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Allen may have been dumbfounded, but as blues songwriter Willie Dixon teased, “The men don’t know/But the little girls understand.”

“Nineteen fifty-six was a great year,” remembers Presley’s seminal guitarist, Scotty Moore. “The crowds had gotten very large, and it would get so loud that it would just cancel out all the sound onstage. The best way I can describe it is like when you dive into the water and you hear the phasing, the rush of the water. Actually, on most songs, if we couldn’t hear him, we’d know where he was at by his body language. We were the only band I know literally directed by an ass.”

As Elvis worked out his own private fantasies onstage, an entire nation would take his directive, even if it was initially slow to accept it.

“Elvis’s sexual history,” the rock critic Robert Christgau has written, “inflects the myth of a feral young Southerner whose twitching hips were the point of articulation for a seismic shift in American mores.”

The exact moment of that shift, according to some Elvisologists, arrived on June 5, 1956, when the twenty-one-year-old Presley appeared on The Milton Berle Show. It was not Presley’s television debut. But in his previous network appearances, when his guitar had largely restricted his movements, Elvis relied more on “attitude, sinking eyelids, a curled lip, sideburns, and a husky voice that rose from somewhere below the waist,” as newsman Peter Jennings later put it, to convey his libidinous intent. Now on the Berle show, performing a lascivious rendition of “Hound Dog,” he moved in a way that was completely unfathomable for a white boy of the 1950s, punctuating a drawn-out, half-time ending with the burlesque bumps and grinds of a female stripper. At one point in the flurry of sexual shakes and shimmies, he seemed to hump the microphone, and in a futuristic salute to his would-be son-in-law, Michael Jackson, almost grab his crotch.

The following day, newspapers across the nation bellowed their outrage at this obscene purveyor of the fledgling art form called rock and roll, Ben Gross of the New York Daily News decrying that popular music had “reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley.”

Forty years later, in his book, Elvis After Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend, Gilbert B. Rodman, an assistant professor of communications at the University of South Florida, would label Elvis’s performance on the Berle show “a message so shocking that it seemed that Western civilization could not possibly survive its utterance,” and call it the moment when rock and roll was “recognized as a threat to mainstream U.S. culture.”

Such intellectual hand-wringing brings to mind the old black-and-white film clips of grim-faced men warning of the dangers of rock and roll, urging decent, God-fearing Americans to smash any copies of the Devil music they could find, lest the nation’s youth be corrupted and damned to hell.

Yet despite on which side of the moral fence one sits, there is no arguing that if Frank Sinatra was the first popular singer to make women swoon with the thoughts of romantic love, Elvis moved those obsessions lower, to erotic regions no mainstream performer had dared acknowledge with such ferocious abandon.

Today, Elvis’s movements seem tame to younger generations raised on incendiary films and videos. But “few rock and rollers of any era have moved with such salacious insouciance,” writes Christgau. In 1956, the cantilevered poetry of Elvis’s swiveling midsection, coupled with the eye-popping sight of his left leg working like a jackhammer, quickly led journalist Pinckney Keel of the Jackson [Mississippi] Clarion-Ledger to dub him “Elvis the Pelvis,” a term Elvis despised, calling it, “One of the most childish expressions I’ve ever heard coming from an adult.”

That same year, on August 6, 1956, Tampa journalist Paul Wilder, a crony of Elvis’s nefarious manager, Colonel Tom Parker, conducted one of the few, and most famous, interviews with Elvis for TV Guide. Backstage