This wasn't Elvis's first TV appearance – six months earlier he'd featured on The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show on CBS – but his performance on The Milton Berle Show was the one that saw him christened "Elvis the Pelvis".
The kid from Mississippi was already a star in the south, but in front of an audience at NBC studios in Hollywood, he introduced himself to a wider world, singing I Want You, I Need You, I Love You before slowing the tempo down for his cover of Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog, gyrating his hips outrageously. Jack Gould of the New York Times wrote "Mr Presley has no discernible singing ability", while John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune called Elvis "unspeakably untalented and vulgar". Religious groups added their condemnation, and the next time that Elvis appeared on television – on The Steve Allen Show later that month – he was forced to wear a tuxedo and sing that same song to a dog, named Sherman. Such was the emasculatory power of the pop process, but the damage had been done.