Lonesome EJ:

From one lonesome to another, as much as I like Elvis, I don't agree that he introduced the blues to its first mass audience, for two reasons: Elvis never really sang the blues (the jump blues, maybe, but not really the blues) and secondly, there were blues artists (and especially jump blues artists) who were very popular well before Elvis reared his head (if that's what he did). Think Louis Jordan.

What Elvis did, rather, was show that it was okay for a white man to sing like that. (Or that it wasn't okay, but was excitingly rebellious.) A lesser accomplishment, but I'll grant you an accomplishment all the same.

Had Elvis been black, he wouldn't have been nearly the phenomenon that he was.