This world has lost its glory, let's start a brand new story now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnpaMPmivPE

Once upon a time, sheet music was the canonical form of popular music. Then Elvis happened.

If you look at the Billboard Top 100 charts, you can clearly see the jump in 1956. We have songs like The Poor People of Paris, Lisbon Antigua, and The Wayward Wind atop the charts, any of which could have been from 1946 or 1926. And then there is Hound Dog. And it's impossible to separate the performance from the music; you can either do a cover of it or do a separate version of it. Nobody was ever a cover band of Mozart or Billie Holiday or Cole Porter.