This anniversary — the 30th year since he died — the fans from all over the world will once again swarm to Graceland; the radio stations will pay tribute with all day marathons of his songs; there will be tribute concerts with Elvis imitators from Japan to Russia to the States. What is it about Elvis Presley, who if he had lived, would have now been in his 70s, and for all we know, still be performing in Vegas?

He didn’t write his own songs. When he started, there were no singer-songwriters, as today’s young musicians with guitars in hand almost have to be if they are going to succeed. But no popular artist has had a greater impact on our culture. He changed the way we heard and looked at popular music. More than anyone, Elvis Presley cut down the gap between black and white America. It has become a cliché for many to say Elvis and his successors ripped off black music and got rich, while the original artists whose songs he covered remained poor and unknown. It is more accurate to say that Elvis encompassed and lived the songs he heard — anything from soul music, gospel, rhythm and blues, to bluegrass and country music.

As a young boy growing up in Tupelo, Miss. and later Memphis, Tenn., Elvis listened on radio to the Grand Ole Opry, to Dewey Phillips’s radio show that broadcast Muddy Waters, and to gospel on church sponsored stations. He tuned in to the all-black music program on WDIA that featured young blues wizard B.B. King, along with Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf, both of whom broadcast live from Memphis. He soaked it all up like a sponge. There were also the weekend all night gospel-sings at a local auditorium, and the night trips to juke joints.

Segregated society had no meaning for him. Other white kids listened to their parents’ music; Elvis ignored the artificial boundaries and lived to hear and to sing in his own way. By the time he was 19, he was on his way. Sam Phillips had cut and released Elvis singing Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup’s “That’s All Right, Mama” and Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He performed them onstage at a local auditorium. The crowd went wild. It was 1954.

Two years later, Elvis made his first TV appearance, on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s program. He had signed as his manager the once -carny Colonel Sam Parker, and moved from Sun Records to RCA. With his recording of “Heartbreak Hotel,” there would be no looking back. The country discovered its first major superstar, or as we would put it today, the first “American Idol.” The music business would never be the same.

It’s difficult to even think that for many in America, Elvis was indecent, outrageous, and a young man who might corrupt America’s youth. The Bible Belt disc jockeys would later incite their fans to burn their Beatles albums in 1964. But that was Old South; the hip New York audiences knew better. Or so we thought.

The distinguished television critic of the New York Times, Jack Gould — the same Jack Gould who was a hero to liberals for defending Edward R. Murrow and standing up to the McCarthyites — sided with the rednecks about Elvis. Watching him on the Milton Berle show, then the medium’s most watched program, Gould wrote:

Attired in the familiar oversize jacked and open shirt which are almost the uniform of the contemporary youth who fancies himself as terribly sharp, he might be classified as an entertainer. Or, perhaps quite as easily, as an assignment for a sociologist.

And then Gould’s kicker: “Mr. Presley has no discernable singing ability.” He sang with a “whine,” Gould wrote, like a novice “aria in a bathtub. As for his music, Gould wrote, “He is a rock-and-roll variation of … the virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of theblonde bombshells of the burlesque runway.” The Journal American’s critic was even worse. “Presley,” he wrote, moved in “suggestive animation” that was just “short of an aborigine’s mating dance.” The Daily News also joined in. His “exhibition,” the critic said, “was suggestive and vulgar,” a kind of “animalism” that “should be confined to dives and bordellos.” How time has changed.

And worst of all, Brooklyn’s revered and liberal Zionist Congressman, Emanuel Celler, a man of conscience who supported so many good causes, displayed his own ignorance. “Rock ‘n’roll has its place,” Celler said, “among the colored people. … The bad taste that is exemplified by the Elvis Presley ‘Hound Dog’ music, with his animal gyrations which are certainly most distasteful…are violative of all that I know to be in good taste.” Celler evidently did not know that “Hound Dog,” performed first by Big Mama Thornton, was written by New York City’s own Jewish songwriters, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.

The point is that Elvis opened up the industry to scores of black artists such as Ray Charles and Chuck Berry, who no longer would be confined to an industry proclaimed “race” market. Elvis embodies America’s democratic vision and hope, one that saw no artificial distinctions based on race or class. Elvis was the last person to hold racist views. He had no prejudice, as Sam Phillips knew. He was in the era of deep segregation, a man way ahead of his time.

Sadly, Elvis also exemplified the downside of America’s growing culture of celebrity, which has eaten up so many gifted artists. A working-class boy, he sought to achieve the American dream, and attained it at a very young age. He got not only the house and car, but the mansion, the fleet of Cadillacs, and a private plane to boot. He also succumbed to the temptation of drugs and his manager agenda, which got him stuck in Vegas, a parody of himself. As Mr. Guralnick writes in his biography, Presley’s story was both heroic and tragic — much like that of the country he lived in.

Mr. Radosh, a historian and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, last wrote for these pages on the Spanish Civil War.