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.
> Elvis had a profound impact on music and therefore society. He made black music mainstream in white society <
But Elvis wasn't the first, not by a long shot.
Haven't you ever seen those old movies from the 1930's and 1940's, with a bunch of white couples jitterbugging to the music of Count Basie and Cab Calloway?
Or have you heard about the "jazz age" of the 1920's, when just about every flapper and her beau were dancing the black-influenced Charleston to Dixieland music performed by both black bands and white bands?
> 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. <
I think you're making a vast overstatement. Bill Haley and His Comets made black-style music wildly popular among white teenagers at least a year before Elvis ever appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Elvis was a pioneer to be sure, but only one among several.
So we'd be listening to different music if Elvis had never lived. Big deal.