Five musicians who hated Elvis Presley (2024)

Affectionately dubbed ‘The King of Rock and Roll’,Elvis Presleyhad a transformational impact on popular culture. Taking R&B and rock and roll to the masses, hits such as ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ became anthems for a generation and facilitated the great artistic innovations of the 1960s.

Elvis was a storied figure who lived an extraordinary life. He rose out of a poor background in the Deep South to become the poster boy for a sexual and musical revolution. Then, in a role reversal later in life, he was confirmed as a defining figure of American extravagance and conservatism in the Cold War era. From the crooning to the shake of the hips, Presley took care of business, with his work ranking among the most influential of all time.

Despite being so significant, or perhaps because of that importance, many grew to loathe the Tupelo native, including fellow musicians. Although he might be celebrated for bridging the gap between Black and white America in an age where racism ran rampant, some rightly point out that one of Presley’s greatest tricks was plucking from the genres that he loved, which were inextricable from the Black community, and then making them his own without any gratification paid to those who he took from.

Regardless of blues pioneer and friend of Presley’s, BB King maintaining, “Elvis didn’t steal any music from anyone. He just had his own interpretation of the music he’d grown up on, same is true for everyone. I think Elvis had integrity,” there are those who asserted that he stole his fast track to success.

Elsewhere, Presley drew the ire of other musicians for his opulence, right-wing politics, and the rumour that the controversial President Richard Nixon might well have hired him to spy on other artists whose work was much more subversive than the glossy shellac he symbolised.

Find the list of five musicians who hated Elvis Presley below.

Musicians who hated Elvis Presley:

Johnny Rotten

While punk is inextricable from the rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly and blues genres, there should be no surprise that Sex Pistols stalwart Johnny Rotten hated Elvis Presley for what he represented. So, what better occasion to outline his hatred for him than straight after Presley’s death?

In 1977,Rolling Stonespoke to Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren – who was of the generation that grew up with Presley – about his death. Unsurprisingly, McLaren was saddened to learn of Presley’s passing. “What’s that?” McLaren questioned. “Elvis Presley died…makes you feel sad, doesn’t it? Like your grandfather died… Yeah, it’s just too bad it couldn’t have been Mick Jagger.”

However, Johnny Rotten took a much less emotional approach and claimed he was happy to see the back of Presley. “f*ckin’ good riddance to bad rubbish,” he asserted. “I don’t give a f*ckin’ sh*t, and nobody else does either. It’s just fun to fake sympathy, that’s all they’re doin’.”

Years later, Rotten seemed to slightly retract his abrasive original position in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Elvis is absolutely irrelevant. He was something my parents liked, so I naturally dismissed him. I’ve never been overly fond of rock `n’ roll anyway, (although) I don’t wish death on anyone. I’ve had far more awful examples (than Elvis) right up close and personal to really bother about someone like him.”

John Lennon

In the early days, John Lennonand the rest of his Beatles bandmates were big fans of Elvis Presley and covered several of his songs in their career. In fact, he made such an impact on Lennon that he once said: “Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis. Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles.”

However, according to reports, as soon as the pair first met, Lennon realised that Presley was everything he hated, and the feeling was mutual. “For John, it was a very disillusioning moment because he loved Elvis’s records, so to discover he was a right-wing southern bigot was a big shock,” veteran DJ Bob Harris – who interviewed Lennon onThe Old Grey Whistle Testin 1975 – toldThe Independent. “Equally, Elvis saw Lennon as being this upstart Liverpuddlian know-it-all who’d taken his crown. He usurped Elvis and he was resentful as hell.”

Furthermore, Lennon would also come to hate Presley’s work. Despite his music providing much inspiration when a youth, Lennon told Juke Box Jury in 1963 that he felt the bastion of rock ‘n’ roll had lost his touch: “Well, I’ve got all his early records, and I keep playing them. He mustn’t make another like this. But somebody said today he sounds like Bing Crosby now, and he does. I don’t like him anymore”.

Big Mama Thornton

One of Presley’s most famous hits is ‘Hound Dog’. However, his version was a cover of the original by blues legendBig Mama Thornton, which Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote to facilitate her arresting vocals. Her version was a big hit, shipping half a million copies, but only three years later, Presley’s would catapult him to international stardom. With millions of records sold, he would never look back, eclipsing Thornton in the narrative.

In a distillation of the accusation that Presley pilfered from those who inspired him without any form of acknowledgement, he totally overshadowed Thornton’s success, and she made next to nothing from his hit song. She once explained: “I got one check for $500 and never saw another”.

According to her biographer Michael Spörke in Big Mama Thornton: The Life and Music, during a 1969 performance at Newport Folk Festival, Thornton referred to ‘Hound Dog’ as “the record I made Elvis Presley rich on.” She allegedly described it at another show as “a song I got robbed of.”

After starting the track at another concert, Thornton stopped, turning around and staring angrily at her drummer, “This ain’t no Elvis Presley song, son,” she reportedly expressed. Enraged, she kicked him off the drums and showed him how to play it, all in front of the audience. According to Spörke, this happened regularly and was a theatrical means of Thornton wrestling ownership of the song back from Presley.

Wynton Marsalis

Another figure who is acutely aware of Elvis Presley’s cultural offences is acclaimed jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Also hailing from the Deep South, he knows a thing or two about rock ‘n’ roll and has even collaborated with Eric Clapton because of it. Once, the New Orleans native called ‘The King’ “distasteful”.

He told the San Diego Union-Tribune: “To me, Elvis represented somebody who — because our country was not ready then to embrace the black artist and make them No. 1 — became No. 1 because of his rendition of what some black people sounded like. What made it distasteful is that we had people who could do it better than him, but who couldn’t be accepted at that time because of the colour of their skin.”

Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley had an interesting history. Famously, ‘The King’ wanted to cover Parton’s 1973 number one hit ‘I Will Always Love You’, which she was excited about. However, it all fell apart after Elvis told Parton that he wanted at least half of the publishing deal to cover it.

“I cried all night,” Parton recalled about this outcome on the Living and Learning with Reba McEntire podcast in 2020. “Oh, I just pictured Elvis, like, singing it. And I know that Elvis loved it … but it’s true. I said no.”

Years before reflecting on the heartbreak, Parton had already expressed her disdain for Presley. They might have come from similar backgrounds in the Deep South, but the country star’s outlook on life and money differed greatly from the rock ‘n’ roll heroes. Parton said that she had no desire to be a star like Presley, who she felt embodied what was wrong with fame and riches.

“I don’t want to be a star if I have no life,” she told Rolling Stone in 1980. “I’m not willing to be like Elvis, who had no personal life. If I want to go out to a movie, I just go out to a movie. If I want to go out to supper, I go out to supper, because I happen to feel that I have no reason to be afraid of the people.”

“I think one of the big mistakes celebrities make is that they think because they are so popular, it sets them apart and makes them like gods instead of just extremely lucky people,” Parton added. “I really feel sorry for a whole lot of stars, and I hope and pray I never get that way.”

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