Controversial king

Main article: Elvis Presley's cultural impact

Sam Phillips had anticipated problems promoting Presley's Sun singles. He recalled: The white disc-jockeys wouldn't touch what they regarded as Negroes' music and the Negro disc-jockeys didn't want anything to do with a record made by a white man. Ironically, hillbilly singer Mississippi Slim, one of Presley's heroes, was one of the singer's fiercest critics. Phillips felt Dewey Phillips—a white DJ who did play 'black' music—would promote the new material, but many of the hundreds of listeners who contacted the station when That's All Right was played were sure Presley must be black. The singer was interviewed several times on air by the DJ and was pointedly asked which school he had attended, to convince listeners that he was white.

Regarding Presley's hybrid style of music, others have observed: Racists attacked rock and roll because of the mingling of black and white people it implied and achieved, and because of what they saw as black music's power to corrupt through vulgar and animalistic rhythms... The popularity of Elvis Presley was similarly founded on his transgressive position with respect to racial and sexual boundaries... White cover versions of hits by black musicians ... often outsold the originals; it seems that many Americans wanted black music without the black people in it. To some, Presley had undoubtedly stolen or at least derived his style from the Negro rhythm-and-blues performers of the late 1940s. But some black entertainers, like Jackie Wilson claimed: A lot of people have accused Elvis of stealing the black man’s music, when in fact, almost every black solo entertainer copied his stage mannerisms from Elvis.

Presley's record sales grew quickly throughout the late 1950s, with hits like All Shook Up, (Let me Be Your) Teddy Bear and I Need Your Love Tonight. Jailhouse Rock, Loving You (both 1957) and King Creole (1958) were released and are regarded as the best of his early films. However, many critics were not impressed—very few authoritative voices were complimentary. In response, it has been claimed that while Elvis’s success as a singer and movie star dramatically increased his economic capital, his cultural capital never expanded enough for him to transcend the stigma of his background as a truck driver from the rural South... 'No matter how successful Elvis became... he remained fundamentally disreputable in the minds of many Americans... He was the sharecropper’s son in the big house, and it always showed.'