The Essential Memphis Library: Elvis Presley’s ‘30 #1 Hits’
Elvis Presley held a press conference attended by more than 150 reporters and photographers on March 1, 1960, in Friedberg, Germany. (AP Photo file/Walter Lindlar)
Welcome to “The Essential Memphis Library.” The idea: If you wanted to build a home library of things relevant to Memphis history and culture, what should be in it? What books, movies, albums, songs, art prints, etc.? This ongoing series will build that library, one suggestion at a time.
Ninety years since his birth and now nearly 50 years after his death, what’s the definitive Elvis Presley?
“Elvis,” the Baz Luhrmann-directed, Austin Butler-starring 2022 blockbuster biopic and the most recent major attempt to reassert Presley’s relevance, mainly saw Elvis as a style icon, sex symbol and vertiginous cultural emblem.
The movie evinced so little faith in the ongoing relevance of Presley’s music that it larded its soundtrack with tributes and reinterpretations from the likes of Doja Cat, Jack White and Eminem rather than count on its audience to want to hear Elvis unfiltered.
As a matter of commercial strategy, maybe “Elvis,” the movie, had it right, but it did Elvis the artist no favors.
That artist got his start in a small Memphis recording studio, working collaboratively with the likes of producer-engineer Sam Phillips and bandmates Scotty Moore and Bill Black. In some conceptions (mine perhaps among them), Presley’s greatest music was his first.
Elvis’ place at the center of the music’s creation myth establishes his claim to the title of King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. But even in the beginning, Elvis was something of a musical polymath, not just threading together country and blues but also gospel and pop and standards.
As an interpretive singer who quickly dipped into movies and operated as a kind of all-purpose celebrity, perhaps Elvis was a Southern-bred update of crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, while Chuck Berry, his birth of rock ’n’ roll contemporary, was more fully a descendent of the country/blues singer-songwriter-guitarist tradition of Robert Johnson and Hank Williams.
Seen through that prism, Elvis’ Sun Records sessions may be his deepest music, but “30 #1 Hits,” a 21-year-spanning, nearly 80-minute single disc collection released by RCA in 2002, may actually be a truer testament to Presley’s legacy.
This compilation is so compact and perfect that a generation’s worth of subsequent repackagings have not altered its stature as an Elvis collection must.
Here is the Elvis that the public tended to adore and rock puritans tried to resist.
From schlock monument (“Heartbreak Hotel”) to easy-swinging doo-wop-pop (“Stuck on You”), from rockers (“A Big Hunk of Love”) to crooners (“She’s Not You”), from plaintive ballads (“Love Me Tender”) to dramatic ones (“Can’t Help Falling in Love”), from movie music (“Hard-Headed Woman”) to the Vegasification of downhome roots (“Way Down”), from R&B updates (“One Night”) to his own deepest, truest soul (“Suspicious Minds”), from charming pop trifles (“Teddy Bear”) to heartfelt devotionals (“Crying in the Chapel”), his commitment to nailing a song and pleasing an audience never wavers.
As one sure shot follows another, what emerges most is a vocal ease and sense of lightness, both across the years and genres.
These are pleasures not to be denied or forgotten.
With bassist Black and drummer D.J. Fontana popping from the jump and the backup-singing Jordanaires in the pocket, the Otis Blackwell-penned “Don’t Be Cruel” positively swings before Elvis really gets a hold of it. No decent singer could mess this up.
But few could elevate it. There’s a casual command and self-aware delight at work, audible in the humming transition and faint concluding chuckle from the second to the third verse.
With “All Shook Up,” Elvis works similar magic on another great Blackwell composition. He ends each verse with a vocal flourish — “My heart beats so it scares me to death,” “That’s to have that girl that I love so fine” — akin to Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant taking flight for a 360-degree layup.
On “One Night” and “Hound Dog,” a lighter approach to prior R&B hits doesn’t undercut the originals so much as purposefully reinvent them.
“One Night” is from New Orleans singer Smiley Lewis, who did it as “One Night (of Sin).” Elvis drops the parenthetical, changing “one night of sin is what I’m now paying for” to “one night with you is what I’m now praying for.”
This doesn’t so much scrub it clean as merely leave more to the imagination. But it also frees it, transforming the song from admonition to affirmation. It becomes a rejection of inherited limits, another part of the journey from country/blues to rock ‘n’ roll.
There’s something similar at work on “Hound Dog,” a Jerry Leiber-Mike Stoller song that was an earlier hit for blues shouter Big Mama Thornton. Elvis’ “Hound Dog,” which simultaneously topped the pop, country and R&B charts, swaps a battle of the sexes for a comedy playlet on class resentment, leaning into the “They said you was high-classed/But that was just a lie” lyric. Moore’s guitar aids the reinvention with an agile leap from blues to rock.
Leiber-Stoller wrote a lot of songs either for Elvis or that were recorded by him, but perhaps only “Jailhouse Rock” is as mischievous as their best titles for R&B vocal group, the Coasters.
They sneak love-song convention into a (male only) prison setting — “Number 47 said to number 3/You’re the cutest jailbird I ever did see” — and Elvis rips into the lyric without hesitation. He cuts so loose that he’s overcome, his “rockrockrock” at the song’s midpoint descending into babble that Moore’s guitar attempts to reconstruct. All hands on deck, y’all. If you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair.
Incidental pleasures abound on the album:
Would-be-universal pop that can’t shake its Memphis/Mississippi raising (“Well-uh bless-uh ma soul,” “Shake-uh, shake-uh, sug-ah”).
Straight-faced spoken refrains that tip-toe along the edges of camp (“Now the stage is bare, and I’m standing there with emptiness all around/And if you won’t come back to me, then they can bring the curtain down”).
A poor kid from Tupelo doing pop-opera (“It’s Now or Never”) like he’s Mario Lanza.
From the first time he stood before a microphone to the gone-too-soon last, Elvis Presley’s musical appetite was voracious. “30 #1 Hits” — perhaps more than any single collection of that music — showcases his desire and ability to share that appetite with a mass audience. To belong to everyone. He still does.
For a full listing of Essential Memphis Library entries, see the project’s index page.
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Chris Herrington
Chris Herrington has covered the Memphis Grizzlies, in one way or another, since the franchise’s second season in Memphis, while also writing about music, movies, food and civic life. As far as he knows, he’s the only member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association who is also a member of a film critics group and has also voted in national music critic polls for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice (RIP). He and his wife have two kids and, for reasons that sometimes elude him, three dogs.
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