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ethic that persisted even at the expense of her self-respect (like when he tries to flatter Vera Miles in Liberty Valance by saying “You sure are cute when you’re angry,” a line that became a yardstick of macho insensitivity). Presley had no such qualms. What you hear in Presley’s recording of “That’s All Right” is a young man unleashing every impulse his father held in check. There’s hardly a sound in the recording that isn’t ecstatic—it’s a young man sensing a bigger world for perhaps the first time, and letting that exuberance lift and carry him toward what he wants. This new style of manliness was far more than just the Saturday-night hillbilly kicking down the door of Sunday-morning respectability; it’s a teenager at the peak of his physical powers getting his first taste of freedom—of sex, of self-determination—and gunning it. It kicked off what Greil Marcus called “the heyday of Sun Records and rockabilly music, a moment when boys were men and men were boys.”
    Perhaps because “That’s All Right” was such a disruption, a joyride that targeted prevailing ideas about “manhood” to their core, the next few songs Elvis cut were ballads, reassuring consolations like “I Love You Because,” “Harbor Lights,” “Blue Moon,” “Tomorrow Night” (the male precursor to the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”), and “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’).” Here was an outpouring of feeling John Wayne would never catch sight of from the corner of his eye.
    Frank Sinatra pitched woo with knowing sentimentality, but his songs and delivery all hewed to Tin Pan Alley’s version of Wayne’s code. Urbane, witty, and unflappable, Sinatra hung on to his mike stand as though it gave him strength, and wooed women with enough restraint and finesse to make up for his skinny physique. With Sinatra, vulnerability was acceptable inside a song, as long as that was the only place it got expressed. Presley, on the other hand, made openly falling apart for a woman seem attractive, enviable, even worthwhile. Who could refuse the man who sang “Heartbreak Hotel” as though a woman’s rebuff meant a life sentence of misery, where loneliness equaled death? The very idea that a woman could drive him to such heights and depths was proof that these emotions were worth feeling. Where Sinatra kept a gentleman’s check on his emoting—and kept it in the service of the music—Presley wallowed in it. Moreover, it would never have occurred to Sinatra to turn his own body into a sex object; the sex was all in the song. Elvis took what women wanted to hear further—the sound of a man doubled over with feeling—and redefined it as cool for all the men in his audience. This, too, was all in the service of the rhythm and blues he sang.
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    Presley’s films are numerous and, sadly, ludicrous. But he worked out his persona through his singing, and the show-business industry couldn’t emasculate him nearly as much through recordings as they did on film. Presley’s vocal agility became analogous to Wayne’s physical control. A lot of listeners cower at the way Presley played the romantic wimp, but his sentimentality was really just another strand of how he rewired manhood: why not get on your knees and plead to a woman, if that would make the difference? And if women liked the scatting and riffing just as much, what were Presley’s aching tremolo and swooping low register good for if not some slurpy ballads? Where Wayne played romantic scenes with diffidence, as if antsy for the more heroic encounters with other men, Presley gave romanticism a rockabilly fool’s glint. You could hear the self-consciousness in the music—with lines this drawn out, this exuberantly extended, his romantic pitches were full of