La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer and musician.
Young is generally recognized as the first minimalist composer, and one of the four most celebrated leaders of the minimalist school, along with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, despite having little in common formally with Glass or Reich. Young is also probably the least heard and least well-known of the major minimalist composers.
His works have been included among the most important and radical post-World War II avant-garde, experimental, or drone music. Both his proto-Fluxus and "minimal" compositions question the nature and definition of music and often stress elements of performance.
[8936 Billy Roberts / 8935 LaMonte Young / 8935 J.L. Lewis]
Jerry Lee Lewis (b. September 29, 1935) is an American rock and roll and country music singer and pianist. An early pioneer of rock and roll music, his career faltered after Lewis married his young cousin, and he afterwards made a transition to country music.
Lewis was born to the poor family of Elmo and Mamie Lewis in Ferriday in Concordia Parish in eastern Louisiana, and began playing piano in his youth with his two cousins, Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart. His parents mortgaged their farm to buy him a piano. Influenced by a piano-playing older cousin Carl McVoy (who later recorded with Bill Black 's Combo), the radio, and the sounds from the black juke joint across the tracks, Haney's Big House, Lewis created his style from black artists who were unable to play to white audiences, mixing rhythm and blues, boogie-woogie, gospel, and country music, as well as ideas from established "country boogie" pianists like recording artists Moon Mullican and Merrill Moore. Soon he was playing professionally.
His mother enrolled him in Southwest Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, secure in the knowledge that her son would now be exclusively singing his songs to the Lord. But Lewis daringly played a boogie woogie rendition of "My God Is Real" at a church assembly that sent him packing the same night. Pearry Green, then president of the student body, related how during a talent show Lewis played some "worldly" music. The next morning, the dean of the school called both Lewis and Green into his office to expel them both. Lewis said that Green shouldn't be expelled because "he didn't know what I was going to do." Years later Green asked Lewis: "Are you still playing the devil's music?" Lewis replied "Yes, I am. But you know it's strange, the same music that they kicked me out of school for is the same kind of music they play in their churches today. The difference is, I know I am playing for the devil and they don't."
After that incident, he went home and started playing at clubs in and around Ferriday and Natchez, Mississippi, becoming part of the burgeoning new rock and roll sound and cutting his first demo recording in 1954. He made a trip to Nashville around 1955 where he played clubs and attempted to drum up interest, but was turned down by the Grand Ole Opry as he had been at the Louisiana Hayride country stage and radio show in Shreveport. Recording executives in Nashville suggested he switch to playing a guitar.
Lewis traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in November 1956, to audition for Sun Records. Label owner Sam Phillips was away on a trip to Florida, but producer and engineer Jack Clement recorded Lewis's rendition of Ray Price's "Crazy Arms" and his own composition "End of The Road". During December 1956, Lewis began recording prolifically, both as a solo artist and as a session musician for such Sun artists as Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash. His distinctive piano playing can be heard on many tracks recorded at Sun during late 1956 and early 1957, including Carl Perkins' "Matchbox", "Your True Love", "You Can Do No Wrong", and "Put Your Cat Clothes On", and Billy Lee Riley's "Flyin' Saucers Rock'n'Roll". Until this time, rockabilly had rarely featured piano, but it proved a highly influential addition and rockabilly artists on other labels soon also started working with pianists.
On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley dropped in on Phillips to pay a social visit while Perkins was in the studio cutting new tracks with Lewis backing him on piano. Johnny Cash was also there watching Perkins. The four started an impromptu jam session, and Phillips left the tape running. These recordings, almost half of which were gospel songs, survived, and have been released on CD under the title Million Dollar Quartet.
Lewis's own singles (on which he was billed as "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano") advanced his career as a soloist during 1957, with hits such as "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire", his biggest hit, bringing him to national and international fame, despite criticism for the songs' overtly sexual undertones which prompted some radio stations to boycott them. In 2005, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" was selected for permanent preservation in the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress.
According to several first hand sources, including Johnny Cash, Lewis himself, who was devoutly Christian, was also troubled by the sinful nature of his own material, which he firmly believed was leading himself and his audience to hell.
This aspect of Lewis's character was depicted in Waylon Payne's portrayal of Lewis in the 2005 film Walk the Line, based on Cash's autobiographies.
Lewis would often kick the piano bench out of the way to play standing, rake his hands up and down the keyboard for dramatic accent, sit down on the keyboard and even stand on top of the instrument. His first TV appearance, in which he demonstrated some of these moves, was on The Steve Allen Show on July 28, 1957, where he played the song "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On."
He is also reputed to have set a piano on fire at the end of a live performance, in protest at being billed below Chuck Berry.
His dynamic performance style can be seen in films such as High School Confidential (he sang the title song from the back of a flatbed truck), and Jamboree. He has been called "rock & roll's first great wild man" and also "rock & roll's first great eclectic."
Classical composer Michael Nyman has also cited Lewis's style as the progenitor of his own aesthetic.
Lewis's turbulent personal life was hidden from the public until a May 1958 British tour where Ray Berry, a news agency reporter at London's Heathrow Airport (the only journalist present), learned about Lewis's third wife, Myra Gale Brown. She was Lewis's first cousin once removed and only 13 years old. (Brown, Lewis, and his management all insisted she was 15). Lewis was nearly 23 years old. The publicity caused an uproar and the tour was cancelled after only three concerts.
The scandal followed Lewis home to America, and as a result, he was blacklisted from radio and almost vanished from the music scene. Lewis felt betrayed by numerous people who had been his supporters. Dick Clark dropped him from his shows. Lewis even felt that Sam Phillips had sold him out when the Sun Records boss released "The Return of Jerry Lee," a bogus "interview" cut together by Jack Clement from excerpts of Lewis's songs, which made light of his marital and publicity problems. Only Alan Freed stayed true to Jerry Lee Lewis, playing his records until Freed was removed from the air because of payola allegations.
Jerry Lee Lewis was still under contract with Sun Records, and kept recording, regularly releasing singles. He had gone from $10,000 a night concerts to $250 a night spots in beer joints and small clubs. He had few friends at the time whom he felt he could trust. It was only through Kay Martin, the president of Lewis's fan club, T. L. Meade, (aka Franz Douskey) a sometime Memphis musician and friend of Sam Phillips, and Gary Skala, that Lewis went back to record at Sun Records
By this time, Phillips had built a new state-of-the-art studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, thus abandoning the old Union Avenue studio where Phillips had recorded B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Lewis, Johnny Cash and others, and also opened a studio in Nashville. It was at the latter studio that Lewis recorded his only major hit during this period, a rendition of Ray Charles's What'd I Say in 1961. In Europe other updated versions of Sweet Little Sixteen (September 1962 UK) and Good Golly Miss Molly (March 1963) entered the Hit Parade. On popular EP's -- Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes, I've Been Twistin', Money, and Hello Josephine -- also became turntable hits, especially in nascent discothèques. Another recording of Lewis playing an instrumental boogie arrangement of the Glenn Miller Orchestra favorite In the Mood was issued on the Phillips International label under the pseudonym of The Hawk, but disc jockeys quickly figured out the distinctive piano style, and this gambit failed.
Lewis's Sun recording contract ended in 1963 and he joined Smash Records, where he made a number of rock recordings that did not further his career.
His popularity recovered somewhat in Europe, especially in the UK and Germany, during the mid-1960s. A concert album, Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964), recorded with The Nashville Teens, is widely considered one of the greatest live rock and roll albums ever.
Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine writes: "Live at the Star Club is extraordinary, the purest, hardest rock & roll ever committed to record."
Lewis has been married six times.
His first marriage, to Dorothy Barton, lasted for 20 months, from February 1952 to October 1953 although there is some question that Lewis may have married Barton earlier than 1952. In a 1978 People magazine interview Lewis stated "I was 14 when I first got married. My wife was too old for me; she was 17."
His second marriage to Jane Mitchum was of dubious validity because it occurred 23 days before his divorce from Barton was final. They were married for four years, from September 1953 to October 1957. They had two children. He then married Myra Gale Brown in December 1957. She was his first cousin once removed, and thirteen at the time of the marriage. This marriage caused a scandal which destroyed his career for a decade. They had two children and divorced in December 1970 after 13 years of marriage. His fourth marriage was to Jaren Elizabeth Gunn Pate, and ended when she drowned in the swimming pool at their home. They were married for 12 years, from October 1971 to August 1983. His fifth wife was Shawn Stephens. This marriage ended with her death from a drug overdose. They were married for three months, from June to August 1984. His sixth marriage was to Kerrie McCarver, with whom he had one child. This marriage lasted 20 years and ended in divorce in 2004.
Lewis has had six children (two have no information known to be published). In 1962, his son Steve Allen Lewis drowned in a swimming pool accident when he was three, and in 1973, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jr., was killed at the age of 19 when he overturned the jeep he was driving.
His current living children are a son, Jerry Lee Lewis III, and one daughter, Phoebe Lewis.
In the 1960's, Lewis's attempts at a comeback as a rock and roll performer had stalled during four years with Smash Records until he began recording country ballads.
He had already recorded a country-oriented LP for the label Country Songs for City Folks. In 1968, his single "Another Place, Another Time" became a Top 10 success and led to a string of Top Ten singles including the 1968 number-one country single "To Make Love Sweeter For You" that brought Lewis renewed stardom among country music fans, much like that which ex-rockabilly Conway Twitty began to cultivate during that same time. His shift to country reflected the fact that he had grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry.
In 1989, a major motion picture based on his early life in rock & roll, Great Balls of Fire!, brought him back into the public eye, especially when he decided to re-record all his songs for the movie soundtrack. The film was based on the book by Lewis's ex-wife, Myra Gale Lewis, and starred Dennis Quaid as Lewis, Winona Ryder as Myra, and Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Swaggart. The movie focuses on Lewis's early career and his relationship with Myra, and ends with the scandal of the late 1950s. A year later, in 1990, Lewis made minor news when a new song he co-wrote called "It Was the Whiskey Talking, Not Me" was included in the soundtrack to the hit movie Dick Tracy. The song can also be heard in a scene from the movie in which it is playing on the radio.
The very public downfall of his cousin, television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, resulted in more adverse publicity to an already troubled family. Swaggart is also a piano player, as is another cousin, country music star Mickey Gilley. All three listened to the same music when they were growing up and frequented Haney's Big House, the Ferriday club that featured black blues acts. Lewis and Swaggart have had a complex relationship over the years.
Lewis's sister, Linda Gail Lewis has recorded with Jerry Lee, toured with his stage show for a time and more recently recorded with Van Morrison.
"The Killer", a nickname he's had since childhood, is known for his forceful voice and piano production on stage; he was described by fellow artist Roy Orbison as the best raw performer in the history of rock and roll music.
In 1986, Lewis was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That year, he returned to Sun Studio in Memphis to team up with Orbison, Cash, and Perkins along with longtime admirers like John Fogerty to create the album Class of '55, a sort of followup to the "Million Dollar Quartet" session, though in the eyes of many critics and fans, lacking the spirit of the old days at Sun.
In 1998 he toured Europe with Chuck Berry and Little Richard. On February 12, 2005, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by The Recording Academy (which also grants the Grammy Awards). On September 26, 2006, a new album titled Last Man Standing was released, featuring many of rock and roll's elite as guest stars. Receiving positive reviews, the album charted in four different Billboard charts, including a two week stay at number one on the Indie charts.
[8935 LaMonte Young / 8935 J.L. Lewis / 8935 Part]
Arvo Pärt (b. September 11, 1935, Paide, Estonia) is Estonia's most renowned composer, working in a minimalist style that employs hypnotic repetitions that is also influenced by counterpuntal elements.
Continuing struggles with Soviet officials led him to emigrate in 1980 with his wife and their two sons. Pärt lived first in Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship; and then he re-located to Berlin where he still lives.
His most familiar works are Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell (1977) and the string quintet Fratres I (1977, revised 1983), which he orchestrated for string orchestra and percussion, the solo violin Fratres II and the cello ensemble Fratres III (both 1980).
Pärt is often identified with the school of minimalism and more specifically, that of "mystic minimalism" or "sacred minimalism."
He is considered a pioneer of this style, along with contemporaries Henryk Górecki and John Tavener. Though his fame initially rested on instrumental works such as Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel, his choral works have also come to be widely appreciated.
Pärt's musical education began at age seven. He began attending music school in Rakvere, where his family lived. By the time he reached his early teen years, Pärt was writing his own compositions. While studying composition with Heino Eller at the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, it was said of him that "he just seemed to shake his sleeves and notes would fall out."
In this period of Estonian history, Pärt was unable to encounter many musical influences from outside the Soviet Union except for a few illegal tapes and scores. Although Estonia had been an independent Baltic state at the time of Pärt's birth, the Soviet Union occupied it in 1940 as a result of the Soviet-Nazi Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; and the country would then remain under Soviet domination -- except for the three-year period of German wartime occupation -- for the next 51 years.
Arvo Pärt's oeuvre is generally divided into two periods.
His early works ranged from rather severe neo-classical styles influenced by Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Bartók. He then began to compose using Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and serialism. This, however, not only earned the ire of the Soviet establishment, but also proved to be a creative dead-end. When early works were banned by Soviet censors, Pärt entered the first of several periods of contemplative silence, during which he studied choral music from the 14th to 16th centuries.
In this context, Pärt's biographer, Paul Hillier, observed that "... he had reached a position of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures, and he lacked the musical faith and will-power to write even a single note."
The spirit of early European polyphony informed the composition of Pärt's transitional Symphony No. 3 (1971); and thereafter, he immersed himself in early music, re-investigating the roots of western music. He studied plainsong, Gregorian chant, and the emergence of polyphony in the Renaissance. The music that began to emerge after this period was radically different. This period of new compositions included Fratres, Cantus In Memoriam BenjaminBritten, and Tabula Rasa.
Pärt describes it as tintinnabuli -- like the ringing of bells. The music is characterized by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triad chords which form the basis of western harmony. These are reminiscent of ringing bells. Tintinnabuli works are rhythmically simple, and do not change tempo. The influence of early music is clear. Another characteristic of Pärt's later works is that they are frequently settings for sacred texts, although he mostly chooses Latin or the Church Slavonic language used in Orthodox liturgy instead of his native Estonian language. Large-scale works inspired by religious texts include St. John Passion, Te Deum, and Litany. Choral works from this period include Magnificat and The Beatitudes.
It is for these latter works that Pärt is best known.
"Even in Estonia, Arvo was getting the same feeling that we were all getting. [...] I love his music, and I love the fact that he is such a brave, talented man. [...] He's completely out of step with the zeitgeist and yet he's enormously popular, which is so inspiring. His music fulfills a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion." -- Steve Reich
Arvo Pärt's music came to public attention in the West, largely thanks to Manfred Eicher who recorded several of Pärt's compositions for ECM Records starting in 1984.
Pärt has said that his music is similar to light going through a prism: the music may have a slightly different meaning for each listener, thus creating a spectrum of musical experience, similar to the rainbow of light.
A new composition, Für Lennart, written for the memory of the Estonian President Lennart Meri, was played at his funeral service on April 2, 2006.
In response to the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow on October 7 2006, Pärt declared that all his works performed in 2006-2007 would be in commemoration of her death:
"Anna Politkovskaya staked her entire talent, energy and -- in the end -- even her life on saving people who had become victims of the abuses prevailing in Russia." -- Arvo Pärt Pärt was honoured as the featured composer of the 2008 RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin, Ireland. He was also commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society to compose a new choral work based on St. Patricks Breastplate, which premiered in 2008 in Louth, Ireland. The new work is called The Deers Cry.
Pärt's music has been featured in over 50 films, from Väike motoroller (1962) to Promised Land (2004). Elements from the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten were used in Léos Carax's film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991); and a part of the composition was heard in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 while the audience confronts the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City.
Terry Riley (b. June 24, 1935, Colfax, CA) studied at Shasta College, San Francisco State University, and the San Francisco Conservatory before earning an MA in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Robert Erickson. He was involved in the experimental San Francisco Tape Music Center working with Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Ramon Sender.
In the 1950's he was working with tape loops, a technology then in its infancy, and he has continued manipulating tapes to musical effect, both in the studio and in live performance, throughout his career.
While his early endeavours were influenced by Stockhausen, Riley changed direction after first encountering La Monte Young, in whose Theater of Eternal Music he later performed from 1965-66. Riley has referred to Young as "the freakiest guy I have ever met in my life," stating that it was Young's ideas that were at the heart of minimalism, though more composers have come to name Riley himself as an influence.
The String Quartet (1960) was Riley's first work in this new style; it was followed shortly after by a string trio, in which he first employed the repetitive short phrases for which he (and minimalism) are now known.
In the early 1960's he traveled around Europe, taking in musical influences and supporting himself by playing in piano bars, returning to California by 1964.
In C (1964) (beginning of the Columbia recording)
His music is usually based on improvising through a series of modal figures of different lengths, such as in In C and the Keyboard Studies. In C (1964) is probably Riley's best-known work and one that brought the minimalist music movement to prominence. Its first performance was given by Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick, among others, and it has influenced their work and that of many others, including John Adams and Philip Glass.
Its form was an innovation: the piece consists of 53 separate modules of roughly one measure apiece, each containing a different musical pattern but each, as the title implies, more or less in C. Traditionally, one performer beats a steady pulse of C's on the piano to keep tempo (this was at Steve Reich's suggestion during the initial rehearsals, and is not part of the original conception or the score). The other performers, in any number and on any instrument, realize these musical modules following a few loose guidelines, with the different musical modules interlocking in various ways as time goes on. All musicians begin with the first figure, performing it as many times as personally desired and work their way through the material until the end, maintaining awareness of the other performers in the mix.
The Keyboard Studies are similarly structured, as a single-performer version of the same concept.
This format, with a collection of minimal musical elements coming together to form a complex and cohesive whole, launched a movement that was a step away from the increasing academicism in western classical music. The complex formal structures of the Second Viennese School and the neoclassicists had dominated the classical musical landscape throughout the middle of the 20th century; the minimalistic movement abandoned that formalism.
A Rainbow in Curved Air (1968)
Riley often further denied strict structure by introducing improvisational elements into his compositions (though he had long been improvising in solo performance); one of the primary pieces to use this approach was his A Rainbow In Curved Air (1968). This work and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, its companion piece on a recording issued in 1969, were intended to give a necessarily truncated impression of the sound of Riley's all-night concerts.
Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1968)
In the "All-Night Concerts," Riley performed mostly improvised music from evening until sunrise, using an old organ harmonium ("with a vacuum cleaner motor blower blowing into the ballasts") and tape-delayed saxophone. When he finally wanted a break, after hours of playing, he played back looped saxophone fragments recorded throughout the evening. For several years he continued to put on these concerts, to which people came with sleeping bags and hammocks, with their whole families.
His most influential teacher was Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996), a master of Indian classical voice, who also taught La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Riley made numerous trips to India over the course of their association to study and to accompany him on tabla, tambura, and voice.
He joined the Mills College faculty in 1971.
For a time Riley stopped notating his works at all, focusing on Indian classical music and solo performance. Working with the Kronos Quartet has led him back to more structured, notatable music, but improvisatory elements remain an important part even of the works composed for them.
Riley began his long-lasting association with the Kronos Quartet, meeting its founder, David Harrington, while at Mills. Over the course of his career Riley has composed 13 string quartets for the ensemble, in addition to other works.
No Man's Land (1984)
Jalapa Express
Return of the Dream Collector
A Spark from the Infinite
He wrote his first orchestral piece, Jade Palace, in 1991, and has continued to pursue that avenue, with several commissioned orchestral compositions following. Riley is also currently performing and teaching both as an Indian raga vocalist and as a solo pianist.
He has composed in just intonation as well as in other microtonal tunings.
Riley's collaborators include the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Pauline Oliveros, and, as mentioned, the Kronos Quartet.
He has also had a notable collaboration with Beat poet Michael McClure, with whom he has released several CD's and most recently contributed music to a London revival of his play The Beard.
A Rainbow In Curved Air inspired Pete Townshend's synthesizer parts on The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley," the latter named in tribute to Riley as well as to Meher Baba.
***
Mort Subotnick:
"The morning of the [premiere of Terry Riley's In C in November 1964] I arrived at the Tape Music Center and found a notice from the Fire Department on our front door declaring the building off limits until further notice. So I phoned our attorney, Jerry Hill.
He was at home trying to avoid being served a subpoena by hiding behind the sofa, so our conversation was a bit odd. Anyway, his advice was just to leave the front door open. It opened out towards the street, so no one would see the notice....
One cop did show up. He thought we were into drugs and nude dancing, so I invited him inside to listen to the music. Also I showed him some of [Chron critic Alfred] Frankenstein's reviews of previous concerts. Alfred, the cop and I were standing the hall, and the cop said, ''Franken-steen?' You've got to be kidding!' 'No, he's a very famous critic,' I replied....
I remember Terry wore a floppy purple bow tie and orange pants."
—Excerpted from A Recollection: From the Archives of Ramón Sender (from the liner notes to In C: 25th Anniversary Concert)
Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935, Tupelo, MS - August 16, 1977), middle name sometimes written Aron, a was an American singer, musician and actor.
Presley began his career as one of the first performers of rockabilly, an uptempo fusion of country and rhythm-and-blues with a strong back beat. His novel versions of existing songs, mixing "black" and "white" sounds, made him popular -- and controversial -- as did his uninhibited stage and television performances. He recorded early rock-and-roll songs, with tracks like Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock later embodying the style. Presley had a versatile voice and had unusually wide success encompassing other styles, including gospel, blues, ballads, and pop.
In the 1960's, Presley made the majority of his 31 movies -- mainly poorly reviewed, but financially successful, musicals. In 1968, he returned with acclaim to live music in a television special, and thereafter performed across the U.S., notably in Las Vegas. He is one of the best-selling and most influential artists in the history of popular music. Health problems, drug dependency, and other factors led to his death at 42.
Elvis Presley was born to Vernon Elvis and Gladys Love Presley. In the two-room shotgun house built by his father in readiness for the birth, Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn. As an only child, Presley became close to both parents and formed an unusually tight bond with his mother. The family attended an Assembly of God church where he found his initial musical inspiration.
Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix -- Scots-Irish, with some French Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee. According to family accounts, one of Gladys's great-grandmothers was Jewish.
Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the small family. Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, evidencing little ambition.
The family often relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by the landowner. He was jailed for eight months, and Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.
In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his instructors regarded him as "average."
He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley's country song "Old Shep" during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, saw his first public performance: dressed as a cowboy, the ten-year-old Presley stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang "Old Shep". He recalled placing fifth.
A few months later, Presley received for his birthday his first guitar. He had hoped for something else -- by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle.
Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it."
Entering a new school, Milam, for sixth grade in September 1946, Presley was regarded as a loner. The following year, he began bringing his guitar in on a daily basis. He would play and sing during lunchtime, and was often teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly music. The family was by then living in a largely African American neighborhood.
A devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio station WELO, Presley was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother, a classmate of Presley's, who often took him in to the station. Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques.
When his protégé was 12 years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time, but succeeded in performing the following week.
In November 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. After residing for nearly a year in rooming houses, they were granted a two-bedroom apartment in the public housing complex known as the Courts.
Enrolled at Humes High School, Presley received only a C in music in eighth grade. When his music teacher told him he had no aptitude for singing, he brought in his guitar the next day and sang a recent hit, Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off Me, in an effort to prove otherwise. A classmate later recalled that the teacher "agreed that Elvis was right when he said that she didn't appreciate his kind of singing."
He was generally too shy to perform openly, and was occasionally bullied by classmates who viewed him as a "mama's boy."
In 1950, he began practicing guitar regularly under the tutelage of Jesse Lee Denson, a neighbor two-and-a-half years his senior. They and three other boys -- including two future rockabilly pioneers, brothers Dorsey and Johnny Burnette -- formed a loose musical collective that played frequently around the Courts.
That September, he began ushering at Loew's State Theater.
Other jobs followed during his school years: Precision Tool, Loew's again, and MARL Metal Products.
During his junior year, Presley began to stand out more among his classmates, largely because of his appearance: he grew out his sideburns and styled his hair with rose oil and Vaseline. On his own time, he would head down to Beale Street, the heart of Memphis's thriving blues scene, and gaze longingly at the wild, flashy clothes in the windows of Lansky Brothers. By his senior year, he was wearing them.
Overcoming his reticence about performing outside the Courts, he competed in Humes's Annual Minstrel show in April 1953. Singing and playing guitar, he opened with Till I Waltz Again With You, a recent hit for Teresa Brewer. Presley recalled that the performance did much for his reputation: "I wasn't popular in school ... I failed music -- only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show ... when I came onstage I heard people kind of rumbling and whispering and so forth, 'cause nobody knew I even sang. It was amazing how popular I became after that."
Presley, who never received formal music training or learned to read music, studied and played by ear. He frequented record stores with jukeboxes and listening booths. He knew all of Hank Snow's songs and he loved records by other country singers such as Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Ted Daffan, Jimmie Rodgers, Jimmie Davis, and Bob Wills.
The Southern Gospel singer Jake Hess, one of his favorite performers, was a significant influence on his ballad-singing style.
He was a regular audience member at the monthly All-Night Singings downtown, where many of the white gospel groups that performed reflected the influence of African American spiritual music.
He adored the music of black gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Like some of his peers, he may have attended blues venues -- of necessity, in the segregated South, only on nights designated for exclusively white audiences.
He certainly listened to the regional radio stations that played "race records": spirituals, blues, and the modern, backbeat-heavy sound of rhythm and blues.
Many of his future recordings were inspired by local African American musicians such as Arthur Crudup and Rufus Thomas.
B.B. King recalled that he knew Presley before he was popular when they both used to frequent Beale Street.
By the time he graduated high school in June 1953, Presley had already singled out music as his future.
In August 1953, Presley walked into the offices of Sun Records. He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a two-sided acetate disc: My Happiness and That's When Your Heartaches Begin. He would later claim he intended the record as a gift for his mother, or was merely interested in what he "sounded like," though there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at a nearby general store. Biographer Peter Guralnick argues that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered. Asked by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of singer he was, Presley responded, "I sing all kinds." When she pressed him on whom he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, "I don't sound like nobody." After he recorded, Sun boss Sam Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young man's name, which she did along with her own commentary: "Good ballad singer. Hold."
Presley cut a second acetate in January 1954 -- I'll Never Stand In Your Way and It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You -- but again nothing came of it.
Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows. He explained to his father, "They told me I couldn't sing."
Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time.
In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver.
His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith's professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist. Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving "because you're never going to make it as a singer."
Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused to a broader audience. As Keisker reported, "Over and over I remember Sam saying, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'"
In June, he acquired a demo recording of a ballad, Without You, that he thought might suit the teenaged singer. Presley came by the studio, but was unable to do it justice. Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew. He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield "Scotty" Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a recording session.
The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night. As they were about to give up and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup's That's All Right. Moore recalled, "All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'" Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for.
Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played That's All Right on his Red, Hot, and Blue show.
Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the last two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended in order to clarify his color for the many callers who had assumed he was black.
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That's All Right is the name of the first single released by Elvis Presley, written and originally performed by blues singer Arthur Crudup as That's All Right, Mama. Elvis's version was recorded on 5 July 1954, and released on 19 July 1954 with Blue Moon of Kentucky as the B-side.
Its catalogue number was Sun 209. The label names the performers as Elvis Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black. Arthur Crudup is also listed on this label, giving him credit for authorship.
It was recorded at Sun Studio in 1954 with Elvis Presley providing vocals and rhythm guitar, Scotty Moore on lead guitar, and Bill Black on upright "slap" bass. It was produced by Sam Phillips in the style of a "live" recording (all parts performed at once and recorded on a single track).
The recording contains no drums or additional instruments.
The recording session was Presley's fourth visit to the Sun Studio. His first two visits, the summer of 1953 and January 1954, had been private recordings for Presley's mother. Upon finishing the recording session, according to Scotty Moore, Bill Black remarked, "Damn. Get that on the radio and they'll run us out of town."
“That’s All Right” was sung by Eddie Clendening, portraying Elvis Presley, in the Broadway musical “Million Dollar Quartet” and on the “Million Dollar Quartet” original Broadway cast recording, copyright 2010 by MDQ Merchandising, LLC.
Rolling Stone Magazine argued that "That's All Right" was the first rock-and-roll record in a 2004 article.
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During the next few days the trio recorded a bluegrass number, Bill Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky, again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed "slapback". A single was pressed with That's All Right on the A side and Blue Moon of Kentucky on the reverse.
The trio played publicly for the first time on July 17 at the Bon Air club --Presley still sporting his child-size guitar.
At the end of the month, they appeared at the Overton Park Shell, with Slim Whitman headlining. A combination of his strong response to rhythm and nervousness at playing before a large crowd led Presley to shake his legs as he performed: his wide-cut pants emphasized his movements, causing young women in the audience to start screaming.
Moore recalled, "During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild."
Black, a natural showman, whooped and rode his bass, hitting double licks that Presley would later remember as "really a wild sound, like a jungle drum or something."
Soon after, Moore and Black quit their old band to play with Presley regularly, and DJ and promoter Bob Neal became the trio's manager. From August through October, they played frequently at the Eagle's Nest club and returned to Sun Studio for more recording sessions, and Presley quickly grew more confident on stage. According to Moore, "His movement was a natural thing, but he was also very conscious of what got a reaction. He'd do something one time and then he would expand on it real quick."
Presley made what would be his only appearance on Nashville's Grand Ole Opry on October 2; after a polite audience response, Opry manager Jim Denny told Phillips that his singer was "not bad" but did not suit the program.
Two weeks later, Presley was booked on Louisiana Hayride, the Opry's chief, and more adventurous, rival. The Shreveport-based show was broadcast to 198 radio stations in 28 states.
Presley had another attack of nerves during the first set, which drew a muted reaction. A more composed and energetic second set inspired an enthusiastic response.
House drummer D.J. Fontana brought a new element, complementing Presley's movements with accented beats that he had mastered playing in strip clubs.
Soon after the show, the Hayride engaged Presley for a year's worth of Saturday-night appearances. Trading in his old guitar for $8 (and seeing it promptly dispatched to the garbage), he purchased a Martin instrument for $175, and his trio began playing in new locales including Houston, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas.
By early 1955, Presley's regular Hayride appearances, constant touring, and well-received record releases had made him a substantial regional star, from Tennessee to West Texas. In January, Neal signed a formal management contract with Presley and brought the singer to the attention of Colonel Tom Parker, whom he considered the best promoter in the music business. Parker—Dutch-born, though he claimed to be from West Virginia—had acquired an honorary colonel's commission from country singer turned Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis. Having successfully managed top country star Eddy Arnold, he was now working with the new number one country singer, Hank Snow. Parker booked Presley on Snow's February tour.
When the tour reached Odessa, Texas, a 19-year-old Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. ... I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it."
Presley made his television debut on March 3 on the KSLA-TV broadcast of Louisiana Hayride. Soon after, he failed an audition for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts on the national CBS network. By August, Sun had released ten sides credited to "Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill"; on the latest recordings, the trio were joined by a drummer. Some of the songs, like That's All Right, were in what one Memphis journalist described as the "R&B idiom of negro field jazz"; others, like Blue Moon of Kentucky, were "more in the country field . . .but there was a curious blending of the two different musics in both."
This blend of styles made it difficult for Presley's music to find radio airplay. According to Neal, many country music disc jockeys would not play it because he sounded too much like a black artist and none of the rhythm and blues stations would touch him because "he sounded too much like a hillbilly."
The blend came to be known as rockabilly. At the time, Presley was variously billed as "The King of Western Bop," "The Hillbilly Cat," and "The Memphis Flash."
Presley renewed Neal's management contract in August 1955, simultaneously appointing Parker as his special adviser.
The group maintained an extensive touring schedule throughout the second half of the year.
Neal recalled, "It was almost frightening, the reaction that came to Elvis from the teenaged boys.
So many of them, through some sort of jealousy, would practically hate him. There were occasions in some towns in Texas when we'd have to be sure to have a police guard because somebody'd always try to take a crack at him. They'd get a gang and try to waylay him or something."
The trio became a quartet when Hayride drummer Fontana joined as a full member. In mid-October, they played a few shows in support of Bill Haley, whose Rock Around the Clock had been a number one hit the previous year. Haley observed that Presley had a natural feel for rhythm, and advised him to sing fewer ballads.
At the Country Disc Jockey Convention in early November, Presley was voted the year's most promising male artist.
Several record companies had by now shown interest in signing him. After three major labels made offers of up to $25,000, Parker and Phillips struck a deal with RCA Victor on November 21 to acquire Presley's Sun contract for an unprecedented $40,000.
Presley, at 20, was still a minor, so his father signed the contract.
Parker arranged with the owners of Hill and Range Publishing, Jean and Julian Aberbach, to create two entities, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music, to handle all of the new material recorded by Presley. Songwriters were obliged to forego one third of their customary royalties in exchange for having him perform their compositions.
By December, RCA had begun to heavily promote its new singer, and before month's end had reissued many of his Sun recordings.
The "iconic cover" of Presley's 1956 debut album featuring a photo taken July 31, 1955.
On January 10, 1956, Presley made his first recordings for RCA in Nashville.
Extending the singer's by now customary backup of Moore, Black, and Fontana, RCA enlisted pianist Floyd Cramer, guitarist Chet Atkins, and three background singers, including Gordon Stoker of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill out the sound.
The session produced the moody, unusual Heartbreak Hotel, released as a single on January 27.
Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS's Stage Show for six appearances over two months. The program, produced in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. After his first appearance, on January 28, Presley stayed in town to record at RCA's New York studio. The sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl Perkins' rockabilly anthem Blue Suede Shoes. In February, Presley's I Forgot to Remember to Forget, a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top of the Billboard country chart.
Neal's contract was terminated and, on March 2, Parker became Presley's manager.
RCA Victor released Presley's self-titled debut album on March 23. Joined by five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently recorded tracks were of a broad variety. There were two country songs and a bouncy pop tune. The others would centrally define the evolving sound of rock and roll: Blue Suede Shoes -- "an improvement over Perkins' in almost every way", according to critic Robert Hilburn -- and three R&B numbers that had been part of Presley's stage repertoire for some time, covers of Little Richard, Ray Charles, and The Drifters.
As described by Hilburn, these "were the most revealing of all. Unlike many white artists ... who watered down the gritty edges of the original R&B versions of songs in the '50s, Presley reshaped them. He not only injected the tunes with his own vocal character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead instrument in all three cases."
It became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard chart, a position it held for 10 weeks.
While Presley was not an innovative instrumentalist like Moore or contemporary African American rockers Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, cultural historian Gilbert B. Rodman argues that the album's cover image, "of Elvis having the time of his life on stage with a guitar in his hands played a crucial role in positioning the guitar...as the instrument that best captured the style and spirit of this new music."
Presley made the first of two appearances on NBC's Milton Berle Show on April 3. His performance, on the deck of the USS Hancock in San Diego, prompted cheers and screams from an audience of sailors and their dates.
A few days later, a flight taking Presley and his band to Nashville for a recording session left all three badly shaken when an engine died and the plane almost went down over Arkansas.
Twelve weeks after its original release, Heartbreak Hotel became Presley's first number one pop hit. In late April, Presley began a two-week residency at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. The shows were poorly received by the conservative, middle-aged hotel guests—"like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party," wrote a critic for Newsweek.
Amid his Vegas tenure, Presley, who had serious acting ambitions, signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures.
He began a tour of the Midwest in mid-May, taking in 15 cities in as many days.
He had attended several shows by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys in Vegas, and was struck by their cover of Hound Dog, a hit in 1952 for blues singer Big Mama Thornton. It became the new closing number of his act.
After a show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, an urgent message on the letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It warned that "Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. ... [His] actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. ... After the show, more than 1,000 teenagers tried to gang into Presley's room at the auditorium. ... Indications of the harm Presley did just in La Crosse were the two high school girls ... whose abdomen and thigh had Presley's autograph."
The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded the singer to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son."
During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of Hound Dog with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.
Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy.
Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway."
Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos".
Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing."
To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis," which he called "one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."
The Berle shows drew such high ratings that Presley was booked for a July 1 appearance on NBC's The Steve Allen Show in New York. Allen, no fan of rock and roll, introduced a "new Elvis" in a white bow tie and black tails. Presley sang "Hound Dog" for less than a minute to a basset hound wearing a top hat and bow tie. As described by television historian Jake Austen, "Allen thought Presley was talentless and absurd... [he] set things up so that Presley would show his contrition."
Allen, for his part, later wrote that he found Presley's "strange, gangly, country-boy charisma, his hard-to-define cuteness, and his charming eccentricity intriguing" and simply worked the singer into the customary "comedy fabric" of his program.
Presley would refer back to the Allen show as the most ridiculous performance of his career.
Later that night, he appeared on Hy Gardner Calling, a popular local TV show. Pressed on whether he had learned anything from the criticism to which he was being subjected, Presley responded, "No, I haven't, I don't feel like I'm doing anything wrong. ... I don't see how any type of music would have any bad influence on people when it's only music. ... I mean, how would rock 'n' roll music make anyone rebel against their parents?"
The next day, Presley recorded Hound Dog, along with Any Way You Want Me and
Don't Be Cruel. The Jordanaires sang harmony, as they had on The Steve Allen Show; they would work with Presley through the 1960s. A few days later, the singer made an outdoor concert appearance in Memphis at which he announced, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna change me none. I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight."
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Hound Dog is a twelve-bar blues written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and originally recorded by Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton in 1952. Other early versions illustrate the differences among blues, country, and rock and roll in the mid 1950s. The 1956 remake by Elvis Presley is the best-known version. This is the version that is #19 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
"Hound Dog" was also recorded by 5 country singers in 1953 alone, and over 26 times through 1964.
From the 1970s onward, the song has appeared, or is heard, as a part of the soundtrack in numerous motion pictures, most notably in blockbusters such as American Graffiti, Grease, Forrest Gump, Lilo & Stitch, A Few Good Men, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The blues singer Big Mama Thornton's biggest hit was Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Hound Dog," which she recorded at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles on August 13, 1952. Thornton’s "Hound Dog" was the first record Leiber and Stoller produced themselves. They took over the session because their work had sometimes been misrepresented, and on this one they knew how they wanted the drums to sound; Johnny Otis was supposed to produce it, but they wanted him on drums.
Otis received a writing credit on all 6 of the 1953 pressings. This 1953 Peacock Records release (#1612) was number one on the Billboard rhythm and blues charts for seven weeks.
Thornton gave this account of how the original was created to Ralph Gleason. “They were just a couple of kids, and they had this song written on the back of a paper bag.” She added a few interjections of her own, played around with the rhythm (some of the choruses have thirteen rather than twelve bars), and had the band bark and howl like hound dogs at the end of the song.
In fact, she interacts constantly in a call and response fashion during a one minute long guitar "solo" by Pete Lewis. Her vocals include lines such as: "Aw, listen to that ole hound dog howl…OOOOoooow," "Now wag your tail," and "Aw, get it, get it, get it."
Thornton's delivery has flexible phrasing making use of micro-inflections and syncopations. Over a steady backbeat, she starts out singing each line as one long upbeat. When the words change from "You ain't nothin' but a HOUND Dog," she begins to shift the downbeat around: You TOLD me you was high-class / but I can SEE through that, You ain't NOTHIN' but a hound dog. Each has a focal accent which is never repeated.
Johnny Otis, Pete Lewis, and bassist Albert Winston are listed as "Kansas City Bill & Orchestra" on the Peacock record labels.
Habanera and Habanera-mambo variations can be found in this recording.
Peacock released Thornton's version in March 1953. Five versions of the song were recorded on several different labels by "country" groups the very next month (April 1953):
Bernie Lowe suspected that Hound Dog could potentially have greater appeal, and asked Freddie Bell of Freddie Bell and the Bellboys to rewrite the lyrics to appeal to a broader radio audience. "Snoopin' round my door" was replaced with "cryin' all the time," and "You can wag your tail, but I ain't gonna feed you no more" was replaced by "You ain't never caught a rabbit, and you ain't no friend of mine." This new version of Hound Dog was recorded on Lowe's Teen Records in 1955 (TEEN 101 with "Move Me Baby" on the flip side, two of four songs the group did with Lowe that year). The regional popularity of this release, along with the group's showmanship, yielded both a tour, and an engagement in the Las Vegas Sands Hotel's Silver Queen Bar.
The Bellboys' Vegas version of the song was a comedy-burlesque with show-stopping va-va-voom choreography.
Others were also performing the song at that time. Bass player Al Rex, who joined Bill Haley and His Comets in the fall of 1955 told of performing the song when given the spotlight at live performances. "I used to do Hound Dog. Haley would get mad at me if I'd do that. This was even before Presley did it. Haley didn't like those guys from Philadelphia that wrote the song."
As Leiber and Stoller were not from Philadelphia (and Haley recorded other Leiber and Stoller songs), Haley was probably referring to Bell and Lowe.
Elvis Presley's first, apparently not very successful, appearance in Las Vegas, as an “extra added attraction,” was in the Venus Room of the New Frontier from April 23 through May 6, 1956. Freddie Bell and the Bellboys were the hot act in town, and Elvis went to the Sands to take in their show. Elvis not only enjoyed the show, but also loved their reworking of "Hound Dog" and asked Freddie if he had any objections to him recording his own version. By May 16 Elvis had added “Hound Dog” to his live performances.
The song was done as comic relief, and Presley based the lyrics, which he sometimes changed, and "gyrations" on what he had seen at the Sands. The song always got a big reaction and became the standard closer.
Drummer D.J. Fontana put it this way: "We took that from a band we saw in Vegas, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. They were doing the song kinda like that. We went out there every night to watch them. He'd say: 'Let's go watch that band. It's a good band!' That's where he heard Hound Dog, and shortly thereafter he said: 'Let's try that song.'"
Presley first performed Hound Dog to a nationwide television audience on The Milton Berle Show on June 5, 1956, his second appearance with Berle. By this time Scotty Moore had added a guitar solo, and D.J. Fontana had added a hot drum roll between verses of the song. Presley appeared for the first time on national television sans guitar. Before his death, Berle told an interviewer that he had told Elvis to leave his guitar backstage. "Let 'em see you, son," advised Uncle Miltie.
An upbeat version ended abruptly as Presley threw his arm back, then began to vamp at half tempo, "You ain't-a nuthin' but a hound dog, cuh-crying all the time. You ain't never caught a rabbit…" A final wave signaled the band to stop. Elvis pointed threateningly at the audience, and belted out, "You ain't no friend of mine."
Presley's movements during the performance were energetic and exaggerated. The reactions of young women in the studio audience were enthusiastic, as shown on the broadcast.
Over 40,000,000 people saw the performance and the next day controversy exploded. Berle's network received many letters of protest. The various self appointed guardians of public morality attacked Elvis in the press.
TV critics began a merciless campaign against Elvis, making statements that he had a "caterwauling voice and nonsense lyrics" and was an "influence on juvenile delinquency," and began using the nickname, "Elvis the Pelvis."
Elvis next appeared on national television singing Hound Dog on the July 1 Steve Allen Show.
Steve Allen wrote: "When I booked Elvis, I naturally had no interest in just presenting him vaudeville-style and letting him do his spot as he might in concert. Instead we worked him into the comedy fabric of our program…We certainly didn't inhibit Elvis' then-notorious pelvic gyrations, but I think the fact that he had on formal evening attire made him, purely on his own, slightly alter his presentation."
As Allen was notoriously contemptuous of rock 'n' roll music and songs such as Hound Dog, he smirkingly presented Elvis "with a roll that looks exactly like a large roll of toilet paper with, says Allen, the 'signatures of eight thousand fans,'" and the singer had to wear a tuxedo while singing an abbreviated version of Hound Dog to an actual top hat-wearing basset hound.
Although by most accounts Presley was a good sport about it, according to Scotty Moore, the next morning they were all angry about their treatment the previous night.
The morning after the Steve Allen Show performance, the studio version was recorded for RCA Victor by Elvis' regular band of Scotty Moore on lead guitar (with Elvis usually providing rhythm guitar), Bill Black on bass, D.J. Fontana on drums, and backing vocals from the Jordanaires. Presley recorded this version along with Don't Be Cruel and Any Way You Want Me on July 2, 1956 at RCA's New York City studio. The producing credit was given to RCA's Steve Sholes, however the studio recordings reveal that Elvis produced the songs (as well as most of the RCA recording sessions) himself, which is verified by the band members. Presley insisted on getting the song exactly the way he wanted it, recording 31 takes of the song.
Don't Be Cruel (G2WW-5936) was the flip side of the Hound Dog single (G2WW-5935),[30] released on July 13, 1956. Both sides of the record topped the charts independently, a rare feat.
The single also topped all three extant Billboard charts: pop, country & western, and rhythm & blues, the first record in history to do so.
On September 9, with the song topping the US charts, Presley performed an abbreviated version of Hound Dog on the Ed Sullivan Show hosted by Charles Laughton. After performing Ready Teddy, he introduced the song with the following statement, “Friends, as a great philosopher once said…” Elvis's first time on the Sullivan show was an event that drew some 60 million TV viewers. During his second Sullivan show appearance, October 28, he introduced the song thusly (although unable to keep a straight face). “Ladies and gentlemen, could I have your attention please. Ah, I’d like to tell you we’re going to do a sad song for you. This song here is one of the saddest songs we’ve ever heard. It really tells a story friends. Beautiful lyrics. It goes something like this.” He then launched into a full version of the song. Elvis was shown in full during this performance.
Again, Presley drew more than 60 million viewers.
Presley's Hound Dog sold over 4 million copies in the United States on its first release. It was his best selling single and starting in July 1956, it spent a record eleven weeks at #1. It stayed in the #1 spot until it was replaced by "Love Me Tender," also recorded by Elvis.
In March, 2005, Q magazine placed Presley's version at number 55 in its list of the Q Magazine's 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks.
The song appears in the 2005 Elvis Presley biopic Elvis, where it shows him performing the song on The Milton Berle Show.
In the 1994 film Forrest Gump, Forrest remembers a time where a man stays at his home and brings a guitar with him. Forrest dances to his playing of this song. It is shows in the next scene that this man was indeed Mr. Elvis Presley. This scene also suggests that Forrest's peculiar dancing (due to the braces he wears on his legs) inspired Elvis's famous dance.
"Hound Dog" was sung by Eddie Clendening, portraying Elvis Presley, in the Broadway musical "Million Dollar Quartet," which opened in New York in April, 2010.
Partial list of "cover" versions of "Hound Dog"
Freddie Bell & his Bell Boys. Re-recorded for Mercury 1956 and released 1957 on the album Rock´n Roll All Flavors John Entwistle (bassist of The Who)—from his 1973 rock'n'roll album Rigor Mortis Sets In Jimi Hendrix—from BBC Sessions (The Jimi Hendrix Experience album) Jimi Hendrix & Little Richard—from the 1972 "duet" album Friends From The Beginning The Everly Brothers—from their Rock 'n Soul album Jerry Lee Lewis John Lennon—from one of his last charity concerts in New York, 1972. Royal Artillery Alanbrooke Band Billy "Crash" Craddock—recorded on his album Live! 1977 Johnny Burnette Trio Recorded live by the Rolling Stones in Memphis, Tennessee on June 28, 1978 Willy DeVille on his 2002 album Acoustic Trio Live in Berlin Robert Palmer recorded the original lyric version for his 2003 blues album Drive Tales of Terror recorded for their EP in 1984 Gene Vincent & His Blue Caps Live from a Alan Freed radio show in July, 1956 Eric Clapton on his album Journeyman Bernie Marsden, Ian Paice, Neil Murray, and Don Airey during an Ian Paice and Friends concert Jeff Beck & Jed Leiber, an instrumental version appeared on the audio album Honeymoon in Vegas—Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992) Koko Taylor on her Force of Nature album in 1993 James Taylor on his Covers album in 2008 Eddie Clendening on Million Dollar Quartet original Broadway cast recording, 2010
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In August 1956, a judge in Jacksonville, Florida, ordered Presley to tame his act. Throughout the following performance, he largely kept still, except for wiggling his little finger suggestively in mockery of the order.
The single pairing Don't Be Cruel with Hound Dog ruled the top of the charts for 11 weeks -- a mark that would not be surpassed for 36 years.
Recording sessions for Presley's second album took place in Hollywood during the first week of September. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the writers of Hound Dog, contributed Love Me.
Allen's show with Presley had, for the first time, beaten CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan, despite his June pronouncement, booked the singer for three appearances for an unprecedented $50,000.
The first, on September 9, 1956, was seen by approximately 60 million viewers -- a record 82.6 percent of the television audience.
Actor Charles Laughton hosted the show, filling in while Sullivan recuperated from a car accident.
Presley appeared in two segments that night from CBS Television City in Hollywood. According to Elvis legend, Presley was shot only from the waist up. Watching clips of the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that Presley "got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. ... I think it's a Coke bottle. ... We just can't have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!"
Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, "As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots."
In fact, Presley was shown head-to-toe in the first and second shows. Though the camerawork was relatively discreet during his debut, with leg-concealing closeups when he danced, the studio audience reacted in customary style: screaming.
Presley's performance of his forthcoming single, the ballad Love Me Tender, prompted a record-shattering million advance orders.
More than any other single event, it was this first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that made Presley a national celebrity of barely precedented proportions.
Accompanying Presley's rise to fame, a cultural shift was taking place that he both helped inspire and came to symbolize. Igniting the "biggest pop craze since Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra ... Presley brought rock'n'roll into the mainstream of popular culture," writes historian Marty Jezer. "As Presley set the artistic pace, other artists followed. . . . Presley, more than anyone else, gave the young a belief in themselves as a distinct and somehow unified generation -- the first in America ever to feel the power of an integrated youth culture."
The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly fevered. Moore recalled, "He'd start out, 'You ain't nothin' but a Hound Dog,' and they'd just go to pieces. They'd always react the same way. There'd be a riot every time."
At the two concerts he performed in September at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, 50 National Guardsmen were added to the police security to prevent crowd trouble.
Elvis, Presley's second album, was released in October and quickly rose to number one.
Assessing the musical and cultural impact of Presley's recordings from That's All Right through Elvis, rock critic Dave Marsh wrote that "these records, more than any others, contain the seeds of what rock & roll was, has been and most likely what it may foreseeably become."
Presley returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its namesake, on October 28. After the performance, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned him in effigy.
His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released on November 21. Though he was not top billed, the film's original title -- The Reno Brothers -- was changed to capitalize on his latest number one record: Love Me Tender had hit the top of the charts earlier that month. To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role. The movie was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office.
Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.
On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed with them. Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any Presley material, he made sure the session was captured on tape. The results became legendary as the "Million Dollar Quartet" recordings -- Johnny Cash was long thought to have played as well, but he was present only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity.
The year ended with a front page story in the Wall Street Journal reporting that Presley merchandise had brought in $22 million on top of his record sales, and Billboard's declaration that he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since records were first charted.
In his first full year on RCA, one of the music industry's largest companies, Presley had accounted for over 50 percent of the label's singles sales.
Presley made his third and final Ed Sullivan Show appearance on January 6, 1957 -- on this occasion indeed shot only down to the waist. Some commentators have claimed that Parker orchestrated an appearance of censorship to generate publicity.
In any event, as critic Greil Marcus describes, Presley "did not tie himself down. Leaving behind the bland clothes he had worn on the first two shows, he stepped out in the outlandish costume of a pasha, if not a harem girl. From the make-up over his eyes, the hair falling in his face, the overwhelmingly sexual cast of his mouth, he was playing Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, with all stops out."
To close, displaying his range and defying Sullivan's wishes, Presley sang a gentle black spiritual, Peace in the Valley. At the end of the show, Sullivan declared Presley "a real decent, fine boy".
Two days later, the Memphis draft board announced that Presley would be classified 1A and would probably be drafted sometime that year.
Each of the three Presley singles released in the first half of 1957 went to number one: Too Much, All Shook Up, and (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear. Already an international star, he was attracting fans even where his music was not officially released. Under the headline "Presley Records a Craze in Soviet," The New York Times reported that pressings of his music on discarded X-ray plates were commanding high prices in Leningrad.
Between film shoots and recording sessions, the singer also found time to purchase an 18-room mansion eight miles south of downtown Memphis for himself and his parents: Graceland.
Loving You -- the soundtrack to his second film, released in July -- was Presley's third straight number one album. The title track was written by Leiber and Stoller, who were retained to write four of the six songs recorded at the sessions for Jailhouse Rock, Presley's next movie. The songwriting team effectively produced the sessions, and they developed a close working relationship with Presley, who came to regard them as his "good-luck charm."
Their title track was yet another number one hit, as was the
Jailhouse Rock EP.
Presley undertook three brief tours during the year, continuing to generate a crazed audience response.
A Detroit newspaper suggested that "the trouble with going to see Elvis Presley is that you're liable to get killed."
Villanova students pelted him with eggs in Philadelphia, and in Vancouver, the crowd rioted after the end of the show, destroying the stage.
Frank Sinatra, who had famously inspired the swooning of teenaged girls in the 1940s, condemned the new musical phenomenon. In a magazine article, he decried rock and roll as "brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious. ... It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phoney and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. ... This rancid-smelling aphrodisiac I deplore."
Asked for a response, Presley said, "I admire the man. He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he shouldn't have said it. ... This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago."
Leiber and Stoller were again in the studio for the recording of Elvis' Christmas Album. Toward the end of the session, they wrote a song on the spot at Presley's request: Santa Claus Is Back In Town, an innuendo-laden blues.
The holiday release stretched Presley's string of number one albums to four and would eventually become the best selling Christmas album of all time.
After the session, Moore and Black -- drawing only modest weekly salaries, sharing in none of Presley's massive financial success -- resigned. Though they were brought back on a per diem basis a few weeks later, it was clear that they had not been part of Presley's inner circle for some time.
On December 20, Presley received his draft notice. He was granted a deferment to finish the forthcoming King Creole, in which $350,000 had already been invested by Paramount and producer Hal Wallis. A couple of weeks into the new year, Don't, another Leiber and Stoller tune, became Presley's tenth number one seller. It had been only 21 months since Heartbreak Hotel had brought him to the top for the first time. Recording sessions for the King Creole soundtrack were held in Hollywood mid-January. Leiber and Stoller provided three songs and were again on hand, but it would be the last time they worked closely with Presley.
A studio session on February 1 marked another ending: it was the final occasion on which Black was to perform with Presley. He died in 1965.
On March 24, Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army as a private at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Captain Arlie Metheny, the information officer, was unprepared for the media attention drawn by the singer's arrival. Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus; photographers then accompanied him into the base.
Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: "The Army can do anything it wants with me."
Later, at Fort Hood, Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten gave the media carte blanche for one day, after which she declared Presley off-limits to the press.
Soon after Presley had commenced basic training at Fort Hood, he received a visit from Eddie Fadal, a businessman he had met when on tour in Texas. Fadal reported that Presley had become convinced his career was finished—"He firmly believed that."
During a two-week leave in early June, Presley cut five sides in Nashville. He returned to training, but in early August his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis and her condition worsened. Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her, arriving in Memphis on August 12.
Two days later, she died of heart failure, aged 46. Presley was devastated; their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names.
After training at Fort Hood, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on October 1.
Introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant while on maneuvers, he became "practically evangelical about their benefits"—not only for energy, but for "strength" and weight loss, as well—and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging.
The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, later including it in his live performances.
Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley's wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity while in the service. He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.
While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.
In her autobiography, Priscilla says that despite his worries that it would ruin his career, Parker convinced Presley that to gain popular respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier rather than in Special Services, where he would have been able to give some musical performances and remain in touch with the public.
Media reports echoed Presley's concerns about his career, but RCA producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared for his two-year hiatus. Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases.
Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,
Hard Headed Woman, and One Night in 1958, and (Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I and the number one A Big Hunk o' Love in 1959.
RCA also managed to generate four albums compiling old material during this period, most successfully Elvis' Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.
Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant on March 5.
The train that carried him from New Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans.
Back in Memphis, he wasted no time in returning to the studio. Sessions in March and April yielded two of his best-selling singles, the ballads It's Now or Never and Are You Lonesome Tonight?, and Elvis Is Back! The album features several songs described by Greil Marcus as full of Chicago blues "menace, driven by Presley's own super-miked acoustic guitar, brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph. Elvis's singing wasn't sexy, it was pornographic."
As a whole, the record "conjured up the vision of a performer who could be all things", in the words of music historian John Robertson: "a flirtatious teenage idol with a heart of gold; a tempestuous, dangerous lover; a gutbucket blues singer; a sophisticated nightclub entertainer; [a] raucous rocker".
Released only days after recording was complete, it reached number two on the album chart.
Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on The Frank Sinatra Timex Special --ironic for both stars, given Sinatra's not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll. Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing. The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.
G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in October. His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later. It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain, remarkable figures for a gospel album. In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24 local charities. During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA presented him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records.
A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of Presley's next studio album, Something for Everybody.
As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is largely "a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once been Elvis's birthright."
It would be his sixth number one LP. Another benefit concert, raising money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii. It was to be Presley's last public performance for seven years.
Parker had by now pushed Presley into a heavy moviemaking schedule, focused on formulaic, modestly budgeted musical-comedies. Presley at first insisted on pursuing more serious roles, but when two films in a more dramatic vein -- Flaming Star (1960) and Wild in the Country (1961) -- were less commercially successful, he reverted to the formula. For the remainder of the decade, during which he made 27 movies, there were few further exceptions.
His films were almost universally panned; one critic dismissed them as a "pantheon of bad taste."
Nonetheless, they were virtually all profitable. Hal Wallis, who produced nine of them, declared, "A Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood."
Of Presley's films in the 1960s, 15 were accompanied by soundtrack albums and another 5 by soundtrack EPs. The movies' rapid production and release schedules -- he frequently starred in three a year -- affected his music. According to Jerry Leiber, the soundtrack formula was already evident before Presley left for the Army: "three ballads, one medium-tempo [number], one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie".
As the decade wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew "progressively worse."
Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), says that he hated many of the songs chosen for his films.
The Jordanaires' Gordon Stoker describes how Presley would retreat from the studio microphone: "The material was so bad that he felt like he couldn't sing it."
Most of the movie albums featured a song or two from respected writers such as the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. But by and large, according to biographer Jerry Hopkins, the numbers seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll."
Regardless of the songs' quality, it has been argued that Presley generally sang them well, with commitment.
Critic Dave Marsh heard the opposite: "Presley isn't trying, probably the wisest course in the face of material like No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car and Rock-a-Hula Baby."
In the first half of the decade, three of Presley's soundtrack albums hit number one on the pop charts, and a few of his most popular songs came from his films, such as Can't Help Falling in Love (1961) and Return to Sender (1962) (Viva Las Vegas, the title track to the 1964 film, was a minor hit as a B-side, and became truly popular only later). But, as with artistic merit, the commercial returns steadily diminished. During a five-year span --1964 through 1968 --Presley had only one top ten hit: "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), a gospel number recorded back in 1960.
As for non-movie albums, between the June 1962 release of Pot Luck and the November 1968 release of the soundtrack to the television special that signaled his comeback, only one LP of new material by Presley was issued: the gospel album How Great Thou Art (1967). It won him his first Grammy Award, for Best Sacred Performance. As described in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Presley was "arguably the greatest white gospel singer of his time [and] really the last rock & roll artist to make gospel as vital a component of his musical personality as his secular songs."
Shortly before Christmas 1966, more than seven years since they first met, Presley proposed to Priscilla Beaulieu. They were married on May 1, 1967, in a brief ceremony in their suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas.
The flow of formulaic movies and assembly-line soundtracks rolled on. It was not until October 1967, when the Clambake soundtrack LP registered record low sales for a new Presley album, that RCA executives recognized a problem. "By then, of course, the damage had been done," as historians Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx put it. "Elvis was viewed as a joke by serious music lovers and a has-been to all but his most loyal fans."
The '68 Comeback Special produced "one of the most famous images" of Presley.
Taken on June 29, 1968, it was adapted for the cover of Rolling Stone in July 1969.
Presley's only child, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, during a period when he had grown deeply unhappy with his career.
Of the eight Presley singles released between January 1967 and May 1968, only two charted in the top 40, and none higher than number 28.
His forthcoming soundtrack album, Speedway, would die at number 82 on the Billboard chart.
Parker had already shifted his plans to television, where Presley had not appeared since the Sinatra Timex show in 1960. He maneuvered a deal with NBC that committed the network to both finance a theatrical feature and broadcast a Christmas special.
Recorded in late June, the special, called simply Elvis, aired on December 3, 1968. Later known as the '68 Comeback Special, the show featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed with a band in front of a small audience -- Presley's first live performances since 1961. The live segments saw Presley clad in tight black leather, singing and playing guitar in an uninhibited style reminiscent of his early rock and roll days. Director and coproducer Steve Binder had worked hard to reassure the nervous singer and to produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned.
The show, NBC's highest rated that season, captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience.
Jon Landau of Eye magazine remarked, "There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home. He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock 'n' roll singers. He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made Jim Morrison green with envy."
By January 1969, the single If I Can Dream, written for the special, reached number 12. The soundtrack album broke into the top ten. According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what "he had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people; being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the soundtrack. ... He was out of prison, man."
Binder said of Presley's reaction, "I played Elvis the 60-minute show, and he told me in the screening room, 'Steve, it's the greatest thing I've ever done in my life. I give you my word I will never sing a song I don't believe in.'"
Buoyed by the experience of the Comeback Special, Presley engaged in a prolific series of recording sessions at American Sound Studio, which led to the acclaimed From Elvis in Memphis. Released in June 1969, it was his first secular, non-soundtrack album from a dedicated period in the studio in eight years. As described by Dave Marsh, it is "a masterpiece in which Presley immediately catches up with pop music trends that had seemed to pass him by during the movie years. He sings country songs, soul songs and rockers with real conviction, a stunning achievement."
The album featured the hit single "In the Ghetto", issued in April, which reached number three on the pop chart—Presley's first non-gospel top ten hit since "Bossa Nova Baby" in 1963. Further hit singles were culled from the American Sound sessions: "Suspicious Minds", "Don't Cry Daddy", and "Kentucky Rain".
Presley was keen to resume regular live performing. Following the success of the Comeback Special, offers came in from around the world. The London Palladium offered Parker $28,000 for a one-week engagement. He responded, "That's fine for me, now how much can you get for Elvis?"
In May, the brand new International Hotel in Las Vegas, boasting the largest showroom in the city, announced that it had booked Presley. He was scheduled to perform 57 shows over four weeks beginning July 31. Moore, Fontana, and the Jordanaires declined to participate, afraid of losing the lucrative session work they had in Nashville. Presley assembled new, top-notch accompaniment, led by guitarist James Burton and including two gospel groups, The Imperials and Sweet Inspirations.
Nonetheless, he was nervous: his only previous Las Vegas engagement, in 1956, had been dismal. Parker, who intended to make Presley's return the show business event of the year, oversaw a major promotional push. For his part, hotel owner Kirk Kerkorian arranged to send his own plane to New York to fly in rock journalists for the debut performance.
Presley took to the stage without introduction. The audience of 2,200, including many celebrities, gave him a standing ovation before he sang a note and another after his performance. A third followed his encore, "Can't Help Falling in Love" (a song that would be his closing number for much of the 1970s).
At a press conference after the show, when a journalist referred to him as "The King", Presley gestured toward Fats Domino, who was taking in the scene. "No," Presley said, "that's the real king of rock and roll."
The next day, Parker's negotiations with the hotel resulted in a five-year contract for Presley to play each February and August, at an annual salary of $1 million.
Newsweek commented, "There are several unbelievable things about Elvis, but the most incredible is his staying power in a world where meteoric careers fade like shooting stars."
Rolling Stone called Presley "supernatural, his own resurrection."
In November, Presley's final non-concert movie, Change of Habit, opened. The double album From Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis came out the same month; the first LP consisted of live performances from the International, the second of more cuts from the American Sound sessions. "Suspicious Minds" reached the top of the charts—Presley's first U.S. pop number one in over seven years, and his last.
Cassandra Peterson, later television's Elvira, met Presley during this period in Las Vegas, where she was working as showgirl. She recalls of their encounter, "He was so anti-drug when I met him. I mentioned to him that I smoked marijuana, and he was just appalled. He said, 'Don't ever do that again.'"
Presley was not only deeply opposed to recreational drugs, he also rarely drank. Several of his family members had been alcoholics, a fate he intended to avoid.
Presley returned to the International early in 1970 for the first of the year's two month-long engagements, performing two shows a night. Recordings from these shows were issued on the album On Stage.
In late February, Presley performed six attendance-record–breaking shows at the Houston Astrodome.
In April, the single "The Wonder of You" was issued—a number one hit in Great Britain, it topped the U.S. adult contemporary chart, as well. MGM filmed rehearsal and concert footage at the International during August for the documentary Elvis: That's the Way It Is. Presley was by now performing in a jumpsuit, which would become a trademark of his live act. During this engagement, he was threatened with murder unless $50,000 was paid. Presley had been the target of many threats since the 1950s, often without his knowledge.
The FBI took the threat seriously and security was stepped up for the next two shows. Presley went onstage with a Derringer in his right boot and a .45 pistol in his waistband, but the concerts went off without incident.
The album That's the Way It Is, produced to accompany the documentary and featuring both studio and live recordings, marked a stylistic shift. As music historian John Robertson notes, "The authority of Presley's singing helped disguise the fact that the album stepped decisively away from the American-roots inspiration of the Memphis sessions towards a more middle-of-the-road sound. With country put on the back burner, and soul and R&B left in Memphis, what was left was very classy, very clean white pop—perfect for the Las Vegas crowd, but a definite retrograde step for Elvis."
After the end of his International engagement on September 7, Presley embarked on a week-long concert tour, largely of the South, his first since 1958. Another week-long tour, of the West Coast, followed in November.
On December 21, 1970, Presley engineered a bizarre meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House, where he expressed his patriotism and his contempt for the hippie drug culture. He asked Nixon for a Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs badge, to add to similar items he had begun collecting and to signify official sanction of his patriotic efforts. Nixon, who apparently found the encounter awkward, expressed a belief that Presley could send a positive message to young people and that it was therefore important he "retain his credibility". Presley told Nixon that The Beatles, whose songs he regularly performed in concert during the era, exemplified what he saw as a trend of anti-Americanism and drug abuse in popular culture.
(Presley and his friends had had a four-hour get-together with The Beatles five years earlier.) On hearing reports of the meeting, Paul McCartney later said that he "felt a bit betrayed. ... The great joke was that we were taking [illegal] drugs, and look what happened to him", a reference to Presley's death, hastened by prescription drug abuse.
The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named Presley one of its annual Ten Most Outstanding Young Men of the Nation on January 16, 1971.
Not long after, the City of Memphis named the stretch of Highway 51 South on which Graceland is located "Elvis Presley Boulevard". The same year, Presley became the first rock and roll singer to be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award (then known as the Bing Crosby Award) by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the Grammy Award organization.
Three new, non-movie Presley studio albums were released in 1971, as many as had come out over the previous eight years. Best received by critics was Elvis Country, a concept record that focused on genre standards.
The biggest seller was Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas, "the truest statement of all", according to Greil Marcus. "In the midst of ten painfully genteel Christmas songs, every one sung with appalling sincerity and humility, one could find Elvis tom-catting his way through six blazing minutes of Merry Christmas, Baby, a raunchy old Charles Brown blues. ... If [Presley's] sin was his lifelessness, it was his sinfulness that brought him to life".
MGM again filmed Presley in April 1972, this time for Elvis on Tour, which went on to win the Golden Globe Award for Best Documentary Film that year. His gospel album He Touched Me, released that month, would earn him his second Grammy Award, for Best Inspirational Performance. A 14-date tour commenced with an unprecedented four consecutive sold-out shows at New York's Madison Square Garden.
The evening concert on July 10 was recorded and issued in LP form a week later. Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden became one of Presley's biggest-selling albums. After the tour, the single "Burning Love" was released—Presley's last top ten hit on the U.S. pop chart. "The most exciting single Elvis has made since 'All Shook Up'", wrote rock critic Robert Christgau. "Who else could make 'It's coming closer, the flames are now licking my body' sound like an assignation with James Brown's backup band?"
Presley and his wife, meanwhile, had become increasingly distant, barely cohabiting. In 1971, an affair he had with Joyce Bova resulted -- unbeknownst to him -- in her pregnancy and an abortion. He often raised the possibility of her moving in to Graceland, saying that he was likely to leave Priscilla.
The Presleys separated on February 23, 1972, after Priscilla disclosed her relationship with Mike Stone, a karate instructor Presley had recommended to her. Priscilla relates that when she told him, Presley "grabbed ... and forcefully made love to" her, declaring, "This is how a real man makes love to his woman."
Five months later, Presley's new girlfriend, Linda Thompson, a songwriter and one-time Memphis beauty queen, moved in with him.
Presley and his wife filed for divorce on August 18.
In January 1973, Presley performed two benefit concerts for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund in connection with a groundbreaking TV special, Aloha from Hawaii. The first show served as a practice run and backup should technical problems affect the live broadcast two days later. Aired as scheduled on January 14, Aloha from Hawaii was the first global concert satellite broadcast, reaching approximately 1.5 billion viewers live and on tape delay.
Presley's costume became the most recognized example of the elaborate concert garb with which his latter-day persona became closely associated. As described by Bobbie Ann Mason, "At the end of the show, when he spreads out his American Eagle cape, with the full stretched wings of the eagle studded on the back, he becomes a god figure."
The accompanying double album, released in February, went to number one and eventually sold over 5 million copies in the United States.
It proved to be Presley's last U.S. number one pop album during his lifetime.
At a midnight show the same month, four men rushed onto the stage in an apparent attack. Security men leapt to Presley's defense, and the singer's karate instinct took over as he ejected one invader from the stage himself. Following the show, he became obsessed with the idea that the men had been sent by Stone to kill him. Though they were shown to have been only overexuberant fans, he raged, "There's too much pain in me ... Stone [must] die." His outbursts continued with such intensity that a physician was unable to calm him, despite administering large doses of medication. After another two full days of raging, Red West, his friend and bodyguard, felt compelled to get a price for a contract killing and was relieved when Presley decided, "Aw hell, let's just leave it for now. Maybe it's a bit heavy."
Presley's divorce took effect on October 9, 1973.
He was now becoming increasingly unwell. Twice during the year he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident. Toward the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semicomatose from the effects of Demerol addiction. According to his main physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley "felt that by getting [drugs] from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street."
Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever.
Despite his failing health, in 1974 he undertook another intensive touring schedule.
Presley's condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembers the singer's arrival at a University of Maryland concert: "He fell out of the limousine, to his knees. People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, 'Don't help me.' He walked on stage and held onto the mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody's looking at each other like, Is the tour gonna happen?"
Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, "He was all gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up. ... It was obvious he was drugged. It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible. ... I remember crying. He could barely get through the introductions".
Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, "I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move. So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel this tour and take a year off...?' I mentioned something once in a guarded moment. He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be all right. Don't you worry about it.'"
Presley continued to play to sellout crowds. As cultural critic Marjorie Garber describes, he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: "in effect he had become Liberace. Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers."
On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son's financial affairs—fired "Memphis Mafia" bodyguards Red West (Presley's friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to "cut back on expenses".
Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggest the singer was too cowardly to face the three himself. Another associate of Presley's, John O'Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits.
However, Presley's stepbrother David Stanley has claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley's drug dependency.
Presley and Linda Thompson split in November, and he took up with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden.
He proposed to Alden and gave her an engagement ring two months later, though several of his friends later claimed that he had no serious intention of marrying again.
RCA, which had enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley for over a decade, grew anxious as his interest in spending time in the studio waned. After a December 1973 session that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, he did not enter the studio in 1974.
Parker sold RCA on another concert record, Elvis: As Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis.
Recorded on March 20, it included a version of How Great Thou Art that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award (All three of his competitive Grammy wins -- out of 14 total nominations -- were for gospel recordings). Presley returned to the studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker's attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful.
In 1976, RCA sent a mobile studio to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley's home.
Even in that comfortable context, the recording process was now a struggle for him.
For all the concerns of his label and manager, in studio sessions between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums. Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977).
The story was similar with his singles—there were no major pop hits, but Presley was a significant force in not just the country market, but on adult contemporary radio as well. Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone. "My Boy" was a number one AC hit in 1975, and "Moody Blue" topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the AC in 1976.
Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his "apocalyptic attack" on the soul classic "Hurt".
"If he felt the way he sounded", Dave Marsh wrote of Presley's performance, "the wonder isn't that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long."
Journalist Tony Scherman writes that by early 1977, "Elvis Presley had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self. Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopoeia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts."
In Alexandria, Louisiana, the singer was on stage for less than an hour and "was impossible to understand".
Presley failed to appear in Baton Rouge: he was unable to get out of his hotel bed, and the rest of the tour was cancelled.
Despite the accelerating deterioration of his health, he stuck to most touring commitments. In Rapid City, South Dakota, "he was so nervous on stage that he could hardly talk", according to Presley historian Samuel Roy, and unable to "perform any significant movement."
Guralnick relates that fans "were becoming increasingly voluble about their disappointment, but it all seemed to go right past Elvis, whose world was now confined almost entirely to his room and his spiritualism books."
A cousin, Billy Smith, recalled how Presley would sit in his room and chat for hours, sometimes recounting favorite Monty Python sketches and his own past escapades, but more often gripped by paranoid obsessions that reminded Smith of Howard Hughes.
Way Down, Presley's last single issued during his lifetime, came out on June 6. His final concert was held in Indianapolis at the Market Square Arena, on June 26.
The book Elvis: What Happened?, cowritten by the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1.
It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse. He was devastated by the book and tried unsuccessfully to halt its release by offering money to the publishers.
By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments -- glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and possibly caused, by drug abuse.
Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour. That afternoon, Alden discovered him unresponsive on his bathroom floor. Attempts to revive him failed, and death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with having "permanently changed the face of American popular culture."
Thousands of people gathered outside Graceland to view the open casket. One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer's biggest-selling issue ever.
Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story, but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement.
Presley left her nothing in his will.
Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18. Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women and critically injuring a third.
Approximately 80,000 people lined the processional route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Presley was buried next to his mother.
Within a few days, "Way Down" topped the country and UK pop charts.
Following an attempt to steal the singer's body in late August, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.
Between 1977 and 1981, six posthumously released singles by Presley were top ten country hits.
Graceland was opened to the public in 1982. Attracting over half a million visitors annually, it is the second most-visited home in the United States, after the White House.
It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
Presley has been inducted into four music halls of fame: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), the Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), the Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001), and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007). In 1984, he received the W. C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation and the Academy of Country Music's first Golden Hat Award. In 1987, he received the American Music Awards' Award of Merit.
A Junkie XL remix of Presley's "A Little Less Conversation" (credited as "Elvis Vs JXL") was used in a Nike advertising campaign during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. It topped the charts in over 20 countries, and was included in a compilation of Presley's number one hits, ELV1S, that was also an international success. In 2003, a remix of "Rubberneckin'", a 1969 recording of Presley's, topped the U.S. sales chart, as did a 50th-anniversary re-release of "That's All Right" the following year.
The latter was an outright hit in Great Britain, reaching number three on the pop chart.
In 2005, another three reissued singles, Jailhouse Rock, One Night/I Got Stung, and It's Now or Never, went to number one in Great Britain. A total of 17 Presley singles were reissued during the year—all made the British top five. For the fifth straight year, Forbes named Presley the top-earning deceased celebrity, with a gross income of $45 million.
In 2009, he was ranked fourth.
Presley holds the records for most songs charting in Billboard's top 40 and top 100: chart statistician Joel Whitburn calculates the respective totals as 104 and 151; Presley historian Adam Victor gives 114 and 138.
Presley's rankings for top ten and number one hits vary depending on how the double-sided Hound Dog / Don't Be Cruel and Don't / I Beg of You singles, which precede the inception of Billboard's unified Hot 100 chart, are analyzed.d According to Whitburn, Presley holds the record for most top ten hits with 38; per Billboard's current assessment, he ranks second with 36 behind Madonna's 37.
Whitburn and Billboard concur that The Beatles hold the record for most number one hits with 20 and that Mariah Carey is second with 18. Whitburn has Presley also with 18 and thus tied for second; Billboard has him third with 17.
Presley retains the record for cumulative weeks at number one: alone at 80, according to Whitburn and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; tied with Carey at 79, according to Billboard. He holds the records for most British number one hits, with 21, and top ten hits, with 76.
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Richard Berry (April 11, 1935 - January 23, 1997) was an African American singer and songwriter, best known as the composer and original performer of the rock standard Louie Louie.
He was born in Extension, south of Monroe, Louisiana, and moved with his family to Los Angeles as a baby. He began singing and playing in local doo-wop groups, recording with several of them including The Penguins, The Cadets and The Chimes, before joining The Flairs (who also recorded as The Debonaires and The Flamingoes) in 1953.
The Flairs’ 1953 record She Wants To Rock, on Modern Records, featured Berry’s bass vocals, and was an early production by Leiber and Stoller. A few months later, when the producers needed a bass voice for The Robins’ Riot In Cell Block #9 on Spark Records, they recruited Berry to provide the menacing introduction to the song – uncredited, as he was contracted to Modern. Berry’s voice was also used at Modern, again uncredited, as the counterpoint to Etta James on her first record and big hit, The Wallflower (Dance with Me, Henry), and several of its less successful follow-ups. Berry also recorded with several other groups on the Modern and Flair labels, including Arthur Lee Maye and The Crowns, and girl group The Dreamers (who later became The Blossoms).
By the end of 1954, Berry left the Flairs to form his own group, the Pharaohs, while also continuing to work with other groups as a singer and songwriter. One of these was a Latin and R&B group, Rick Rillera and The Rhythm Rockers. In 1955, Berry was inspired to write a new calypso-style song, Louie Louie, based on The Rhythm Rockers version of René Touzet's El Loco Cha Cha, and also influenced by Chuck Berry's Havana Moon. Richard Berry and the Pharaohs recorded and released the song as a B-side on Flip Records in 1957.
It became a minor regional hit, was re-released as an A-side and, when the group toured the Pacific Northwest, several local R&B bands began to adopt the song and established its popularity. "Louie Louie" finally became a major hit when The Kingsmen's raucous version – with little trace of its calypso-like origins other than in its lyrics - became a national and international hit in 1963. The nearly unintelligible (and innocuous) lyrics were widely misinterpreted as obscene, and the song was banned by radio stations and even investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The song has been recorded over 1,000 times, but, because Berry sold its copyright cheaply in 1959, he received little financial reward for its success for many years.
Berry continued to write and record in the late 1950s, including such numbers as "Have Love, Will Travel" (which would later become a local hit for The Sonics), but with little commercial success, and also continued as a performer. His other songs also included "Crazy Lover", recorded on their 1987 debut album by the Rollins Band.
During the 1980's, Louie Louie received a number of unprecedented accolades, with hundreds of cover versions being issued on CD compilations and played on radio marathons. In 1986 and again in 1993, Berry finally received substantial financial benefits for writing the song. In February 1996, he performed for the final time, reuniting with The Pharaohs and The Dreamers for a benefit concert in Long Beach, California. However, his health declined, and he died of heart failure in 1997. He was interred in the Inglewood Park Cemetery in Inglewood, California.
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The Kingsmen is a 1960's garage rock/frat rock band from Portland, Oregon, United States. They are best known for their 1963 recording of Richard Berry's Louie Louie, which held the #2 spot on the Billboard charts for six weeks. The single has become an enduring classic.
When recorded the band members were Jack Ely (vocalist/rhythm guitar), Lynn Easton (drummer), Mike Mitchell (lead guitar), Don Gallucci (piano) and Bob Nordby (bass guitar). Ken Chase (Kingsmen manager and Portland radio station KISN music director) produced the recording session. Robert Lindahl (Northwestern Inc. recording studio owner) was the audio engineer.
Louie Louie was kept from the top spot on the charts in late 1963 and early 1964 by the Singing Nun and Bobby Vinton, who monopolized the #1 slot for four weeks apiece. The Kingsmen single reached #1 on the Cashbox chart and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Additionally in the UK it reached #26 on the Record Retailer chart. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.
The B-side of the single was an instrumental, Haunted Castle.
The band attracted nationwide attention when Louie Louie was banned by the governor of Indiana, Matthew E. Welsh, and attracted the attention of the FBI because of alleged indecent lyrics in the Kingsmen's version of the song. The lyrics were, in fact, innocuous, but Ely's baffling enunciation permitted teenage fans and concerned parents alike to imagine the most scandalous obscenities. All of this attention only made the song more popular. In April 1966 Louie Louie was reissued and once again hit the music charts, reaching #65 on the Cashbox chart and #97 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
