Time to Get Real Gone: Boarding the Burkian Mystery Train for  a Ride on the Pentadic

Timothy Phillips Marmack, English

Elvis Presley returned, in July of 1954, to Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee at the behest of studio founder Sam Phillips, for a third attempt at recording, this time with the support of guitarist Scotty Moore and stand-up bassist Bill Black.  The third song recorded at this four-sided session—“That’s All Right (Mama)”—most likely changed the face of not only popular music, but popular culture (in America, and eventually, the world) forever.  By linking this defining primacy with the use of twentieth-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke’s investigative Pentad and its five provisional “relationships” concerning human motivation in symbolic action—Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose, and an eventual, but not entirely inclusive sixth, Attitude—this paper fashions an uncommon inquisition into Presley’s initial rise as a musical and cultural icon.  His status not only birthed a rebellious teenaged-enlightenment, but also originated a musical style (“rock n’ roll”) that was melded from a plethora of cultural and ethnic influences.

     Burke’s philosophy underscores the need to understand or interpret human behavior (the basic forms of thought), to interpret rhetoric as action, and realize that all acts are, by nature, a persuasion to motivate.  Similarly, Presley’s isolated happenstance in Phillips’ studio allows for an explanation into the what, when and where, who, how, and why that changed a nation’s thought process, social mores, and created a new lifestyle.  Thus, through the application of Burke’s situational terms, the genesis of “That’s All Right” is revealed to be a musical and social turning point in twentieth-century popular culture.