The words startled me as soon as I saw them: “Virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy.” That’s how the staid old New York Times described Elvis Presley back in the late 1950s, when he first began gyrating his hips and turning his lip up in that famous sneer. Elvis died 36 years ago this week, and I chuckled about a story on him that used those words: Hootchy-kootchy.