Pat Boone Says: You Don’t Have to Wiggle
. . . Do I think performers have a moral obligation to their fans? Well, I do. I have had considerable success in the rock-and-roll field, but I think that some of its exponents, usually the instrumentalists, are giving it a black eye. They are way off-base with their onstage contortions. I don’t think anything excuses the suggestive gyrations that some rock-and-rollers go in for . . . . I like rhythm, too. But the human body consists of about 200 separate bones and I don’t think it’s necessary to call all of them into play even on a jittery ditty like, “Long, Tall Sally.” I belong to the finger-snapping school myself. That, and a little tapping of the feet, is enough to satisfy my soul. And it seems to satisfy my audiences, too.
—Pat Boone, This Week Magazine, July 7, 1957
Pat boone is rock ’n’ roll’s favorite whipping boy. People love to kick him around. It’s an extreme sport for un-athletic, hard-living liberals. Boone’s white buckskin shoes, milk-fed complexion, combed hair, and croony baritone voice make him an ideal villain for a genre that glorifies emaciation, bed head, screeching guitars, and raw-throated yowlers. Boone has helped his detractors’ case by broadcasting his conservative values. But his greatest sin is a musical one. In the mid-fifties he recorded tidy, buttoned-up versions of R&B hits like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and Fats Domino’s “Ain’t It a Shame” (he tweaked the title to make it “Ain’t That a Shame”). Little Richard loves to beef about Boone: “The white kids wanted [my version] ’cause it was real rough and raw, and Pat Boone had this smooth version.” And so the white kids would take mine and put it in the drawer and put his on top of the dresser.” Fats Domino also grumbled: “That hurt. It took me two months to write ‘Ain’t It a Shame,’ and his record comes out around the same time mine did.” White guys join the fray too. Upon his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, Billy Joel made a de rigueur swipe: “I was into the originators, the real R&B—not stuff like Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon.”
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