Elvis Presley's Debut Album Still Exerts Startling Power
With Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis film just around the corner, I’ve been immersing myself in the King’s music more than usual lately. His 1956 debut album Elvis Presley has been at the top of my playlist.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Luhrmann film does at the box office as a measure of how relevant Elvis is to audiences in 2022. While still hailed as one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century, Elvis’s stock seems to have dropped in recent decades. Compare Elvis to The Beatles and there seems to be a clear difference in how eagerly younger listeners embrace the artist’s music. Every generation seems to rediscover The Beatles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case with Elvis. A recent Washington Post article noted Elvis’s aging fanbase and pondered the question of whether the King still matters as much as he used to.
Linking Elvis to the world’s most noteworthy humans is common among aficionados, I find. At the “Conversations on Elvis” event, the affable, entertaining host, Tom Brown, a local radio personality and a frequent host of Elvis events and programs, says that people often ask him, “How long will this go on?” And he replies, “Do you say that about Shakespeare?”
The audience applauds, but that comparison may be part of the long-term problem. Elvis isn’t Shakespeare. He was an interpreter, and the artistic titans that we revere through the ages were timeless originators, whether they composed symphonies or painted abstracts. Okay, Elvis was indeed an originator. And a revolutionary. With his mix of country, gospel and blues, nobody sounded like Elvis before Elvis. But he relied on the material of others. By cultural contrast, Dylan’s lyrics continue to be studied in college classrooms. Lennon and McCartney’s beautiful, inventive melodies will probably be played forever.
My view is that modern audiences can feel however they want about Elvis. But for me the music does the talking. When you hear Elvis’s music, the power of his voice continues to shine through. All you have to do to understand why Elvis was one of the most popular and influential figures in the history of music is listen.
His debut LP is as good a place as any to start. This was Elvis’s long-form introduction to the world. It’s easy to overlook today how much of an impact Elvis had on popular culture. In a sense we take him for granted. Variety made much the same point in its review of the Luhrmann film:
Luhrmann is out to capture how Elvis, with his thrusts and his eyeliner and his inky black hair falling over his face, was a one-man sexual earthquake who remade the world. Yet Elvis’s transformation of the world was, in fact, so total and triumphant that it may now be close to impossible for a movie to capture how radical it was. With its over-the-top shots of women at Elvis’s early shows erupting into spontaneous screams, or throwing underwear onstage, plus scandalous headlines and finger-wagging moral gatekeepers growing hysterical over how Elvis was busting down racial barriers or promoting “indecency,” “Elvis” keeps telling us that it’s about an insurrectionary figure. The irony is that Luhrmann’s style is too ripely sensual, too post-Elvis, to evoke what the world was like before Elvis.
Elvis’s first album captures the sound that made him such a revolutionary figure. It’s as definitive an example of the rockabilly sound as anything outside Elvis’s legendary work at Sun Records. The first track is “Blue Suede Shoes”, written by fellow rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins. As terrific as Perkins’s original is, Elvis takes the song to a whole new level. What stands out most about his voice is its versatility and just how expressive it is. Throughout his career, Elvis always seemed to make the most out of every line he sang. His raucous interpretation of “Blue Suede Shoes” is a perfect example. Elvis quite simply sings the hell out of this song, backed by a propulsive musical accompaniment. This is rock ‘n’ roll.
Elvis follows up that intro with the plaintive ballad “I’m Counting on You”. Presley’s yearning, sensitive vocals show us a completely different side of the singer—proving just how accurate Elvis’s self-description was when he first entered the doors of Sun Records in Memphis and told receptionist Marion Keisker, “I sing all kinds.” The rest of the album features a mix of rockers and ballads, and Elvis knocks every song out of the park. His interpretation of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman”, for example, shows off a playful energy.
There’s always been a lot of controversy regarding Elvis’s relationship to Black musicians. The truth is Elvis always publicly stressed his Black musical influences and that he was merely interpreting songs by Black artists. A 1957 interview with Jet magazine, targeted at an African-American readership, provides a typical example of Presley’s modesty: “A lot of people seem to think I started this business,” he said. “But rock 'n' roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let's face it: I can't sing like Fats Domino can. I know that.” Later in his career, he called Domino “the real King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
As Ken Budd acknowledged in his Washington Post article, Elvis was primarily an interpreter of other people’s material. But what an interpreter! Maybe the only track on his debut that doesn’t improve upon the original is Elvis’s cover of “Tutti Frutti”. It’s hard to compete with Little Richard in a rendition of one of his most famous songs, but Elvis rises to the occasion more than any other singer.
What the Elvis Presley album captures so well is Elvis’s charisma, his raw youthful exuberance, and the genre-straddling versatility that made him such a game-changing figure. Elvis sang like no other white musician did at the time. But to say that he merely brought Black musical forms to a predominantly white audience is doing him a disservice. From the time he recorded “That’s All Right (Mama)” with Bill Black and Scotty Moore, Elvis pioneered a mix of blues, country, and rhythm & blues that was like nothing anyone had heard before. His 1956 debut shows Elvis equally comfortable with fun rockers like “One-Sided Love Affair” and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You)”; the bluesy “Money Honey”, the country-flavoured “Trying to Get to You”, the ballad “I Love You Because”, and eerie falsetto on the standard “Blue Moon”.
Listen to that voice, which sounds just as warm, intimate and powerful today as it did in 1956, and you’ll understand why Elvis changed the world. Watch him perform these songs and what you see is the consummate entertainer: handsome, magnetic, dangerous, moving like no one had before him. But in the end, as the cliché reminds us, it really is “all about the music”, and the music on this LP is stunning from beginning to end. As startling as any debut in the history of recorded music, Presley’s first album is fully deserving of its legendary status.