Elvis rocks “The Milton Berle Show” (June 5, 1956)

Today marks the day Elvis famously performed “Hound Dog” on “The Milton Berle Show” and stirred up quite a frenzy. On June 5, 1956, Elvis set his guitar to the side and performed what came to be known as one of the most controversial performances in television history. The provocative hip-swinging dance moves caused a national scandal and set the stage for the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s place in history.

His performance of “Hound Dog” drove the kids in the audience wild and disgusted the press and some of the adult viewers. His sexy moves and black-influenced sound was condemned by certain factions of the “morally concerned” establishment and the religious community, but his seemingly unstoppable popularity continued to grow to new heights.

According to History.com, “By the end of 1955, Elvis Presley had nearly 18 months of nonstop touring behind him and two dozen singles already under his belt, though his only hits were on the Country and Western charts. He was a hardworking and hard-to-categorize up-and-comer, but the next six months would make him a superstar. It was his debut single on RCA/Victor, his new label, which propelled Elvis to the top of the pop charts. But if ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is what made him the king of the radio and record stores during the spring of 1956, it was television that truly made him the King of Rock and Roll.”

Reaction to Elvis’ performance in the mainstream media was almost uniformly negative. “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability….For the ear, he is an unutterable bore,” wrote critic Jack Gould in the next day’s New York Times. “His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway. The gyration never had anything to do with the world of popular music and still doesn’t.” In the New York Daily News, Ben Gross described Presley’s performance as “tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos,” while the New York Journal-American‘s Jack O’Brien said that Elvis “makes up for vocal shortcomings with the weirdest and plainly suggestive animation short of an aborigine’s mating dance.” Meanwhile, the Catholic weekly America got right to the point in its headline: “Beware of Elvis Presley.”