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IN PRAISE OF COPYING
Copying, originality, invention, innovation and the King of Rock 'n' Roll

WELCOME TO ELVISLAND

Few events on the planet capture our mixed-up and confused feelings about copying better than the annual Elvies festival, held each October in an unprepossessing purpose-built holiday resort outside the seaside town of Porthcawl in wet and windy south Wales. The Elvies is the world's largest such gathering devoted to His Presleyness (it has a daily attendance only slightly lower than the much cooler and well-funded Burning Man Festival). Over the course of one autumnal weekend, out where the brown-grey waves of the Bristol Channel meet the post-industrial landscape of the Welsh coast, more than 100 acts strut their stuff - shake their hips and curl their lips - and present their impersonations of the one and only - The King.

In 2012 the Elvies achieved something particularly special: it witnessed the largest ever recorded gathering of Elvis impersonators doing their snake-hipped best, rather rowdily singing along to 'Hound Dog' (smashing the record held by a Nike US sales conference some two years previously).

Elvies organizer Peter Phillips noted, 'We had all sorts of different Elvises aged from three to 80 and from the UK, Ireland, Germany, Malta and even Brazil. They were wearing all manner of Elvis costumes from gold lamé jackets, to leather jump suits and GI uniforms.'9 (Although, if the photographic evidence is anything to go by, the predominance of rather paunchy Vegas Elvises says something about the festival's demographic.)

1-2-3-4: off they go - jumping, gyrating, shaking, uh-huh-ing and vairmuch-ing.10

COPYCATTING AN ORIGINAL

On the surface, the Elvies is a celebration of copying - of impersonations of the great man whom we all acknowledge as one of the great innovators. The man Mick Jagger dubbed 'a unique artist - an original in an area of imitators'.

" The Elvies is a celebration of copying. "

As with most Elvis-related events, the majority of people seem happy with the kind of mimicry on show - no-one is actually seriously pretending to be Elvis even if they've got his moves down to a 't'. Nobody's deluding themselves or anyone else - apart from the 'guy [who] works down the chipshop [who] swears he's Elvis', as the song has it.

Some of the Elvises of course are more Elvis-y than others: some have more of the voice, some have more of the looks or the costume or the legs. And for those that don't really have any of these things, the weakness of their impersonation is taken in good spirit. Good and bad copying seem to be equally well-received: accurate and inaccurate turns alike. Fat Elvis or thin Elvis, young (and there are some very young Elvises - young enough to be great grandchildren of his Uh-Huhness) or old Elvis. Every Elvis is good in Elvisland.

Even if that great Welsh Elvis-a-like, Michael 'Shaky' Barrett (AKA 'Shaking Stevens') - were to stumble in and run through any one of his 33 (!) UK Top 40 Elvis-style singles, still we'd all be happy: while he still appears and moves like Truck Driver Elvis, we know and he knows and we know he knows his copying is not meant as a bad thing but as an 'homage' or something similar.

But beyond all this happy copying of different degrees of faithfulness, on another level, nobody seems to want to mention the fact that the object of all this copying - the Original, the King himself - wasn't perhaps quite as, well . original as all that.

" The King himself - wasn't perhaps as original as all that. "

ELVIS-A-LIKE

Let's start with his handle - the Elvis name is no one-off, no 'moonunit' neologism (the name Frank Zappa famously gave his son).

Indeed, the name Elvis has a long and honourable past: it is an anglicized version of the name of a real 6th-Century Celtic bishop, Saint Ailbe (alternative spellings include Ailbhe, Elfeis, Ailfyw, Ailvyw, Elveis, Albeus), who supposedly baptized the patron saint of Wales, St David. The abandoned ruins of the church of St Elvis don't sit outside Memphis, Tennessee, nor just off the strip in Vegas, but in a farm on the cold wet hillside about 4 miles east of the city which bears the name of Wales' Patron Saint, looking out towards Ireland, where that Elvis lived. His mother's name is undeniably Welsh (Gladys); his surname too seems to be of local origin: the North Pembrokeshire Preseli (sic) Hills run some 13 miles from Dinas Island to Crymych through what is now the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. Although, as is so often the case, the geographical origins of the family's name are not something that the owners are aware of - a name is just a name after all, even if it is handed down over many generations.

" Elvis was and remains a covers artist. "

Nor was the music Elvis made all that new: it was a mix of the stew of RnB and Blues and Gospel and such like he heard near Memphis' Beale Street where he had his first (truck driving) job; the songs all covers, not originals, including tracks from The King's early Sun Sessions like That's All Right, Mama by Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup and Blue Moon of Kentucky, a 1947 hit for Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass boys. While in later years, his management attempted to secure co-writing credits for the songs the man recorded, Elvis was and remains a covers artist - not some auteur, singer-song-writer or inventor, singing the songs of his heart and his own creation but someone who sang the songs of someone else. As any amateur musician will tell you, there's a world of difference between the status of those who 'write their own material' and 'covers bands'.

'Real' musicians, we imagine, create their own music, write their own tunes and their own lyrics; by contrast we consider 'cover' artists as musical freeloaders - not talented enough to do their own thing. It's worth noting that this is both a passing idea (for much of the history of the music industry, it has been as much if not more the performance of a song that matters - the product of the interpreter's rather than the songwriter's efforts and skills') and one dependent on the cultural context (the notion of the 'auteur' performer and the singer songwriter flourished particularly in the latter part of the 20th Century).

Of course, there are cover artists and then there are cover artists - the local wedding band are not a patch on Elvis, surely? Even my band, the Mighty Big Shorts, are a covers band. It makes us feel slightly better - when faced with the disdain of proper muso's moonlighting as sound-engineers - to recall that The King often sang other people's songs better than the composers could do so themselves (even if the same cannot strictly be said of our shows).

" Even Elvis' famously shocking cover of Hound Dog was stolen from a local band. "

But even Presley's iconic covers of other people's tunes were often not his own: his version a copy of other's covers. His rendition of Hound Dog is seen by many as his breakthrough number but it was not fresh out of the box - the Leiber and Stoller song had already been a genre hit for blues singer Willie Mae 'Big Mama' Thornton. Thornton's version created such a splash that it spawned a handful of country-style covers and a bizarre selection of 'response' and spoof records (including 'Bearcat' with re-written lyrics by Sun's own Sam Phillips).

Elvis' shocking, highly sexualized version made him a national phenomenon when he played the Milton Berle Show in NBC-TV on 5 June 1956. While the first 90 seconds of the tune were performed uptempo, the final minute was what got the nation's parents uptight:

'slowing the pace, Elvis bent the mike toward him and performed a series of slow pelvic thrusts . the sexual symbolism was all too obvious'11

But this, too, was copied from a local band, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whom Elvis and his band saw in Vegas. 'When we heard them perform that night, we thought the song would be a good one for us to do as comic relief when we were on stage. We loved the way they did it', noted guitarist Scotty Moore. So what did they do? They copied it.

You could say that the distinctive sound that Elvis brought out of the original Sun Sessions in July 1954 was the product of an accident rather than a deliberate 'invention' too: when Elvis, Scotty Moore and Bill Black were playing around with That's All Right, Mama, playing it at double speed and so on, producer Sam Phillips stopped them and asked, 'What are you doing?' 'We don't know', they said. Phillips had found the sound he was looking for. 'Back up and do it again', came the voice from the control room.12 Copy, copy, copy.

SHAKE A LEG

Even Elvis'...