Joseph Epstein's "Can't Take That Away From Me" left me shaking with emotion (Casual, March 1). Epstein eloquently describes what I have been feeling for over 40 years. The maddening fact that generations of young people have never heard, much less appreciated, the sublime voices of Dick Haymes, Sarah Vaughn, June Christy, Billy Eckstine, Jo Stafford, and others too numerous to mention, or the entrancing music of Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Artie Shaw, and other great bands also too numerous to list makes my eyes brim with tears and my heart ache with anguish.
More than anything else, the blame for the death of "popular music" can be laid at the blue-sueded feet of the iniquitous Elvis Presley. With his popularizing the opprobrious and cacophonous rock 'n' roll "music," the talentless Presley drove a poisonous stake deep into the heart of popular music because with the deplorable ascendancy of rock 'n' roll, the truly marvelous love ballads and stirring musical compositions of genuine talents such as Gershwin, Porter, Kern, Berlin, Rodgers, Mercer, Carmichael, and others were no longer being written. Next to Stalin and Hitler, Elvis Presley is the most prolific murderer of the century. After all, just look at what he wantonly killed.
LANNY R. MIDDINGS, SAN RAMON, CA