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Nearly as great as our need to elevate certain common folk to the status of heroes is the need of others to tear them down — to show us that our heroes are possessed grievous flaws that make them unworthy of the praise and attention we lavish on them. Such was the case with the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. Although his public persona was that of the wild, rebellious, gyrating rock-n-roller, Elvis was actually a shy, humble, religious, polite, respectful young man. Surely this private Elvis was too good to be true. A poor white Southerner who had achieved unprecedented fame and success by co-opting the black man's music, surely Elvis must have been a racist at heart. So it was believed at the height of Presley's popularity in early 1957, when the rumor began circulating that he had dismissively put down blacks by stating that The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes. Never mind the rich rhythm and blues and gospel music heritage of blacks that Elvis had so assiduously mined in becoming the most popular entertainer the world had ever seen; the only use he had for them was as servants and consumers of his products. This alleged utterance of Elvis Presley's was so completely at odds with his true personality and beliefs that anyone who knew him found it hard to believe the rumor could be taken seriously.Sam Phillips, the producer and head of Sun Records who gave Elvis his start, noted that The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley had to be one of the biggest things that happened to us ... And Elvis biographer Charles L. Ponce de Leon observed that: When rumors of the alleged 'Negro slur' were at their height in mid-1957, plenty of musicians and other acquaintances whom Elvis had encountered during his rise to fame testified that the remark attributed to the singer was completely out of character for him: But millions of people knew only the public Presley image and very few knew Elvis the man, so the rumor grew and spread throughout early 1957. It mattered not that the story came cloaked in impossible details, such as Elvis' supposedly making the statement in Boston (a city he had never visited) or on Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person television program (on which Elvis had never appeared). Finally, Jet magazine, finding that tracing the rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth, dispatched reporter Louie Robinson in search of the truth. Robinson went straight to the source, visiting Presley on the set of Jailhouse Rock: Michael T. Bertrand, writing in Race, Rock, and Elvis, noted that the infamous remark first appeared in an article about the singer as something said by an anonymous person on the street:
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