Introduction:
Elvis Presley’s blues recordings are regarded as some of the best he ever made, and yet he never made a blues album, and the few blues-based compilations that have been released since his death have included songs that clearly were not blues, and omitted ones that were. The following video contains an attempt at putting together an Elvis blues album, and the essay that follows takes the form of what would be liner notes for this imaginary album. They are adapted from my book on Elvis’s career: “Reconsider Baby: A Listener’s Guide.”
Please note, the following video is blocked by YouTube in the following areas: Norfolk Island, South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands, Christmas Island, St Martin, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, St Barthélemy, US Outlying Islands, Aruba, Svalbard & Jan Mayen, Guernsey, Heard & McDonald Islands, Bouvet Island, American Samoa, Isle of Man, Åland Islands, US Virgin Islands, Jersey.
***
Notes/Commentary:
Elvis Presley was associated with the blues almost from the very beginning of his career. When his February 1955 recording of Baby Let’s Play House was released, Billboard said it was “patterned after primitive Southern blues.” The same publication referred to his 1956 recording of My Baby Left Me as “a real blues with that wild r&b infusion so well calculated to hit the all-market pay-off.” And when John S Wilson gave a positive review to Elvis’s second album in the New York Times in 1956, he used the words “Rocking Blues Shouter” as the headline, conjuring up thoughts of Jimmy Rushing and Jimmy Witherspoon rather than a slim white kid from Tupelo. And let’s not forget that Elvis’s very first A-side was his reinvention of Arthur Crudup’s blues That’s All Right.
Despite this, Elvis’s association with the blues over the last seven decades has been problematic. Few would disagree that some of his very best recordings are straight blues numbers, most notably 1960’s Reconsider Baby and 1971’s Merry Christmas Baby. And yet these kinds of tracks are very few. Meanwhile, the word “blues” was often misused, such as on the 1961 soundtrack number Beach Boy Blues (more on that later). Then there’s the thorny issue that Elvis never actually recorded a blues album, despite supposedly announcing his intentions to do so in the early 1970s. A handful of efforts have been made to compile a blues album, most notably Reconsider Baby back in 1985. In 2001, BMG issued a “Blues” volume in their Ultimate Collection series of Presley discs, but much of the disc had little to do with the blues, and other key tracks were missing, not least the aforementioned Merry Christmas Baby.
The truth is that Elvis recorded very few pure blues numbers, but this should hardly be surprising for an artist that spent his career merging genres together to create something unique to him. Just take a listen to the live versions of Lawdy Miss Clawdy in the 1970s and you’ll find a rock ‘n’ roll (or rhythm & blues – you decide which) number performed with backing vocals straight out of the gospel tradition. Or how about the 1970 recording of Faded Love for the Elvis Country album? A country song given a rock makeover.
Elvis Country is a key album in the Elvis legacy. In many respects, Elvis Country sums up the Presley magic on twelve key tracks. Recorded in June and September 1970, the album came about almost by chance, as Elvis realised that, during the epic June sessions, he had unintentionally gone some way to recording a country album. Elvis then delved into his memory bank of country songs in order to complete the LP. He tells the musicians at one point that “it doesn’t have to be strictly country.” He was taking country songs and then interpreting them in his own way – ignoring established generic and cultural barriers, just as he had with Crudup’s That’s all Right back in 1954. We can think of his relationship with the blues in a similar way. Elvis recorded a number of songs that have entered the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, but he reworked them in the way he wanted.
This album takes a look at his relationship with the blues, from his straight recording of blues classics through to makeovers of numbers such as Big Boss Man and Hi-Heel Sneakers and even the faux-blues of Beach Boy Blues. To do this, we mine not just studio recordings, but also home recordings, live performances, rehearsals, and jam sessions.
We start off with a kind of prelude, with Elvis at home with a few friends, softly singing Jimmy Reed’s Baby What You Want Me To Do, accompanied only by his own guitar playing. The song was an Elvis favourite, and was intended to be recorded at a 1967 studio session which was ultimately abandoned for reasons that are unimportant here. In 1968, he sang the song during the making of his TV special for NBC (now known affectionately as the Comeback Special), returning to it time and again during the various live sections. It was also part of his repertoire when he returned to live performances in 1969, even though, surprisingly, it is not known to have been performed in the 1970s. Even so, this opening version comes from November 1973, when he was recuperating after a spell in hospital where he was, according to biographer Peter Guralnick, “treated as an addic.” At a time of crisis, Elvis was turning to his roots.
Reed’s 1959 recording of the song was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2004, and here it segues into another inductee, Reconsider Baby. Lowell Fulson’s song was written and recorded in 1954, just as Elvis was starting out on his music career. In 1956, it formed part of the famous Million Dollar Quartet jam session with Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins – and maybe Johnny Cash, but that discussion is for elsewhere. Elvis recorded a studio version in 1960, and then sang it occasionally on stage during his post-comeback years. The version here is from August 1969, an apparently off-the-cuff rendition that is performed effortlessly, and showing Elvis’s command of the genre.
We stay in 1969 for Stranger in My Own Home Town, recorded at American Studios in Memphis in February. The song had been written and recorded by Percy Mayfield in 1963, but Elvis doesn’t just alter the feel of the song, but gives it a complete transformation. The length of Elvis’s version is nearly double that of the original, with him singing the same two verses over and over again, subtly changing the melody each time. Unusually, there is an instrumental introduction lasting a full verse, and then a number of instrumental breaks over which Elvis improvises partly off-mic and shouts encouragement to the band as the number fades out. Everyone seems to be having a great time and this type of recording portrays the great joy that music-making can bring.
We then travel back to 1958, to the sessions for what most regard as Elvis’s finest film, King Creole. Trouble is a traditional blues for the first half before kicking into an up-tempo rocking section. It’s the horns that open the song with a slow, traditional-sounding introduction before Elvis growls “If you’re looking for trouble, you came to the right place.” Once again, Elvis is having a ball. The horns blast away behind him in the choruses and, instead of simply trying to cope with them, he gives them shouts of encouragement. Elvis would return to the song some ten years later during the making of his 1968 TV special, but, rather strangely, it never became a regular item during the years that followed, despite a brief appearance during 1973. None of the versions from 1968 onwards include the up-tempo section, with the 1968 version used in a medley, and the 1973 renditions sticking closely to a traditional blues form.
Hi-Heel Sneakers is another song that Elvis covered that has since been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Here, as elsewhere, the song is given a makeover. This 1967 recording is a rocking romp through the song, and a performance that lasts almost five minutes. Elvis adds a rough edge to his voice here, and the whole thing rocks with abandon, partly thanks to the contributions of Boots Randolph and Charlie McCoy on saxophone and harmonica respectively. It was an epic recording but, sadly, cut by nearly two minutes for record release, with the unedited version not being made available until 1993. Even worse, it was wasted as a B-side and wasn’t compiled on to an album in America until the Elvis Aron Presley 8LP set in 1980, although it had appeared on Elvis in Demand in the UK in 1976. The unedited version is presented here.
We travel back in time to late 1954 for Milkcow Blues Boogie, which almost single-handedly demonstrates Elvis’s attitude towards the blues throughout his career. He starts the song as a slow-tempo traditional blues and then stops after a few lines and announcing “Hold it, fellas. That don’t move me. Let’s get real, real gone for a change” before restarting the song at twice the tempo with a rhythm & blues feel to it. It was an audacious move for someone still at the very beginning of their career and, while that opening comes across as somewhat hokey from a distance of sixty-eight years, Elvis is telling us firmly that he will sing the blues his way.
We return now to Reconsider Baby, heard earlier in a live performance from 1969. For the studio version, we head to 1960. No less than twelve numbers were recorded on April 3rd, and it was already past dawn when Elvis launched into the blues number. The recording is helped by a stunning solo by saxophonist Boots Randolph. On the one hand this sounds like a group of musicians letting off steam and yet, on the other, it’s an absolutely perfect recording, with Elvis for perhaps the first time on record totally mastering a blues number. Peter Guralnick sums up the track by saying that “Elvis’ voice soars, giving the blues a kind of harmonic freedom that recalls no-one so much as Little Junior Parker but in the end is Elvis’ mark alone.”
Some of Elvis’s finest performances in the second half of his career came about from his willingness to launch into songs that just happened to come into his head during a session, such as with his medley of Got My Mojo Working and Keep Your Hands Off Of It. The former will forever be associated with Muddy Waters, while the waters are muddied (sorry, I couldn’t resist) when it comes to the origins of the latter. Luckily, tapes started to roll within seconds of this jam starting, and it was preserved for posterity. Once again, the joy of music making is at the fore here – this is just Elvis sitting back and enjoying himself, but it remains one of the highlights of the June 1970 sessions, even if it was tucked away on initial release on the lacklustre Love Letters from Elvis LP. Extensive overdubs were applied to make the jam session seem more together and more like a finished master, but they are not included here.
As we have seen, Elvis recorded a significant number of classic blues numbers, but his relationship with the blues was (and still is) more complicated than that. He was just at ease taking songs and giving them a bluesy makeover, or even recording faux-blues for the movie soundtracks of the 1960s, including Hard Luck for Frankie and Johnny and the country blues of All I Needed Was the Rain for Stay Away,Joe. Perhaps the best known of them is Beach Boy Blues¸ recorded for Blue Hawaii. The film is the best of the “beach and girls” formula that was repeated many times over the next seven years of his career. Beach Boy Blues isn’t a blues at all with regards to musical form and lyrics, and yet it’s easy to be fooled into thinking it is, and this was a type of song that Elvis returned to time and again – not least with the likes of Give Me the Right or A Mess of Blues, both of which have ended up on Elvis blues compilations. But the faux-blues are an essential part of Elvis’s relationship with the genre, and he does his best to make these songs sound like the real deal through arrangement (most notably the use of harmonica here) and vocal performance.
If Beach Boy Blues is a faux-blues, then Steamroller Blues is a parody of the blues. James Taylor’s song was intended to poke fun at some of the blues being recorded by white singers during the late 1960s, and the lyrics are clearly over-the-top and non-sensical. But you wouldn’t know if from Elvis’s versions, where he treats the song as the legitimate article. There might have been a wry smile from him at times as he compares his lovemaking to a steamroller and a cement mixer, but he generally threw himself into the song (and its massive arrangement) during his 1970s live performances, and this version from a Memphis concert in March 1974 may be the best of them.
Returning to genuine blues material, we travel back to Elvis’s 1967 studio recording of Big Boss Man, that had been first recorded by Jimmy Reed in 1959. As with Hi-Heel Sneakers, Reed’s shuffle blues is given a mod makeover that, in many ways, makes the record sound more in tune with the music and culture of the period than anything that Elvis had recorded for half a decade. Billboard raved about Big Boss Man, saying that it was a “wild rocker right in the top Presley selling bag.” Presley’s voice was beginning to gain the roughness that would be so characteristic of his work during the 1968 TV special, especially when he reached into his upper register. It’s an arresting performance that stalled at #38 in the charts. The song would be revisited for the TV special and would also be performed regularly in concert during 1974 and 1975, and more occasionally in 1976 and 1977.
We move to March 12, 1961, for I Feel So Bad, Elvis’s cover of Chuck Willis’s 1954 single. While Elvis’s version features a great bluesy vocal, and perhaps a more raucous sound overall, the arrangement is virtually the same as Chuck Willis’s original, which seems something of a let-down given Elvis’s history of taking an original and turning it into something completely different. These kinds of “faithful” covers (the less generous would call them “copycat”) got more and more common as Elvis’s career progressed. Many of them went undetected for years, but now, with almost any song we want to hear being at our disposal thanks to the internet, it’s much easier to trace Elvis’s arrangements back to earlier versions. Nonetheless, the record was described in Variety as “a return to the lowdown country blues field with surefire impact.”
One of the hit singles released during Elvis’s years in the army was One Night, recorded on February 23, 1957. But it wasn’t Elvis’s first attempt at this song written by Dave Bartholomew and Pearl King. He had first tried it on January 18, 1957, but that version (known as One Night of Sin) remained unreleased for over twenty-five years. With Elvis still a controversial figure, the original lyrics were deemed to be too risqué, and so the song was put aside while a deal was figured out with the songwriters in order to rewrite them and make them more palatable. This is another song that makes Elvis association with the blues more complicated. The song isn’t really a blues in its construction, and yet, in Elvis’s hands, it’s difficult to call it anything else, because he approaches it in the same way that he would for a straight-ahead blues tune.
While in Texas for a live show, Elvis, Scotty and Bill took time to record two songs on January 6, 1955 for KDAV radio as a promotion for their performance. Years later, an acetate was found of the recordings, and issued on CD in 1992. Fool, Fool, Fool is the only Elvis recording of the song (originally by The Clovers) known to exist, although he had incorporated it into his live performances by November 1954. This is the nearest he came to a straight blues number during the Sun years. His style seemed to be developing all the time. By this point many of his mannerisms were already in place, including the infamous “hiccupping” sound. The recording is more informal than a studio master, with laughter being heard during the first verse. This is therefore a wonderful window into what Elvis and his small band probably sounded like when they were jamming in private, away from live audiences and away from Sam Phillips who was always looking for the next hit single.
The same can be said for When It Rains, It Really Pours, a song originally written and recorded by Billy “The Kid” Emerson under the title When It Rains It Pours. Elvis first attempted it in a 1955 session for Sun (his last for the label), but that version wasn’t completed. It was attempted again at an RCA session in 1957, but that version didn’t appear until 1965, on the mop-up album Elvis for Everyone. The version we hear here was recorded in Elvis’s dressing room during rehearsals for the NBC TV show of 1968. While it wasn’t chosen for inclusion in the tapings of the show, this is probably the rawest of all of Elvis’s versions of the song. Again, the song is not strictly a blues as such, but Elvis does his very best to convince us that it is.
We now move to another set of rehearsals, this time on July 24, 1970, when Elvis and the band was working on the shows for his third post-comeback Las Vegas season. We have already encountered the up-tempo version of Stranger in My Own Home Town, but here he takes the same song and performs it as a slow blues number. When Elvis runs out of lyrics, he starts making them up. It is a wonderful performance, that sits alongside Merry Christmas Baby and Reconsider Baby as one of Presley’s best blues recordings.
Merry Christmas Baby is probably the only true Elvis classic recorded during the studio sessions of 1971. This slow blues has a jam-like feel to it, with Elvis shouting asides to the band and singing off-mic during instrumental breaks. Unsurprisingly, the number was edited for release, but at least over five minutes were retained for the album version, and it is worth the price of admission on its own. When released as a single, it headed Variety’s “Top Singles of the Week” who referred to it as a “straight blues number…in lowdown style.” That praise, however, did not translate into record sales. The unedited version is heard here.
Interestingly, previous compilations of Elvis’s blues material have always omitted the most famous blues that Elvis ever recorded, See See Rider. The first known recording was by Ma Rainey back in 1924. Elvis’s upbeat version (his opening number for hundreds of concerts in the 1970s) is barely recognisable as the same song, and perhaps shows us why he returned to blues standards throughout his career: the blues form is so simple that it also the most malleable in all popular music. It is possible to take the songs and do almost anything with them. Part of the inspiration for Elvis’s version comes from LaVern Baker’s rhythm & blues single from 1963, and Elvis retains parts of that arrangement, most notably the backing vocals. The performance heard here is from February 19th, 1970 – a time when the song was still performed mid-set, and had yet to take on the grandiose qualities of later in the decade.
We round out our collection of Elvis’s blues recordings back where we started, with Baby What You Want Me To Do. This version was recorded during the tapings of the NBC TV special, during the famous sit-down shows. As we have seen throughout this collection, Elvis often turned to the blues when he wanted to jam with the musicians around him, and this performance certainly feels like a jam session. As with Merry Christmas Baby, Got My Mojo Working, Stranger in My Own Home Town, and Hi-Heel Sneakers, Elvis doesn’t want to let the song finish, and he is again totally absorbed within the music-making process – and in the blues genre itself.
While this collection features nothing from the final three years of Elvis’s life, that doesn’t mean that he abandoned the blues during that period. See See Rider continued to be performed, and both Big Boss Man and Steamroller Blues were staples of his repertoire. Even Reconsider Baby turned up on occasion as late as March 1977. In fact, perhaps Elvis’s relationship with the blues can best be seen through the times he chose to turn to the genre: in 1954/5 when he was starting out; in 1960, when he was recording his first album on return from the army; in 1967, when he was trying to make something happen in his career after a series of poor formula films; in 1968, when he was making the TV show for NBC that would kickstart his comeback; in 1969, at American Studios where he was trying to capitalise on the success of that show; later in the same year, during his return to live performances after a break of eight years; the home recordings of 1973, following a serious health scare; and even as things fell apart for him during the final years of his life.
His sense of ease with the blues seemed to not only give him solace during challenging times, but also gave him inspiration and hope when he most needed it.
Beyond Boundaries 