Sad jester denies Rock'n'Roll's blended bloods

MSNBC race-hate monger Joy Reid was recently booted from that drain-circling, wacky left outlet.

But even as she writhes hilariously in professional demise, Reid continues to gasp out her wickedness.

"We black folk gave y’all Country music, Hip-Hop, R&B, Jazz, Rock'n'Roll. They couldn’t even invent that, but they have to call a white man ‘The King.’ Because they couldn’t make Rock'n'Roll, so they have to stamp ‘The King’ on a man whose main song was stolen from an overweight black woman," Reid recently told podcaster Wajahat Ali, himself a progressive shoveler of race hate.

"Hound Dog," the song to which the rejected black-supremacist blowhard referred, and which the dominative Big Mama Thornton first sang, was written by Mike Lieber and Jerry Stoller, a white, Jewish songwriting team responsible for hits by Elvis, the Coasters, Wilbert Harrison, Ben E. King, and numerous other marquee names.

Of course, select Rock'n'Roll ingredients existed prior to Presley's 1954 recording debut at Sun Records in Memphis. Works embodying them were electrifying and wondrous.

But the national stage appearance of Crown Electric Co. truck driver Elvis marked -- not an example of white culture appropriating something blacks had already developed, but for which they were denied credit -- but the emergence of the hitherto-unrepresented country, white working class into popular culture visibility. And that idiosyncratic influence is essential to the genre. 

The composite creature was unlike any predecessor. Tennessee Rockabilly guitar man Carl Perkins did not sound like venerated shouter Big Joe Turner, nor did the frantic storms of Jerry Lee Lewis recall the risible and urbane stylings of Fats Waller -- though all men helped develop the new music.

In his invaluable volume, "Unsung Heroes of Rock'n'Roll," veteran music writer Nick Tosches noted that the burgeoning sound, which spread across 1950s America and ultimately the entire globe, began in regional pockets and was of mixed parentage.

"Rock'n'Roll was not created solely by blacks or whites," wrote Tosches. Earlier, after dispatching mono-racial Rock'n'Roll creation fancies, the author observed, "One could make just as strong a case for Jews being the central ethnic group in Rock'n'Roll's early history; for it was they who produced many of the best songs, cultivated much of the greatest talent, and operated the majority of the pioneering record companies."

It would be impossible to construct an exhaustive review of early Rock'n'Roll without citing Doc Pomus, Mort Schuman, Les Bihari, or Sid Nathan. It is telling that many of today's race-as-creative-qualification theorists might not even be able to identify those men, significant to the style's germination though they were.

It is flatly anti-creative to argue that an individual or community can "steal" art from another. Universal influencing is not only legitimate,  but how works are birthed. One artist inspires another, an idea is raised up, turned around, and new art is born.

Concepts like ownership, territoriality and separatism are wholly foreign to the phenomenon.

Critics are correct to point out that elements of white-dominated mass popular culture have at times assumed and domesticated black-impacted idioms (think Pat Boone), while paying neither due acknowledgment nor recompense. Deserving artists went unnoticed - and that was criminal.

But Elvis was one of many talented men and women whose music helped American popular culture become representative of all America's people. To ignore that today and instead proffer slanderous myths is an affront not only to their contributions and the prize of racial unity, but to the ideals of honesty and reason.

White House spokesman Harrison Fields was caustic:

"Joyless Reid is an ungrateful hack who fails to acknowledge her privilege. Whatever remains of her success would only be possible in the United States of America, the same country she degrades for sport. She was too unhinged for MSNBC, and was fired. Instead of changing her act, she’s doubled down on stupid."