music.