They didn’t exactly sound black. As kids from a different musical culture, they absorbed what they could from black music and made their own sound. Music being music, it doesn’t fit into the descriptions and neat categories we try to make for it. It just flows along.
Re the “stealing” issue: I do remember really hating the white covers of black songs in the fifties that took a song with an exciting spirit to it and made it into a white piece of junk. “Dance with Me Henry,” “Tweedly Dee,” etc. The names Georgia Gibbs and Pat Boone come to mind. Happily, that trend was short-lived.
Then of course there was the other kind of stealing, “with a fountain pen,” as Bob Dylan says in “Talking New York Blues.”
For the record, I liked Big Mama Thornton’s version of Hound Dog a lot more than Elvis’s. A lot of selling the music comes down to who looks or sounds better. I’m not a Pat Boone fan, but nobody had their arms twisted to buy his records. You might as well indict the whole record buying public for preferring bland fifties pap for earthier blues and r and b music. Whites as well as black musicians were cheated in a way by the preferences of millions of Americans who preferred very bland, innocuous music. That ‘s life.
For the record, I liked Big Mama Thornton’s version of Hound Dog a lot more than Elvis’s. A lot of selling the music comes down to who looks or sounds better. I’m not a Pat Boone fan, but nobody had their arms twisted to buy his records. You might as well indict the whole record buying public for preferring bland fifties pap for earthier blues and r and b music. Whites as well as black musicians were cheated in a way by the preferences of millions of Americans who preferred very bland, innocuous music. That ‘s life.