Long Live the King: The Songwriters who made Elvis Presley a legend
Long Live the King: The Songwriters who made Elvis Presley a legend
This past Sunday would have 76th birthday of the King of Rock and Roll himself, Elvis Presley. The very name of this pop music icon immediately calls to mind a host of images from his unprecedented career; the sleepy-eyed smile and gyrating hips of the late 1950s, the silly, shallow but extremely profitable movie star moment of the 1960s, the puffy, bedazzled jumpsuits and epic sideburns of the late 1970s. Those images range from silver screen to black velvet, but the images don’t capture the whole story.
Underneath the rhinestones and pompadours, Presley was an extremely intuitive, intelligent musician with a passion for gospel, rhythm and blues, and jazz – interests that were almost unheard of for a popular singer of the early 1950s. When hitmakers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (“Hound Dog,” Jailhouse Rock”) first met Presley in order to collaborate on the songs for the film “Jailhouse Rock,” they were shocked by Presley’s musical knowledge. Leiber remembered in his joint autobiography with Stoller, “When it came to the blues, Elvis knew his stuff. He may not have been the most conversant about politics or world history, but his blues knowledge was almost encyclopedic. Mike and I were blown away.”
Despite his talent as a singer and his passion for music, Presley was not a songwriter himself. However, many of his greatest hits were originally billed with Presley as a co-writer. This was due to a now-defunct practice in the music publishing industry of assigning a songwriting credit to the singer in order to collect royalties on the composition they made famous (Presley’s manager, Colonel Parker, was notorious for finding ways to make a buck). The lyricist of “Love Me Tender,” Ken Darby, was so frustrated with the practice that he credited his wife as Presley’s supposed collaborator, noting, “She didn’t write it either.”
While Presley was not a songwriter or a technical wunderkind, his vocal prowess and keen interpretation of music maintains a firm hold on the public imagination to this day. While many of his hits have been covered by generations of musical artists, there’s something about an Elvis recording that cannot be matched, and, invariably, all others fall short, revealing themselves as pretenders to the throne. Few popular artists working today can claim the same level of indelibility.
Otis Blackwell, a frequent Presley collaborator, never actually met the artist who made songs like Blackwell’s “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel” into enormous hits. Even still, the death of Presley in 1977 had a profound impact on Blackwell. In an interview with the Time Barrier Express in 1979, Blackwell remembered:
“The one other time that I experienced that was when my mother died and my son…I mean some people you just figure are never going to die. Inside man, they’ll always live. When they’re gone, a certain piece goes and you just can’t believe it.”
Presley’s death resonates to this day, with fans making annual pilgrimages to Graceland, Presley’s former estate. But for today, we instead pay tribute to the birth and life of an unparalleled figure in music history, and the writers who crafted that legend.
Don’t be cruel, pencil-pushers; tell us your favorite Presley song in the comments below!
OVERRATED. That’s presley. 2 min is not a song and nothing was his creation anyhow.