The year 2005 celebrated two major anniversaries in American popular music. It marked fifty years since 1955, when rock ’n’ roll first conquered the pop singles chart, and also what would have been the seventieth birthday of Elvis Presley (who was so young when he made his initial breakthrough that his father had to co-sign his first contract with RCA Records). For Elvis, the timing was perfect. However, in terms of my own appreciation of both occurrences, the timing was completely off.
My father was born the same year as Elvis Aron Presley, and I came along a season or so after the King returned from the army. My dad was slightly too old to be part of the demographic that made Elvis a superstar, and I was too young to get it. When I was first starting to notice pop music, in the seventies, it was in a fallow period. I was caught between disco and punk, of which neither appealed to me. Rock ’n’ roll was music that my parents’ generation liked. It meant the Stones, the Dead, Hendrix, and other figures.
By 1977, the year both Elvis and Bing Crosby died, I had already infiltrated my father’s jazz stash and begun working forward from Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Bix through Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane. Along the way I also discovered Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Great American Songbook. Rock ’n’ roll remained for me a bizarre thing that held some strange fascination for zillions of people but that I just couldn’t get started with. One thing that I did have in common with most rock fans of my generation, which is to say everybody else, was that none of us knew what to make of Elvis Presley. By the time of his death he was a joke to high school kids born in the sixties, who listened to the Sex Pistols (whose Sid Vicious savaged both Sinatra and Presley in his parody of “My Way”), David Bowie, Kiss, or, in my case, Bing.
Elvis Presley seemed like a caricature in his last few years, but a caricature of what we didn’t know, since we had never experienced him in his glory days (which had been only, in fact, a few years earlier). With those capes and jumpsuits, he appeared to belong with Liberace. His demotion from king to laughingstock was confirmed for me in the eighties and nineties, when he was increasingly spotted walking the earth, always by hayseeds: Elvis pumping gas, Elvis driving a pickup truck, Elvis ordering a bucket of chicken from the Colonel (Sanders, not Parker). But for years two people I revered, the critic Gary Giddins and the writer and editor Robert Gottlieb, kept telling me I was wrong to dismiss Presley so offhandedly. Finally, in the summer of 2004, I decided to see what all the shaking was about. I got hold of RCA Records’ four big Essential Masters boxes.
By the time I finished listening to them, I was completely hooked. Seventeen CDs were hardly enough. I was amazed by what I heard. After a lifetime of not getting it, I finally experienced my very own Elvis epiphany, and the mystery of why he is considered one of the great pop performers of all time was revealed to me. It was a vision straight from Graceland of a transcendental being, not in a white robe but in a white jumpsuit, with guitar rather than harp.
In his memoir If I Can Dream, Larry Geller, who later became Presley’s hairdresser and “spiritual advisor” (somehow for one man to fulfill both of those roles in Presley’s life seems perfectly appropriate), writes convincingly about being a teenager in 1956 and hearing Elvis for the first time. “I still think of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ as a record that came out of nowhere. There was nothing like it before.”
For a time, the early histories of rock ’n’ roll (and especially film and TV documentaries) wrote off prerock popular music as a strictly white-bread confection represented by Patti Page’s bland love songs and treacly novelties, that is, until Presley and the early rockers came along and left America “All Shook Up.” Yet even if one ignores artists like Sinatra and Nat King Cole—whose music was considerably more exciting than “Doggie in the Window”—it’s plain that both rhythm and blues (and black artists in general) and country and western had been making significant inroads into the pop mainstream long before the Presley explosion of 1956. In fact, there was a lot like “Heartbreak Hotel” before 1956, not the least of which was the dozen-plus sides Presley had recorded for Sun Records.
Geller also writes of how “Heartbreak Hotel” caught on before anyone had any idea of who Presley was, but that “not long after,” Geller and his teenage pals “got the shock of our young lives when we saw a photograph of Elvis. Because of his sound and his name—what kind of a name was ‘Elvis’?—we assumed that he was black.” Yet that was mainly because of the single that RCA chose to promote as his first blockbuster hit: Had kids first been exposed to Presley on “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” they would have assumed Presley was a veteran bluegrass singer; had they heard “My Happiness” or “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” they would have thought he was one of the many acts both black and white that imitated the Ink Spots, that enormously popular black pop vocal group.
There’s a remark attributed to Sam Phillips, who owned and operated Sun Records and more than anyone deserves credit for “discovering” Elvis Presley, in which he supposedly said that he could make a fortune if he could find a white man who sang “black.” In reality, there were already plenty of white singers who patterned themselves after black R&B singers. Pop music historian Arnold Shaw quotes Frankie Laine as saying that he wasn’t going to make it in this business until he started “singing like a spook.” Likewise, Johnnie Ray was a white singer who enjoyed a brief vogue for singing in a manner that can be described as simultaneously anticipating rock ’n’ roll style and caricaturing it.
Regarding Phillips’s remark, it was hardly the only time the producer-entrepreneur put all his racial cards on the table in a most undiplomatic fashion. Presley biographer Peter Guralnick quotes him as saying he was determined to find “genuine, untutored Negro music” by performers with “field mud on their boots and patches on their overalls.” Even without factoring in thousands of black jazz and classical performers, nearly all of the better R&B and gospel artists were highly tutored and more likely to wear tuxedos; there was considerably more mud and other barnyard decorative material covering the boots of white country performers. But then Phillips had much in common with white ethnomusicologists in the jazz and folk fields (who were often named Lomax) who managed to backhandedly insult African American music even as they labored to preserve and record it.
Presley’s innovation was neither in sounding black nor in sounding like a hillbilly, but in the brilliant way he embraced all three strains of pop music as they existed in the early fifties: rhythm and blues or black pop (and with it gospel); country music or mid-American pop; and the music of the mainstream, which, at its finest, was represented by singers who had jazz and big band experience and who sang songs from Broadway shows. The country and blues influences were probably what most attracted the teenagers of 1956, but in retrospect Presley is clearly a crooner, who comes out of a very clear-cut tradition of the finest male singers of the Great American Songbook, especially Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Billy Eckstine, Dean Martin, and, to an extent, Frank Sinatra—and also the great crooners of the blues, like Louis Jordan, and country, like Jimmie Rodgers and Milton Brown.
It’s been suggested that Presley comes most distinctly out of Martin and Crosby; Martin always sounded essentially like Crosby (although he averred on several occasions that his primary influence was Harry Mills of the Mills Brothers) tempered with occasional Italian curse words and various mannerisms designed to suggest various states of inebriation. Likewise, Presley essentially sounds like Martin with the Neapolitan trimmings replaced by what he learned from the blues and country traditions, these being the wild gyrations that thrilled teenagers, annoyed adults, and gave satirists like Stan Freberg (in his surprisingly respectful spoof of “Heartbreak Hotel”) grist for the parody mill.
As Giddins has pointed out, Bing Crosby sang in a distinctly Presleyian voice in the middle of his 1950 “Sunshine Cake” (when I first heard the disc as a little kid I actually thought it was Elvis, somehow making a guest appearance on a Crosby disc); likewise, when Martin sings quasi-folkish material, the similarities to Presley are unmistakable. Dean Martin on his 1956 “Memories Are Made of This,” sounds exactly like Elvis; when Presley sings “Angel” in his 1961 film Follow That Dream, he sounds exactly like Dino. On his 1960 single “Kiss Me Quick” by Doc Pomus (vaguely a bolero with castanets and rock ’n’ roll triplets) Presley sounds even more like Dean Martin, but with a sharper sense of rhythm; his cutoffs and stops are amazing. On this disc in particular he’s almost a better Dean Martin than Dean Martin. Presley also told Keely Smith that he learned a lot of his choreography and body language from Louis Prima.
Presley was, in fact, a great crooner, one of the very greatest. In spite of his way with blues and country material, it may be that his most notable strength was ballads and love songs, of both the country and the city variety. It would be foolish to deny that he was the first great rock ’n’ roll star, or that he remains, to this day, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, yet from the perspective of history he has almost nothing in common vocally with subsequent rock stars. To me, he doesn’t sound anything like Ozzy Osbourne, David Bowie, Neil Diamond, or even John Lennon, but he does sound a lot like the previous generation of important male pop singers.
Presley was the first rock ’n’ roll superstar foremost in the sense that his music was the first to be directed at kids—and this is what separates him from all of his predecessors. It wasn’t always so: The Sun records in particular offer a fascinating vision of the Elvis that might have been. He sings mainly blues (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train”), country (“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Just Because”), and pop (“Harbor Lights”) classics. It’s hard to imagine another singer who would take on both Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon” and Bill Monroe’s bluegrass classic “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” It was only when RCA realized he was selling millions of records to teenagers that his material was significantly dumbed down: “Teddy Bear,” “Good Luck Charm,” “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” and many others—these are perhaps the most forgettable part of his legacy.
In my head I can hear Louis Jordan or Ray Charles doing “Blue Suede Shoes,” but not “His Latest Flame” or “The Girl of My Best Friend” These last titles are particularly puerile songs of teen angst; anyone who’d gone through puberty would instantly dismiss them as juvenile above and beyond the call of duty. (Although their purely musical elements—the vocals and the instrumental work—are often ingenious.) One can’t imagine any of Presley’s inspirations in the country, blues, or pop fields doing them (at least not before 1950). It was part of the Presley success story that he was anointed to instigate the Generation Gap (which is depicted humorously in Broadway’s 1960 Bye Bye Birdie). Yet it didn’t have to be that way. Larry Geller remembers, “Contrary to myth, not every adult found Elvis shocking. I recall my parents watching him on Ed Sullivan and enjoying it quite a bit.”
But that was the definition of the new music: What made rock ’n’ roll different from all other earlier pop music was not that it was necessarily intended to appeal to young people—you can say the same thing about swing and about Sinatra-era pop singers—but that it was specifically designed to piss off parents. In fact, nearly every documentary on early rock or Presley devotes time to showing the reaction of the older generation. In general, this is given way too much attention—the rock bashing by church and school officials was mild compared to that directed against jazz in the twenties and swing in the thirties. The more the occasional deacon or elder condemned rock ’n’ roll, the more the business and entertainment communities embraced rock ’n’ roll as a new way to make lots and lots of money. It has always mystified me as to why rock is sometimes regarded as a subversive music or the sound of rebellion, when it has always been enthusiastically supported by corporate America, since even before Elvis. As for Presley himself, he would have never considered himself a rebel: Far from wanting to antagonize the older generation, he addressed all his elders as “Mister” and “Ma’am.” He was a sweet-natured, levelheaded boy—before prescription medications screwed him up—and, in general, conducted himself more like Perry Como than Jim Morrison.
Somewhere along the line, someone got the idea that Presley lost his musical potency after returning from military service in Germany; the idea is articulated, though more diplomatically, by at least two of his closest friends, Joe Esposito and Larry Geller, in their autobiographies. (The field of Memphis Mafia memoirs is a growing subgenre of Elvis lit.) This idea is no more valid than the fiction that all of pop before Presley dealt with doggies in windows.
The mid-fifties—the years of Presley’s breakthrough and the original first age of rock ’n’ roll (conveniently demarcated by his 1958 induction)—are generally considered Presley’s sweet spot: Peter Guralnick devotes roughly five hundred pages of his two-volume, 1,300-page biography to the five years leading up to his departure for Germany. RCA-BMG Records, which controls all of Presley’s output, has released three five-CD box sets; while the packages devoted to the sixties and seventies are selective, and thus titled The Essential Masters, the box containing his fifties recordings is The Complete Masters. Clearly, Presley’s first burst of fame and fortune is more prized than his later work. In this respect, Elvis’s chroniclers risk making him into a rock ’n’ roll equivalent of Louis Armstrong, whose early work (the Hot Fives and Sevens) is prized by scholars who, for many decades, derisively dismissed the rest of his brilliant career.
One preconceived notion of pop music history, however, that is largely true is that rock ’n’ roll essentially faded from public consciousness after 1958; Elvis had not only left the building; he had split the entire scene, and at roughly the same time Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper all died in a plane crash in February 1959; Little Richard decided he’d rather sing about Jesus than “Tutti Frutti”; Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were both virtually excommunicated for doing the wrong thing with the wrong women. The middle-class baby boomers who bought Bill Haley and Elvis records a few years earlier were now going to college and teaching themselves to pick out “Tom Dooley” on beat-up guitars. While folk was capturing the tweed-covered youth (who were causing a disturbance at the Newport jazz and folk festivals), there was also a notable resurgence in popularity of jazz-influenced pop singing in a Sinatra-influenced style. A number of the leading exponents of the traditional songbook were actually of Presley’s approximate generation, like Steve Lawrence, Nancy Wilson, Jack Jones, and Bobby Darin, most of whom started out by singing triplet-heavy kiddie pop before graduating to more mature styles. Darin’s 1959 “Mack the Knife” was a breakthrough blockbuster because he managed to capture both the kids who were raised on rock and their parents.
In June 1958, Presley, on leave from the army, did a session for RCA that might be considered the end of his first rock ’n’ roll era. It produced a hit in “A Big Hunk o’ Love.” Both the song and the arrangement are rudimentary—just another 12-bar, three-chord blues; every other song Presley recorded in the fifties seemed to be one. But “Hunk o’ Love” is elemental Elvis at his best; the arrangement has undeniable energy, drive, and his own brand of swing. The song charted, and remained a favorite of Presley fans long enough for the King to reference it in his 1972 hit “Burning Love.”
There’s nothing to suggest that either he or his audience was growing tired of such material. But there’s plenty to indicate that Presley, who was twenty-five when he was mustered out of the service, was ready to grow as an artist, and fully aware that there was more to music than 12-bar, three-chord rockers. He wouldn’t ever relinquish hard-core, head-banging rock ’n’ roll, but he would supplement it with a wide palette of new colors. It was one of many lessons he learned from Crosby and Sinatra: never to be pinned down to a single style.
Upon returning from Germany, Presley’s first move was to make his “comeback” (the first of several) on a TV special hosted by Frank Sinatra. In a much quoted statement, Sinatra had earlier blasted the entire first generation of rock ’n’ rollers at the very dawn of the music’s emergence. In essence, he characterized rock stars as juvenile delinquents (Sinatra’s reference to “sideburns” would seem to be specifically aimed at Presley); yet long before his remark, at the time when Elvis was still singing for Sam Phillips at Sun, Sinatra had already recorded his own pseudo-rock ’n’ roll single. In 1960, he paid early for the right to host Elvis’s return from the service by outbidding every other TV producer. The immediate result was one of the most enjoyable duets of either man’s career: Ol’ Blue Eyes sings a Nelson Riddle, Swingin’ Lovers-style treatment of “Love Me Tender” and the Pelvis essays “Witchcraft,” complete with his trademark Elvish gyrations.
The decision of Presley’s all-controlling manager, the notorious Colonel Parker, to have Elvis make his official return on Sinatra’s show was strictly a matter of money and business. Yet it turned out to be a prescient decision for a number of reasons, first because Sinatra was the showbiz legend who had practically invented the concept of the comeback.
In fact, Presley’s appearance on the Sinatra show signified that though he had been the original poster boy for rock ’n’ roll, and had done more than anyone else to put that nascent style on the map in 1955–58, he was moving beyond it by 1960. It’s wrongheaded to view this as a corruption of his more hard-rocking beginnings (there are obvious parallels to Bing Crosby’s conscious decision twenty-five years earlier to move beyond his early jazz-based work, and remake himself as the Everyman of American pop). Like Crosby before him, Presley obviously realized that sticking to one style, one way of doing things, would have limited him in both the short and the long runs. There’s every reason to believe he consciously took Crosby as a model; Gary Giddins has made a list of thirty-one songs that the Pelvis undoubtedly learned from Der Bingle (one of which was his only performance of a Cole Porter song, “True Love,” which essentially was the final chart hit for both Crosby and Porter).
From 1955 to 1958, Presley’s output was already comparatively diverse for an emerging pop star in his early twenties. Crosby, Sinatra, and Nat Cole were all much more specialized in that period of their lives (Crosby doing jazz, Sinatra doing ballads, Cole doing mostly piano). Presley, however, had the benefit of growing up with these three musical icons, among others, as guiding stars. He could switch between traditional blues and R&B, country and bluegrass, and slow love songs in a variety of genres, and do them all convincingly even before he was twenty-four. Presley had come out of the age of covers—white singers taking the music of black and country performers and somehow both sanitizing it and mimicking it note for note (like future Elvis impersonators)—and yet when he sings material that you would think only specific performers could do, like Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman” and “What I Say,” he sounds like himself and remains completely credible.
Presley’s artistic growth in the postarmy years was exponential, on a Crosbyesque level. The energy of those early, three-chord and 12-bar blues rockers like “Long Tall Sally” and “Ready Teddy” is still present, but he’s doing so much else as well. Even before he went into the service, in time for Christmas 1957, he taped an album of Christmas songs, climaxed by “Blue Christmas,” a 1948 song that spelled instant crossover, having been done early on by Billy Eckstine and Ernest Tubb. He also had recorded several gospel classics, such as Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley.”
Perhaps his experiences in Germany and Paris (his only significant stay in Europe) impacted upon his desire to add other elements to his music: His first notable postarmy hit was “Wooden Heart,” which he had heard in Germany and sang in G.I. Blues, his first postarmy film and a successful attempt to cash in on the publicity surrounding his army experience. Originally titled “Muss I Den,” in German, this is about as far removed from one of Presley’s premilitary elemental rockers as possible, being a traditional polka composed by the future international hit maker Bert Kaempfert (who later wrote hits for both Cole, “L-O-V-E,” and Sinatra, “Strangers in the Night”). He sings in a high tenor, free of gyration, and barely sounds like himself; the disc became one of his biggest European hits.
As with Crosby, the expanding diversity of Presley’s music was often keyed directly to his films: That was an obvious source of inspiration for all the Hawaiian music in his career. In fact, his first big Island song, “Blue Hawaii,” was a direct hand-me-down from Crosby (who introduced it in the 1937 Waikiki Wedding); for most of the sixties, Elvis spent much of his screen time on the sand: Paradise, Hawaiian Style; Girls! Girls! Girls!; Clambake. Presley did enough Hawaiian and Island songs to fill an album, and though the pictures were somewhat gimmicky—as song titles like “Rock-a-Hula Baby” indicate—you can tell he is sincere in his love for Hawaiian music, especially on “Blue Hawaii” and “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” The latter is an extraordinary record: Presley sings it completely straight, with no vocal tricks or special effects, with incredible sincerity—his voice is smooth and velvety, it’s one of the sexiest and most compelling vocals of his entire career. This brilliant and beautiful vocal makes it perfectly clear that Presley was the next logical step after Crosby, Eckstine, and Martin.
Presley also went Italian in these years, reinvent ing himself as a Neapolitan balladeer at the same moment when Dean Martin was morphing into a Gucci cowboy. He sang “O Sole Mio” as “It’s Now or Never” (Tony Martin, who had a hit with the same melody titled “There’s No Tomorrow,” gave Presley’s version his Jewish blessing). “Now or Never” opened the gates for “Surrender,” based on “Come Back to Sorrento,” and was also a hit for Presley, who also sang “Santa Lucia” in Viva Las Vegas. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (from Blue Hawaii) was written for Presley by the Italo-American songwriters and producers Hugo and Luigi, and was later taken up by Al Martino. “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” was Presley’s biggest hit import, and was one of the great love songs of his white jumpsuit era. Presley actually sang quite a few more Italian songs than Sinatra did.
Presley further explores a variety of polyrhythms in the sixties work, and, eventually, through Latin and clave beats. Quite a few of the fifties hits use the basic 8th- and 16th-note patterns that became an overnight cliché in early rock, but Presley was also developing his own version of the shuffle beat, which had been brought to the forefront of R&B by those two guys named Louis, Jordan and Prima, and which also served as the underlying beat of Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” Increasingly, various Latin, Caribbean, and Pan-American beats were finding their way into Presley’s music. Even early on, there’s more rhythmic variety in Presley’s work than a lot of other early rock acts; the shuffle rhythm of Leiber and Stoller’s “Treat Me Nice” is a lot more pleasing than most anything recorded by Presley’s contemporaries. In general, Presley’s sixties music is much more rhythmically interesting than the earlier work. “Kiss Me Quick,” with its subtle bolero, turns out to be a mere dry run for the more ambitious “Viva Las Vegas,” which brilliantly incorporates a South American samba beat into the Presley shuffle. Leiber and Stoller’s “Bossa Nova Baby” (from the 1963 Fun in Acapulco) is admittedly a crass attempt to cash in on a contemporary trend, but Elvis’s performance makes it a superior piece of work. It’s not in the least Brazilian, but it gets an irresistible Latin-shuffle groove going, and as dance music is every bit as successful as “Jailhouse Rock.”
One aspect of Presley’s career that owed much to Sinatra was his ownership of publishing houses. As with much else in his career, it was the Colonel who pushed Elvis into the publishing business; financially it was a major boost, but artistically it could be considered a compromise of whatever artistic principles Elvis had. Joe Esposito, foreman of the Memphis Mafia and officially Presley’s road manager, writes tellingly about Presley’s publishing interests adversely affecting his music. Before he was in the publishing biz, Esposito writes in Good Rockin’ Tonight, Elvis was inclined to do any song that he liked. He would hear a good country or pop tune on the radio, or he would come across a good R&B tune in one of the “race” records shops in Memphis. Yet after 1960, Presley knew it was in his best financial interests to record as many songs as he could of which he owned at least a portion of the copyright. Thus, a lot of superior songs never got sung by the King, and a lot of crummy ones did.
Sinatra had owned several publishing houses at different points in his career (following in the footsteps of bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey); he had writers working for him, and he often came up with ideas for songs, like “Come Fly with Me,” for which he would retain the publishing rights. Yet Sinatra would never have taken the idea as far as Presley and Parker did—to actually insist on owning a piece of the action of a song as a precondition for singing it. Small wonder he never sang Cole Porter after 1958.
Something that Presley had more in common with his pop-jazz predecessors than his rock descendants was that he never claimed to be a songwriter; his strength was interpreting and bringing his own personal vantage point to songs others had written. When he does do a really first-rate song, which was rare, the results are tremendous, as on his terrific 1964 treatment of Chuck Berry’s fundamental rocker “Memphis, Tennessee,” which is at once both touching and exuberant.
One of the easiest ways to make money where music publishing is concerned is to put one’s name on something that already exists. In these years in particular, there was a major precedent for taking traditional melodies and folk songs, putting new lyrics and titles to them, and sitting back and collecting the royalties. Presley seems to have gotten stuck with more half-baked folk adaptations than anyone: The title song of the 1967 film Stay Away, Joe is “Jump Down, Spin Around,” while “Do the Clam” comes from a folk-blues source that had already been mined for “Hey, Bo Diddley.” Sometimes, the authors of these folk plagiarisms are credited for “adaptations,” but the only adapting the authors of the title song of Frankie and Johnny did was to put the lyric into the first person and interject a few modulations into the melody.
The 1967 Clambake illustrates what a mixed bag Presley’s movies and music had become by that time. The picture, which was also released as a twelve-track LP on RCA, is no Gone With the Wind, but it’s not nearly as bad as the rank and file of Presley’s screen efforts are supposed to be. (Presley was actually the last of the male major movie musical stars—a direct descendant of Jolson, Crosby, and Astaire—and his films are worthy of closer investigation.) The title number borrows liberally from the folk song “Short-nin’ Bread,” but is far from bad, and serves as the basis for a diverting dance number (with girls in shiny bikinis, how bad could it be?). Then there’s “Confidence,” which borrows just as liberally both musically and visually from “High Hopes,” “Swingin’ on a Star,” and other movie numbers written (by Jimmy Van Heusen) for star singers to do with a bunch of kids.
The bulk of the other numbers in Clambake are just business as usual, but there are two notable exceptions: “A House That Has Everything” is a superior ballad by Presley standards, and boasts a simplicity (as well as moralizing message) that seems straight out of Hank Williams. Elvis croons it to co-star Shelley Fabares onscreen, and his performance is direct and moving, one of his most effective love songs ever; there’s a plain beauty here and a lack of artifice that Nat King Cole or one of the other great male pop singers would have admired. Even better is “You Don’t Know Me”: Somehow Elvis put his foot down and insisted on including one of the all-time great country saloon songs. This gem is a little incongruous buried in the middle of a rather trivial film, but here it is, and Presley’s performance digs considerably more deeply than co-composer Eddy Arnold’s or even the iconic Ray Charles version.
It’s easy to single out the inferior songs in Presley’s films, but there are just as many minor classics, like “All That I Am” in Spinout and “Almost in Love” in Live a Little, Love a Little, the latter being a superior song that would have suited Tony Bennett. “A House That Has Everything” is one of the prettiest things Presley ever sang. It’s worth at least a half a dozen of the three-chord rock numbers Presley cut ten years earlier, yet “A House That Has Everything” is not available in any of BMG’s Essential 60’s Masters boxes. (I had to find it on an out-of-print Clambake sound track disc on eBay. The Essential 60’s Masters series deliberately avoids the movie songs, and, in fact, the time is well nigh for a big megabox of Presley’s film tracks.)
There are several interviews and press conferences with Presley during which he’s asked if he considers himself a country singer or a rock singer, and he answers that gospel is too much a part of what he does for him to consider himself either one.
The expected trajectory of a blues and pop singer in the mid-twentieth century was out of the church and onto the jukebox. Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughan in the forties, Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls in the fifties, then Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight in the sixties, to name just six, all started singing in church (and in the case of Cooke and Rawls, were stars on the gospel circuit) before they crossed over to pop. But it would be hard to think of another singer, black or white, who became a star in mainstream pop before he or she began to concentrate on spiritual music. In that aspect of his career, Presley has more in common with Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and other major American composers who began exploring their spiritual side later, rather than earlier, in their careers.
Presley’s gospel recordings represent perhaps the most consistently excellent work of his entire career. He made three full albums of gospel songs, the first few tracks of which are included in the BMG Complete 50’s Masters box. None of them are on the Essential 60’s and 70’s, although all are on the even more essential two-CD package Amazing Grace—His Greatest Sacred Performances. Unlike Cooke and Rawls (who were both, like Nat King Cole, the sons of preachers), Presley did not start his career by thrilling fellow parishioners; as Guralnick makes clear, he didn’t really sing anywhere in public before he began recording. But nonetheless to the young Presley, singing was what you did in church, and the terms “gospel” and “music” were interchangeable. The local quartets, like the Blackwoods, were heroes to him; his highest ambition as a youngster was to land a gig singing with such a quartet. He also heard the blues, and he loved the blues; he heard country and he loved that, too. But only gospel was so real and tangible to him that he could reach out and touch it.
Presley was at his most consistently excellent when singing this music: He brings to it both a conviction and an intensity unmatched elsewhere in his catalog; he sings about God with the same power as Billie Holiday singing about her man or Jolson about his Mammy. He sang songs from both the black (blues) and white (country) traditions of religious music, songs associated with Thomas A. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, even the religious album by Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae; he made the semitraditional hymn “In the Garden” into a thing of extraordinary beauty. Presley’s most celebrated spiritual-oriented song was “If I Can Dream” (the climax of the 1968 so-called Comeback Special), which is not technically a gospel song, since it concerns itself with earthly, rather than spiritual, salvation. Even so, its lyrics allude directly to the speeches of Martin Luther King, and Presley sings it with the same inspiration and passion that he normally reserved for gospel music.
Virtually the only two Broadway show tunes that Presley sang were both transformed by him into sacred songs: “The Impossible Dream” (from Man of La Mancha) and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (from Carousel). He is just about the only performer ever to make “Impossible Dream” palatable, and he named the second as his favorite song in his famous army press conference before sailing for Germany in 1958. He didn’t put “Walk Alone” on record until nearly ten years later in 1967, and even then he sang it with countrified chord substitutions that would have horrified Rodgers and Hammerstein. But it’s impossible not to feel the spirit when he sings, and it isn’t so much that he convinces you that he believes it, but that he makes you believe it yourself.
Presley’s most famous traditional pop standard was “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which is said to have come his way courtesy of Gene Austin via Colonel and Marie Parker. “Lonesome” was a collaboration of Lou Handman (author of one of Bessie Smith’s finest nonblues songs, “My Sweetie Went Away”) and Roy Turk (who wrote, among many standards, Bing Crosby’s theme song, “When the Blue of the Night [Meets the Gold of the Day],” which was also originally in 3/4). It was widely recorded in 1927, which indicates some measure of popularity, but never became an iconic hit of the era, like “My Blue Heaven” or “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”
It was then revived notably in 1950, at one of the final sessions of the World’s Greatest Entertainer, Al Jolson, as well as by Blue Barron and His Orchestra. This very traditional waltz is, overall, Presley’s greatest ballad, and the single most significant piece of evidence that Presley had a voice fully as beautiful as the other three guys who are generally ranked as the most successful male singers in American popular music—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole. (Not to mention Billy Eckstine, Perry Como, Vic Damone, Jack Jones, and Jolson himself.) It’s hard to think of anybody in the popular music sphere of the last fifty years—Broadway, country, rock, soul, or whatever—who has pipes and chops to compete.
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” contains a feature that would be regarded as unique in any popular song: a spoken monologue, a poetry recitation of sorts. The monologue was published as part of the original sheet music, but, as far as I can tell, it was not included in any of the original twenties recordings; it doesn’t seem to have been recorded until 1950. On the Blue Barron disc, the piece is recited by a local Chicago radio announcer named John McCormick (no relation to the famous Irish tenor of thirty years earlier); it was a minor chart hit that year. Jolson, not surprisingly, intones the recitation with considerably more conviction.
Tom Parker and his wife may have suggested “Lonesome” to Presley, but he had certainly heard the Jolson version. He sings it in his tenor register, high and sweet, which is reminiscent of both Gene Austin and Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, but his confidence and sincerity recall that of the great Jolson. Then, to the surprise of the engineers at the session, he goes into the McCormick-Barron monologue. Although he had tried spoken passages in at least two earlier songs, the “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” monologue is unique. It’s been suggested that Presley couldn’t get through the whole thing without cracking up and the speech had to be assembled from multiple takes; the existence of a complete alternate (on the 2002 box Today, Tomorrow and Forever) suggests that this isn’t so. It’s true that Elvis, who acted on his own initiative by including the monologue, in later years frequently broke up with laughter during this song, even before he got to the spoken passage. A famous concert recording from 1969 has Presley, who could never be accused of taking himself too seriously, crooning the following couplet: “Do the lights in the parlor seem empty and bare? / Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?” The text, with its allusions to As You Like It (“You know, someone said that the world’s a stage, and each must play a part”) is probably as close as Presley ever came to Shakespeare—at least until the 2005 Broadway musical All Shook Up, which expertly managed to bowdlerize both the Bard and the King.
Ervin Drake, composer of Sinatra’s iconic “It Was a Very Good Year,” once described a late-night conversation with Sinatra in which the subject of Presley somehow came up. Drake is one of the few songwriters whose work had been recorded by both Presley (who sang Drake’s “I Believe”) and Sinatra, although he certainly was much closer, personally and aesthetically, to the latter than to the former. In any event, one night a few hours after a show at the Sands, Sinatra and Drake were hanging out by the side of a pool with drinks in hand (every scene in Vegas involves pools and drinks), chatting. As Ervin told me, he said to Sinatra, “You know, I’m not exactly sure what it is that Elvis does, but whatever it is, he’s the best at it—in fact, he’s a real champion.” At this point, Sinatra raised his glass in agreement. “Yeah, he’s the best,” said the Chairman of the King, “whatever it is.”
Nancy Sinatra, who co-starred with Presley in the 1968 Speedway, once reported a conversation with her father on the subject of Elvis Presley. On this particular occasion Sinatra Senior dismissed him not on the basis of his singing talent or his taste in music, but because of his perceived inability to grow as an artist. Nancy protested that the people around Elvis wouldn’t let him grow, but Sinatra pooh-poohed this excuse. As well he should have. From his perspective, we can’t blame him—Sinatra wouldn’t let anybody stand in his way in terms of choosing a song or polishing an arrangement or mix to perfection.
Yet this conversation represents perhaps the only time Frank Sinatra was documented as discussing Presley as even a potentially kindred spirit—which they were. They both were only children who required the company of an entourage around them after they grew up (Elvis’s Memphis Mafia was his equivalent of the Rat Pack); they both were extremely attached to dominating mothers and had comparatively passive fathers. Sinatra and Presley were among the few singers who attained superstardom in Hollywood, and they both had a lot of comebacks.
More important, both Sinatra and Presley were their own tastemakers. But that may be where the similarity ends. Esposito describes how Presley would work with his recording engineers to mix his own master tapes. He would then have a one-off acetate pressed of his mix, and then compare it with the mix that RCA released. When the label tampered with his intentions, it would annoy him, but, unfortunately, not to the degree that he would actually do anything about it. The word came down from the Colonel that only Elvis himself was important: The quality of his songs or the plots of his films or any thing else was irrelevant. This was precisely the opposite of Sinatra’s attitude; in his music especially, Sinatra only wanted to sing the best songs. Elvis did, too, but he didn’t have the attitude or temperament to stand up to the Colonel or RCA Records or Paramount Pictures. Sinatra and the equally pugnacious Ray Charles constantly made their own opportunities, and heaven help you if you got in their way. Perhaps to stick to your own standards in showbiz, you had to be something of a gangster.
One of the most repeated—and indisputable—truisms about Presley’s canon is that he frequently took second-rate songs and turned them into classics—something that rarely had to be said about Sinatra or Tony Bennett, who made a point of only singing songs that were excellent to begin with. Unfortunately, Presley lacked their fortitude—otherwise, everything might have been as good as “Memphis, Tennessee” and “You Don’t Know Me” or his riveting live version of Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” What Sinatra did for Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter, Presley should have been for Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, Big Bill Broonzy, and Willie Dixon—he should have been the greatest interpreter of those other great American songbooks, and he should have done more traditional Tin Pan Alley songs and show tunes, too.
When the Elvis sightings of the early nineties reached a peak, I couldn’t help speculating: There’s so much interest in Elvis now, can you imagine what it’ll be like when he actually dies? Presley’s death, obviously, left a gap that no one has been able to fill. Now, in 2010, it seems more clear than ever that Elvis Presley was not the beginning of something, but an end. John Lennon famously once said, “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” He had it the wrong way around: After Elvis, there was nothing.