Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley

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Essential Albums

  • From Elvis In Memphis
    From Elvis In Memphis
    From Elvis In Memphis

    Following his smash-hit 1968 NBC TV special, Elvis Presley chose to capitalise on his creative revitalisation by heading back to where it had all started: Memphis, Tennessee. This time, though, instead of working with Sam Phillips and Sun Records, Presley followed the lead of producer Chips Moman at his hitmaking American Sound Studio. The album they made together, 1969’s From Elvis in Memphis, presented a slight twist on Presley’s initial formula: Instead of combining country songs with 1950s R&B, Presley combined them with the enormously popular Southern soul sound. It’s an album that replaces rockabilly fervour with a more laconic, almost mature-sounding groove, as Presley winds his way through country classics old and new. From Elvis in Memphis proves that Presley, now in his early thirties, could succeed in an entirely different pop music zeitgeist than the one he helped shape. Here he isn’t innovating, but rather cutting through modern-day arrangements and rhythms with ease—making his sound less nostalgic, and undoubtedly introducing him to a new generation of fans. There are moments on From Elvis in Memphis where his usual pop polish is breached, too: The Eddy Arnold song “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)” has an accidentally modern introduction, as Presley restarts the tune several times in quick succession, in a way that almost sounds digitally manipulated. And while the album’s biggest hit was “In the Ghetto”—a ballad by Mac Davis that landed in the Top 10—that tune was overshadowed by another track from the American Sound sessions. A pinnacle of late-1960s pop production, “Suspicious Minds” didn’t make the cut for From Elvis in Memphis. But the song became Elvis’ last No. 1 hit in America when it was eventually released as a single—and, to this day, it remains one of his biggest songs ever, as closely associated with the singer’s sound as classics like “Hound Dog” or “All Shook Up”. (“Suspicious Minds” would later be added as a bonus track on From Elvis in Memphis.)

  • How Great Thou Art
    How Great Thou Art
    How Great Thou Art

    Though Elvis Presley’s 1968 NBC special is often cited as the starting point of his spectacular comeback, his mid-career renaissance actually began a year earlier, with the 1967 gospel collection How Great Thou Art. To those who only knew Presley from his hip-shaking, hound-dogging early days, the spiritual side he displayed on How Great Thou Art might have been a bit of a shock. But to some fans, this was Elvis Presley, and while his gospel numbers may not be as well known as his rockers, How Great Thou Art was a hit album at a time when he needed one: It brought Presley back near the top of the pop charts, and earned the singer his first Grammy, thanks to the title track, which was named Best Sacred Performance. Presley’s gospel pivot had been inspired a few years earlier, thanks to “Crying in the Chapel”, a tossed-off single that became a surprise hit in 1965, after sitting in a vault unreleased for five years. The song’s success prompted RCA to encourage Presley to make another gospel record, eventually leading to How Great Thou Art. “Crying in the Chapel” shows up again on this record, and it’s not hard to understand why it became a hit: The song features the same quivering, crooning singing that appeared on Presley’s early ballad hits—you can trace its lineage all the way back to “Love Me Tender”. And while no other single from How Great Thou Art managed to cross over into pop success, Presley’s lush, almost chintzy collection of gospel classics ultimately went multi-platinum. (His work on the album went beyond just providing vocals, though: Presley is credited with arrangements on a number of the tracks, including “Run On”, one of a handful of songs here that draw heavily from the tradition of African-American gospel music groups like the Golden Gate Quartet.) If How Great Thou Art was a sharp juxtaposition to the sometimes frivolous music Presley was making in his Hollywood-soundtrack phase, it was also tied to the popular music of the late 1950s and early 1960s that Presley had released so successfully—making all these reverent tunes a still fairly familiar-sounding listen to his fans.

  • Elvis
    Elvis
    Elvis

    Released in late 1956, just seven months after the arrival of his self-titled debut, Elvis would become the singer’s second chart-topping album of the year. That’s a huge achievement, to be sure—but not necessarily a surprising one: Presley’s rise had been so rapid, it was all but a given that Elvis would claim the No. 1 spot. That’s probably why Presley and his producer, Steve Sholes, weren’t too concerned about reinventing the wheel with Elvis, which finds Presley returning to the country, R&B and rock sounds that had made his first release so massive. What sets Presley’s second album apart from the singer’s debut smash—which featured singles recorded at various points in the mid-1950s—is that the 12 tracks on Elvis were largely the result of just a few designated sessions. That makes Elvis more akin to what we’d now consider a studio album—a rarity at the time. As a result, there’s a consistency to Elvis, which feels impressively casual at times; if you close your eyes while listening, it almost feels like a lost document of some imagined, impossible roadhouse show (the real Elvis shows, of course, were drowned out by screams). As for the songs, Elvis features intentional nods to Presley’s own history (and mythology): “So Glad You’re Mine” was written by Arthur Crudup, while “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again” had famously been performed by Bill Monroe—two musicians whose work Presley had covered on his very first Sun Records single. And “Old Shep” is the Red Foley song that Presley supposedly sang in a state fair contest when he was 10 years old. The biggest song from Elvis, though, found him reuniting with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller—the songwriters behind “Hound Dog”—for a completely different-sounding song: “Love Me”, the woeful lover’s plea that turned out to be a pitch-perfect vocal showcase for Presley.

  • Elvis Presley
    Elvis Presley
    Elvis Presley

    By the time Elvis Presley released his self-titled debut album in early 1956, the Tupelo, Mississippi native already had a chart-topping country record to his name—“I Forgot to Remember to Forget”—with another single, “Heartbreak Hotel”, climbing the pop charts. A few months earlier, RCA Victor had paid a then-grandiose sum of $40,000 to buy out Presley’s contract with Sun Records—a deal encouraged by Presley’s money-minded manager, Colonel Tom Parker. RCA was determined to cash in on its investment, and waged with a full-fledged promotional campaign in the hopes of turning Elvis Presley (and Elvis Presley) into a phenomenon. Needless to say, the pay-off was almost instantaneous: Five of the nearly two dozen Presley songs that RCA released as singles in 1956 would hit No. 1. By year’s end, the country kid was a household name, sparking riotous crowds and breathless controversy wherever he went and every time he flaunted his scandalous dance moves on TV—the energy of which is captured on Elvis Presley’s iconic cover. The decision to release an album that contained none of Presley’s massively successful early RCA singles spoke to the label’s confidence in him. Instead of a greatest-hits collection, contemporary listeners of Elvis Presley get a guide to the R&B, rock and country sounds that Presley combined in such an intoxicating (and pop-moulding) fashion. Many of Presley’s groundbreaking early hits are collected here, from “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Blue Moon”. And while there are tunes from Nashville songwriters Jimmy Wakely and Don Robertson, Presley also covers songs made famous by iconic Black artists like Little Richard, Ray Charles and Clyde McPhatter—a violation of the long-running segregation at the heart of American popular music, and a move that fanned the flames of Presley’s provocative image. The first rock album ever to top the Billboard charts, Elvis Presley remains a document of a transformative moment in pop history, as the myth of genre was being melted and reimagined—one rockabilly song at a time.

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About Elvis Presley

In 1992, the U.S. Postal Service conducted a nationwide vote on a crucial subject: Should their upcoming stamp feature Young Elvis or Older Elvis? More than 75 percent of the million-plus ballots voted for Young Elvis, but the fact that the question was asked at all speaks to the difficulty of pinning down just who the man was and how he should be remembered: Boundary-breaking R&B singer or Hollywood crooner? Rock pioneer or Vegas showman? An artist who legitimised blues for white audiences or appropriated it from black performers? In truth, Elvis Presley was all these things and more, a prism through which just about every myth we have about race, pop culture and the American dream can be refracted. Born in 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a two-room shotgun house built by his father, Presley moved to Memphis as a teenager, recording his first sides for Sun Records a couple of months after he finished high school. He liked country, but also blues; he liked ballads, but played with an irrepressible energy that helped shape the feel of rock and roll. (His breakthrough, an uptempo cover of the blues singer Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right”, reportedly started as a goof Presley was killing time with between takes of something more subdued.) In addition to becoming one of the first artists to successfully make R&B for white audiences, Presley was also one of the first performers whose fame (good and bad) came in large part from television—you can’t see hips move in the newspaper. (The New York Times, reporting on Presley’s Milton Berle Show performance in June 1956: “His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway.”) Presley parlayed his screen appeal into a successful movie career, spending most of the '60s in Hollywood. (A handful of his most indelible songs—including “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Return to Sender”—started life on soundtracks to movies in which he also starred.) In 1968, he ventured to recapture the jolt of his early years, staging a television special (Elvis, a.k.a. the ’68 Comeback Special) that constituted his first live performance since 1961. The following year, he released From Elvis in Memphis, an album that found him suddenly, effortlessly, in step with contemporary pop and soul. Though Presley toured almost relentlessly until his death from a heart attack in 1977, he became increasingly cloistered, at one point giving up recording studios in favor of using a mobile studio RCA Records sent to his Memphis mansion, Graceland. A car aficionado with no shortage of spending money, he was known to occasionally approach strangers outside Cadillac showrooms and ask which model and color they liked best before offering—out of the blue—to pick up the bill. Nearly 80,000 people were estimated to have attended the procession for his funeral, where he was buried next to his mother.

BORN
8 January 1935
GENRE
Rock

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