After a four-day Dzogchen Buddhist retreat, as I was catching up on the news, the quote below leaped out at me. So I wrote this for my new blog and thought I’d share it here as well.
By Mel Harkrader Pine
“A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” (Elvis) Presley told Jet magazine in 1957. “But rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”
The paragraph above is from the October 25 obituary on Fats Domino in The New York Times. How do you react to Elvis’s quote?
Most likely, those words would not be uttered in a public medium today, although they might be said privately among friends. First, of course, is the reference to “colored people.” That was an OK phrase in 1957 for folks we now call black or African-American, and I doubt we’ll fault him for that.
But what about the stereotyping? I’ll add here that 20 years ago I took voice lessons…
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Melting-Pot Dharma 