[Atlas Sneezed]

I agree with Elvis because of his influence on music for the last 50 years.

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If you define influential by the "how much different would our lives be if he had never existed"-test, then any entertainer would have a hard time making the list. You might get some authors who affected national views (Twain, Stowe, etc.) but the fact that we'd be listening to a slightly different form of pop music hardly is a blip.

My take is that the technology innovators (from Whitney to Gates) should be ranked higher.

[Kirkwood]

Sorry, but Elvis had a profound impact on music and therefore society. He made black music mainstream in white society. Without Elvis, you would have had none of the rock and roll talents of the late fifties and sixties, including the Beatles. Rock and roll and pop music and everything that evolved from Elvis probably never would have happened. Music would have evolved from the likes of Pat Boone and Rosemary Clooney. Elvis made the genesis of rock and roll acceptable to white America and then to the world. No one else was capable of making that transistion possible.