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John Bakke remembers all too well the first Elvis Presley seminar he organized. It was 1979, and the dust had yet to settle on Presley’s sensational death just two years prior. No one seemed willing to take either the musician or Bakke seriously.

“I was interviewed by some skeptical reporters,” says Bakke, now professor emeritus at the University of Memphis. “I said Elvis may be an object of serious historical study, and The Associated Press picked that up right under `Man Bites Dog’ stories.”

How things have changed in two decades. For this year’s conference - titled “Is Elvis History? 2002 and Beyond” and scheduled 9 a.m.-4 p.m. today at U of M’s Fogelman Executive Center - Bakke says he has been interviewed by a swarm of international media from The New York Times and The Washington Post to Polish, Australian and German television reporters.

“And nobody is presuming that there isn’t going to be something important said,” says Bakke, who seems a little surprised himself. “It’s an indication of an awareness that Elvis is not just passing through.”

Underwritten in part by a grant from the Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation, the sold-out seminar - which benefits U of M’s Elvis Presley Endowed Scholarship Fund - gleans all sides of the melodious debate, examining Presley’s place within the context of music and social history as well as asking whether that legacy has run its course.

Among the esteemed speakers Bakke has lined up: Peter Guralnick, whose detailed portraits Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love have made him Presley’s foremost biographer; hailed writer Greil Marcus, whose books include Mystery Train, Dead Elvis and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives; Michael Bertrand, the author of Race, Rock, and Elvis; and Allison Graham, who wrote Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle.

Sun Records founder/producer Sam Phillips and Presley pal Jerry Schilling, head of the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission, will talk about the real Elvis.

Others scheduled to speak include veteran record executive Eddie Ray; U of M history professor Dr. Charles Crawford; former Shelby County sheriff and mayor Bill Morris; local columnist Jackson Baker, and WKNO-TV Channel 10 personality `Mr. Chuck’ Scruggs.

After holding back-to-back seminars, first in 1997 for the 20th anniversary of Elvis’s death, then in 1998, Bakke feels less concerned with staging an annual event than with giving the seminar enough time out so something new can be brought to the table.

Among those with a fresh perspective this go-round is University of Mississippi visiting professor Michael Bertrand, who will address Elvis in relation to the civil rights era.

“You have Emmett Till being lynched for crossing a line for violating etiquette, you have at the same time Clyde McPhatter or the Dominos or the Ravens coming into the South,” says Bertrand. “Young white kids are flocking to these concerts, falling in love with these artists. They’re basically violating the same type of etiquette. And then in Memphis you have this young man recording at Sun Records. He’s doing the same thing. He’s crossing these same boundaries of class and race, and yet he becomes an extremely popular figure. It’s very interesting for me, that you would have two men, Emmett Till and Elvis Presley, occupying the same space at the same time.”

With such critical focus being applied to a rock singer, one would think a seminar titled “Is Elvis History?” answers itself.

Yet the shifting sands of social opinion are just as important to Bakke as are the certainties of Presley’s musical past. And the crux of this seminar is to examine how Elvis as a social phenomenon will be seen in coming years: revolutionary or reactionary.

“Elvis is getting a lot of credit for the impact he’s had on music itself,” says Bakke. “Culturally, I think he’s seen more as a regressive force, as someone who exploited black music rather than brought it into the mainstream. When he was first popular, people like (Black Panther) Eldridge Cleaver and Abbie Hoffman were proclaiming him as being a real force of liberation. I think that’s changed a little bit to where he’s (now) seen as, at best, more of a transitional figure and, at worst, a kind of low-class, low-brow imitation.”

No doubt there will be those ready to defend and denounce such a statement at the seminar.

And that makes Elvis just as controversial, i.e., relevant, as ever.

- Bill Ellis: 529-2517