As the rock 'n' roll icon returns in holographic form in the show Elvis Evolution, premiering in London in November, here is our pick of his finest musical moments.
10) Crawfish, 1958
(Ben Weisman and Fred Wise)
Originally designed as a vehicle for James Dean, Elvis Presley’s fourth – and best – film found him working with Walter Matthau and the man who directed Casablanca, Michael Curtiz. Certainly the sexiest song ever sung about seafood, Elvis’s duet with a fish peddler in the French quarter of New Orleans in King Creole is one of his best performances, while the slow, aching blues is so cool that it was always referenced by Joe Strummer as being his favourite Elvis track. He looked like Jimmy Dean and sang like no one on earth (and certainly like no one on Bourbon Street).
9) Young and Beautiful, 1957
(Aaron Schroeder and Abner Silver)
Aaron Schroeder wrote over 1,500 songs, including 17 for Elvis, of which five reached number one (A Big Hunk O’ Love, Good Luck Charm, I Got Stung, Stuck On You and It’s Now or Never). He liked to say, not always in jest, “I don’t read music – that’s why I make so much money.”
In the late Sixties, Schroeder negotiated the music rights for Hanna-Barbera’s animated productions and ended up writing the theme song for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in 1969. Surprisingly this wasn’t covered by Elvis.
8) Jailhouse Rock, 1957
(Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
Having already written Riot In Cell Block #91, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller were the perfect team to write Elvis’s “crime song”. After the singer successfully covered Hound Dog, the Colonel offered the writers a deal.
“We did about four or five movies, and each one was sillier than the last” said Leiber. “We were getting cross-eyed from trying to keep our interest up. And then we ran into a problem with Colonel Parker, who was a colonel like I’m a ballet dancer.” However when Elvis sings, “If you can’t find a partner use a wooden chair…” he sounds like he’s coming to burn your house down. By the time of 1962’s She’s Not You, which Leiber and Stoller wrote with Doc Pomus, Elvis’s records were beginning to sound so familiar that they all sounded like Christmas.
7) Love Me, 1956
(Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
Even back then, at the very dawn of rock and roll, when commitment and sincerity were of paramount importance, Elvis treated this song as a bit of a jape. Look at him performing it on TV at the time and he’ll have a smirk on his face, either winking at his band or at a girl in the audience. It was corny, it was schmaltzy and it was old-fashioned. And yet, and yet… it was sexy.
Leiber and Stoller wrote it as a country and western parody, although it quickly became a standard of the genre. And as soon as Elvis covered it, the song became his and his alone. He performed it on his 1968 comeback TV special, and throughout his tours of the Seventies, and every time he did, the women in the audience would whoop and holler and pretend to swoon. This was their adolescence he was playing with, and they loved it.
He would slowly sing, “Treat me like a fool…” and then wait for the screams and the giggles, wait for the audience members who had wet themselves to the song the first time around, to leap up in their seats and start applauding. He would look down with lidded eyes at his girls in the front row, give them a lopsided grin and maybe twitch one leg. And they loved it.
This was their song, their moment, and it wasn’t for sharing. All eyes would be on his, in case he glanced their way, and made them feel – oh-so-fleetingly – like they had done back in 1956. Elvis knew the power of the song, and although he’d always found it a bit tacky, he’d perform it with passion if not necessarily with commitment. David Lynch understood the power of the song, too, and got Elvis-aficionado Nicholas Cage to sing it to his squeeze Laura Dern in his 1990 thriller Wild At Heart (a.k.a. The Wizard of Elvis), causing her to go into paroxysms of desire.
6) All Shook Up, 1956
(Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley)
If you believe the story of the song’s provenance (Otis Blackwell being inspired to write the lyric by an excited bottle of soda after his publisher challenged him to write a song about “anything”), then you’ll also believe that this is one of the first proper examples of pure “pop” writing: not only is it a song about “nothing”, it is also a song literally about “pop”.
At the end of Grease, Olivia Newton-John undergoes a complete transformation to become a rock chick. It was originally planned that Olivia and John Travolta would sing a version of All Shook Up, but movie songwriter John Farrar had other ideas. Instead he came up with You’re The One That I Want. Which obviously wasn’t the same thing at all.
5) Hound Dog, 1956
(Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller)
Originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton in 1953, Elvis’s version was jauntier, based in part on a spoof take on the song by Freddie Bell & The Bellboys, whose act he had seen in Las Vegas. When he performed it on The Milton Berle Show he added his half-speed coda, thrusting his groin into the heart of middle America, sending the rest of the country into something of a panic.
It ended up selling 7 million copies. “I heard the record and I was disappointed," said Mike Stoller, who, along with his partner, had initially considered Presley to be something of an idiot savant. “It just sounded terribly nervous, too fast, too white. But you know, after it sold 7 or 8 million records it started to sound better.”
4) Don’t Be Cruel, 1956
(Otis Blackwell and Elvis Presley)
A prime example of late-period western bop, Elvis swings through this song, with a completely understated performance. In a word, it was loping. Producer Sam Phillips, who no longer had anything to do with him by this stage, had to pull his car over to the side of the road when he first heard it on the radio. “I thought, they have finally found this man’s ability… The rhythm was right, and it was moving along just right, it had that absolute spontaneity, and yet Elvis still had command.”
3) Heartbreak Hotel, 1956
(Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden and Elvis Presley)
Based on a suicide note, Phillips originally called this a “morbid mess”, and the demo vocalist Glenn Reeves thought so little of it that he wanted his name kept from Elvis. With this record there had been an attempt to mimic the “slapback” sound of Sun, but the first time around it hadn’t been much of a success.
However when it was rerecorded, the lumbering blues started to work, with Elvis’s slurred vocals sounding almost desperate. “His phrasing, his use of echo, it’s all so beautiful,” said Paul McCartney. “As if he’s singing it from the depths of hell.” It turned out to be his first national number one, selling over 2 million copies.
2) Mystery Train, 1955
(Little Junior Parker and Sam Phillips)
Recorded in July 1955 as his noble farewell to the record label Sun, this was Elvis’ cover of a fairly nondescript 1953 song by Little Junior Parker, being empirical evidence that Elvis really was the man who turned old rhythm and blues records into brand new rockabilly ones. Songwriter Doc Pomas said that it sounded like somebody coming up from the swamp, and it still does, with Elvis standing there, water and viscous fluid dripping from his curled lip and his satin shirt, his eyes tracing every inch of your baby’s body, as he moved from burbling baritone to whining tenor in a heartbeat.
Of course, one of the people this record inspired was the great Johnny Burnette, a pioneer of wildman rockabilly, a man who made records so fiery, so sparse, they sounded almost elemental, as though nothing could have possibly come before them. Burnette’s stuff was field music, bashing out a rhythm with two big sticks, a fuzzy guitar and a raucous yell. Collars up, lip curled, grease in hand: Lonesome Train, Honey Hush, Drinkin’ Wine Spo-De-O-De - oh Lawdy!
1) That’s All Right, 1954
(Arthur Crudup)
With this record, producer Sam Phillips captured lightning in a bottle. Consequently, this has become the lodestar of rock and roll, the song by which every other rock song should be judged. It would be wrong to say that before this there was nothing – there was jump blues, R&B, hillbilly, urban swing, Ike Turner and even Bill Haley – but this was the line in the sand, the vortex through which the teenage demographic came of age.
Written and originally performed by the blues singer Arthur Crudup (not a rock and roll name), this was Elvis’s first commercial single, one of the most defining moments of the 20th century, lasting just one minute and 57 seconds. When the recording session was done, bass player Bill Black said, “Damn. Get that on the radio and they’ll run us out of town.”
“I cannot tell you [what style it was], even though I’ve been asked quite a few times,” said Scotty Moore, who played guitar on the track. “It wasn’t even really the lack of a drummer. I guess it was just a combination of several different styles rolled into one. I was a big fan of Merle Travis, of Chet Atkins with his thumb and finger styles, and a lot of the blues players – it was just trying to roll different sounds together, and that’s what came out. Like we used to say then, and probably people still do today when you ask them how they do something, ‘I just did everything I could,’ you know?
"That’s what happened – I played everything I knew. I wasn’t even looking for an individual style, and probably, I’d never have known that I had one if I’d stayed in a five or six piece group, but by pulling it down to a trio like that, you naturally had to do more. So that was how I developed the combination rhythm and a few notes type thing – we were forced into it really, I guess you could say.”
This was also the first proper rockabilly record, and, until he became public property a few years later, after this came out Elvis started to be called “the Hillbilly Cat” and “the King of Western Bop.”
This is the record that has the ability to make you forget all others, the record that forces you to banish all the gentrified pop that came in its wake, as well as all the wishy-washy blues that came before it. This is the rock and roll sticky fly trap. That’s All Right is one of those things that just can’t be argued with, a pop-cultural milestone whose importance only escalates with age.
Though the acetate of Paul McCartney’s first band, the Quarrymen – owned by the man himself – is still probably the rarest record in the world, a Sun acetate of That’s All Right that surfaced in 2013 would run it a very close second. John Heath bought it for $6,000 in 2004 from a retired English teacher in the Memphis area, who had acquired it from her mother’s friend, and who had once worked for a Memphis radio station. It is one of the two-sided acetates – it was backed with Blue Moon of Kentucky – sent to the WHBQ, WMPS and WHHM radio stations.
“The sound went straight up your spine,” said country star Waylon Jennings. “It just climbed right through you.”
Billboard’s response? “A potent new chanter who comes thru with a solid performance.”
Oh, and pretty much invented rock and roll as we know it, creating something that had never been heard before, and setting himself free in the process.
“It was like being hit with a truck filled with happiness,” said the film director David Lynch. “It was a thrilling truck, and you know, I sort of wish everybody could experience that feeling. You’ve heard these stories. So many musicians when they heard Elvis for the first time, they just slammed their head with their fist and just said, ‘Damn! This is it!’ And it was just suddenly so obvious. It wasn’t there, and then it was there.
"And it had this unbelievable power, and it just screamed out, and everybody and his little brother lit up like a Christmas tree. It was unbelievably beautiful. I just, inside, felt this thrill, this love of the sound. It was like grabbing onto an electric wire.”
These other Sun songs are also indispensable: Just Because, Trying To Get To You, Good Rockin’ Tonight, Baby Let’s Play House, Trying To Get To You, When It Rains It Really Pours, Blue Moon (a 32-bar pop classic that Elvis turns into an eerie 16-bar blues), You’re A Heartbreaker, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Tomorrow Night, I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine (just listen to the extraordinary way Elvis pronounces kiss as “kist”)…
