Good points, although I would say the majority of artists these days write their own songs, except for country singers. Even so, there's still a large number of pop and rock vocalists or musicians who don't write their own songs and rely on songs written by independent songwriters. What has changed these days is that the non-songwriting artists don't have their own music publishing companies, which was not the case with Elvis. In the 1960s, his music publishing companies held the copyrights on more than 2000 songs.
As far as Elvis's skills as a musician, he played acoustic or electric guitar, starting with his Sun recordings (acoustic guitar) and continuing through the early 60s, when the movie songs started becoming substandard. He also played acoustic guitar and piano on his American Sound studio sessions, not on every song but more than one might think. And he continued to play guitar, though sporadically, on his 70s albums. Elvis also played bass, the last time in 1976 on one of his versions of "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." And according to DJ Fontana, Elvis also played the drums on one of his songs. And as for his expertise as a guitarist, his lead guitarist, James Burton said he wasn't a great guitarist but added he was a good guitarist, better than people gave him credit for being.
And on the songwriting issue, Red West, said a few years ago he believed Elvis was capable of writing his own songs. And perhaps the reason he didn't is that Elvis's manager, Col. Parker, kept Elvis so busy, he didn't have a lot of time to sit down and write songs. He did write two with Red, "That's Someone You Never Forget" (about his mother) and "You'll Be Gone" (with Charlie Hodge helping to write the latter). Ironically, the one person who caused Elvis to lose interest in trying to write his own songs was Priscilla. She was dismissive of the two above songs, thinking Elvis should've been writing rock songs, not ballads.
She had a point, although the whole idea should've been encouraging Elvis to write more, which could've led to more rock songs. Elvis never lost his love for rock but by the 70s, Parker had created such a bureaucracy in getting good songs of any kind to Elvis, that his publishing liaison, Lamar Fike, came to the studio with fewer and fewer offerings, resulting in Parker trying to grab a third of the publishing on already published songs, a hassle that bothered Elvis so bad (because Parker and his associates did it in the studio as Elvis was recording), Elvis told Parker to stop doing it. Near the end of his life, neither RCA nor Parker could cajole Elvis into the studio because of the fear the sessions would be disrupted by Parker's publishing grabs.
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