10 most important figures in 20th century music

A pedant writes: if H, D & L count as one then it would be eight, unless Donald is the leader of their quartet, in which case it would be seven.

 

Aside from Elvis' influence a la simply being popular and lots of people loving Elvis' music and emulating various things about him, he was also a very important and influential musical artist in representing a cross-cultural/multi-cultural melting pot of music--who was a simultaneously accepted (by the middle classes)/mainstream and importantly controversial white artist taking elements of country, blues, rhythm & blues and crooner/pre-rock pop and mixing them all together into something new that had a profound impact on youth culture, paving the way for all sorts of cross-cultural/multi-cultural-influenced music that both had great appeal and that had risque elements (the latter representing youth rebellion against older generations). Elvis might not have been the first to do it, and of course in today's political climate some folks have a problem with the "appropriation" aspects, and then later in his career he had a very different sort of image/niche that dilutes appreciation of his importance, but Elvis was certainly the most popular, most influential white artist of the early rock & roll era, and if those appropriation elements of his music hadn't been there in an artist who the broader culture paid a lot of attention to pro and con, rock wouldn't have developed at all in the same manner that it did, at the time that it did.

Whether he wrote his own music has nothing at all to do with it.

 

Gershwin
Cole Porter
Harold Arlen
Lerner & Loewe
Rogers & Hammerstein