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anything Little Willie John had set in motion. Lee had been a big band singer for Will Osborne and Benny Goodman and was famous as the voice of Darling in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955). Luxurious in her passivity, she turned “Fever” into a steam bath, but her flirtation was all ladylike finesse; she purred where John growled, and her finger snaps had all the crackle of milquetoast. For the length of Lee’s single, which included several painfully self-conscious key changes, it seemed as though Tin Pan Alley might actually tame the beast. But Lee never had another top ten hit. Paul McCartney was a fan, but Lee’s image was all risqué control—her next biggest record, “Is That All There Is?” in 1969, worked as a coda to many a one-hit wonder, including herself.
    Ironically, Presley covered “Fever” more as a nod to Lee than Little Willie John, but that was just the Memphis boy in him who yearned to be Dean Martin. Presley did away with the key changes (wisely) and sounded drunk on his own restraint. Like Little Willie John, an anxious quietude hovers over Presley’s take. There were worlds in Presley’s pauses, and the sustained tension only underlined its seething contradictions (weakness as strength). At best, this “Fever” was heartache, a yearning for something the singer feared might elude him; at its worst, it was the most damning feeling a man could carry, a measure of his capacity to feel. Elsewhere, you can measure Presley’s success in his cohorts’ different slants on manhood: Presley’s rock ’n’ roll man was a metaphor for freedom and new male identities, not a new rigid code. If anything, Presley’s more provocative peers worked out the feminine side of masculinity, peacocking insecurities, vulnerabilities, and sexual eccentricity when they lacked Presley’s striking good looks.
    Little Richard was the most flamboyant of these performers. His bouffant hairdo anticipated the Afro, and he tossed his head back with the illicit thrill of a gay man passing as a mere eccentric in a straight man’s club. Suburban Eisenhower culture in the 1950s was so sexually occluded that it accepted Richard as a kind of oddity, just another weird twist in the new teen craze. But Richard’s persona drew on lyrics transparently trimmed of explicit come-ons even before they suggested homosexuality (“Well, long tall Sally’s built pretty sweet/She’s got everything that Uncle John needs…”), and his singing was so good he managed to distract attention from his beehive and Vegas showgirl makeup. In retrospect, it’s nothing less than astounding that Little Richard broke through, essentially as a novelty, in January of 1956 (just before Presley had his first national hit), with “Tutti Frutti.” He threw in manic falsetto “Whoo!” at every turn, and “Long Tall Sally” was heard as “Wop-Bop-A-Lu” gibberish when it was really code for God Knows What.
    Buddy Holly presented another kind of man: one who got up his nerve with women only through song. Holly turned John Wayne’s dismissive tag line from The Searchers (“That’ll be the day”) into a triumphant rock catchphrase, a world of revenge hurled at a suspicious lover, and John Lennon’s favorite song. Consider the conceit: Holly, the wire-framed nerd, found something in Wayne’s bigoted Ethan Edwards to call his own—something that reduced that oversized character’s blind hatred into a retort that boomeranged with affection. Holly hiccuped coyly, as if barely containing all the terror of changing from a boy into a man. Physically, he was a geek with glasses, but as a writer he held his own with Chuck Berry, Jerry Lieber and Ed Stoller (“Hound Dog”), Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus (“His Latest Flame”), and Willie Dixon (“Wang Dang Doodle”). A song like “Peggy