Lionel and Elvis

Sadly, great Australian boxer Lionel Rose died this week.

At the age of 19 Rose became the first Aboriginal person to win a world title – when he defeated Masahiko “Fighting” Harada in Tokyo in 1968 to win the world bantamweight belt.

Rose grew up in a bark shed at Jackson’s Track, a poor settlement near the Gippsland town of Drouin in Victoria but became a champion.

Rose represented a positive figure for Australian indigenous people. He was a part of my childhood, in a way as he was the first famous Aboriginal person I'd heard of as a teenager.

As a Victorian friend said to me, "he was a superb sportsman and someone that I looked up to at the time, and still do. Plus, he was very cute".

I was intrigued to read in his obituary by Gerry Carman that Rose gathered a glittering array of admirers around Australia and overseas and his biggest American fan was Elvis Presley. Rose and his trainer Jack Rennie apparently were the only outsiders allowed on to the set of a Presley film (Roustabout) and spent three hours with the king of rock’n’roll, who insisted on a brief “spar” with him.

“Elvis never forgot his raisin’” is one of the many tributes to Elvis Presley on a story wall at the shotgun shack he was born in at Tupelo, Mississippi, now a museum, which I visited in 2006. It was thus named because a shotgun bullet could pass from the front to the back.

The tribute was written by Annie Presley, a cousin by marriage and a dear friend of Elvis’s mother, Gladys.

Another tribute tells of Elvis sneaking away to the local black Baptist church to listen to gospel music.

The shack is not that different to back in 1934 when Elvis’s dad Vernon borrowed $180 for materials to build it with Elvis’s grandfather and uncle on land he sharecropped.

In 1948, Vernon moved the family to Memphis, about 160km north, to look for work. What they couldn’t load in their 1939 Plymouth, they left behind. But it was Graceland, the home he moved into after he became a star, when he was 22, that most people associate with Elvis.

On the way to the recent Byron Bay Bluesfest I listened in the car to Paul Simon’s Graceland:

"The Mississippi Delta was shining

Like a National guitar

I am following the river

Down the highway

Through the cradle of the civil war

I'm going to Graceland

Graceland

In Memphis Tennessee..."

With the civil war always as the backdrop, the U S of A is the land that created rock’n’roll – and before that gospel, jazz, soul, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and country. Elvis and later the Beatles and the Rolling Stones unashamedly turned black music into white music for a wider audience.

Rose, on the other hand, recorded country/pop music singles such as I Thank You.

I wonder if during those three hours together Elvis and Rose jammed or just talked about coming from the wrong side of the tracks – something they shared although from different countries and backgrounds.

They were both stars.