Elvis Presley – Fanfare for the Common Man
The same could be said for many of the session’s cuts. Another Top-10 country release, “Love Me”, was a Lieber-and-Stoller-penned ballad that had been conceived as a Homer-and-Jethro-style sendup of country cliches. But Elvis sang it sincerely, straight out from his heart. He sang Foley’s “Old Shep”, Eddy Arnold’s 1953 hit “How’s The World Treating You”, the country standard “When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again”, and all the rest in the same earnest fashion, usually backed by playing and production that, today, is easily recognizable as the Nashville Sound.
Of course, Elvis did not invent the Nashville Sound all by his lonesome any more than he invented rock ‘n’ roll by himself. Many others played significant roles, among them Atkins, who was often behind the board on Presley’s RCA sessions and who played guitar on his first; pianist Floyd Cramer, who had backed Presley at the Hayride, played on Presley’s first RCA date and later became an Elvis studio staple; Don Robertson, who created the slip-note piano style Cramer made famous and who wrote many of Presley’s most countrified early ’60s offerings; guitarist Hank Garland, an Elvis studio fixture from the last pre-army session until his death in 1963; and the Jordanaires, who began as a Southern gospel quartet and became synonomous with both the Nashville Sound and Elvis Presley. (Not to mention producers such as Owen Bradley and Ken Nelson.)
But Elvis was as vital to the Nashville Sound’s creation as any of them. In fact, listening closely to Presley’s 1956 RCA sessions can lead one to reasonably conclude that what Chet Atkins and the rest did was not to pop up country, but to country up “Don’t Be Cruel”.
PART VI: Comeback to country
Throughout the ’50s and into the early ’60s, Elvis continued to draw upon the country repertoire on a regular basis. In 1959, he took “A Fool Such As I”, a 1953 hit for Hank Snow, all the way to #2 on the pop charts, and his albums of the period included country covers such as Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart”, Faron Young’s “Is It So Strange” and Ernest Tubb’s “Blue Christmas”. Additionally, his first gospel albums, 1957’s Peace In The Valley and 1960’s His Hand In Mine (both among the finest Nashville Sound recordings ever made), were overflowing with selections from both the Southern and country gospel traditions.
For a country boy at heart, these songs — many of them had been among his favorites since he’d been a boy in Mississippi — no doubt spoke deeply to Elvis, providing him with a constant and immediate connection to his country-boy roots even as his fame was soaring to heights no one had previously imagined and that no solo performer since has even approached. It’s surely no coincidence that the only time in his career Elvis didn’t record country songs was during the mid-’60s, when he was swallowed up by increasingly bad movies and had stopped touring altogether, in the process losing the vital connection it provided him to his people. Tellingly, the mid-’60s also includes the only significant period Elvis was regularly absent from the country charts.
To a significant degree, Presley’s people were country people, so it makes sense that his return to the country charts, his return to creative control of his career, and his return to the country repertoire would all arrive together. Elvis had 80 singles, including ten #1 hits, on the country charts during his career, which according to Billboard makes him the 34th most successful charting country performer of all time. That’s higher than Garth Brooks and Hank Thompson, higher than crossover specialists Kenny Rogers and Glen Campbell — higher than Hank Williams, even.
Much of this country chart action came in the later stages of his career, after the ’68 Comeback Special and the incredible American Studios sessions in 1969. But before all that, in the fall of 1967, Elvis had already returned to his greatness by reclaiming his roots in the studio — and he did it with country music. The steel-guitar-filled cover of Eddy Arnold’s “Just Call Me Lonesome” from those sessions is country poured as straight as anything Elvis ever recorded, offering not even the sweet-voiced Jordanaires as a chaser. His delicate version of another Arnold hit, “You Don’t Know Me”, as well as a Marty Robbins-style “Singing Tree”, are late-period Nashville Sound at its most gorgeous, and his reworking of “Too Much Monkey Business” has a twangy, front-porch vibe.
When he returned to Memphis in 1969 for the American sessions that would produce the From Elvis In Memphis and Back In Memphis albums, he continued this country attack, laying down blistering, soulful versions of a string of country classics (“I’m Movin’On”, “From A Jack To A King”, “I’ll Hold You In My Heart”), as well as perfect models of a just-emerging pop-and-soul-influenced brand of country (“In The Ghetto”, Kentucky Rain”, “Suspicious Minds”, “Gentle On My Mind”) that Elvis himself had helped to create. Besides returning him to the pop and country charts, these strongly country-inflected sessions at American resulted in art as powerful as any Elvis ever created.
Elvis continued in this country vein for the rest of his career, though never more completely than on his great 1971 album, Elvis Country, recorded at Nashville’s famed Studio B. On this album of nothing but country songs, some numbers are played as nearly straight-on country music (Monroe’s “Little Cabin On The Hill”, for example), others are fine examples of the new countrypolitan sound that was just then taking over the charts (“There Goes My Everything”), and still others (like his majestic, larger-than-life version of Ernest Tubb’s “Tomorrow Never Comes”) rock and twang to some place that maybe only Elvis could go — a place where this country boy can reach for Something More even as he feels the world breathing down his neck.
PART VII: Common people
There’s a telling concert moment captured on The Essential ’70s Masters box. Without warning, Elvis starts into a poem: “As a guy said one time,” Elvis begins, “he said, uh…
You never stood in that man’s shoes
Or saw things through his eyes
Or stood and watched with helpless hands
While the heart inside you dies
So help your brother along the way
No matter where he starts
For the same God that made you, made him too
These men with broken hearts.
It’s Hank Williams’ most famous Luke The Drifter recitation, and Elvis uses it to make a connection that’s tough to pin down with mere words. “I’d like to sing a song along the same line,” he continues, then tears into a rocking version of the Joe South soul-country classic, “Walk A Mile In My Shoes.” It’s a remarkable moment, a big-gesture rock ‘n’ roll performance that, like so much of Presley’s finest work, feels like it’s R&B and C&W in precisely equal measure. “Oh well I may be common people”, he cries, “but I’m your brother. And when you strike out and try to hurt me, it’s a-hurtin’ you. Lord have mercy.”
Till the day he died just over 20 years ago, Elvis knew who he was and who his people were. And he never forgot.
David Cantwell and his significant other, Doris Saltkill, have just bought an old home in Kansas City, Missouri. They plan to decorate the upstairs bathroom — the one with the cool, Depression-era pink and black tile — in an unironic Elvis motif.