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Presley, Elvis
Unless you were a big fan of country music in 1955, chances are you had no idea who Elvis Presley was. While at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis recorded just under a score of songs that today are among the most seminal recordings of all time; but none of the Sun recordings ever made the Top 40 pop charts. In retrospect, this seems amazing considering the widespread effect these seventeen or so songs had on music. But at the time, Elvis' success on local radio seemed sufficient, and for a country boy it would have been foolish to think that anything more than regional fame was within his grasp. No major label was signing rock-and-roll or rhythm-and-blues artists, black or white, so independent labels were picking up the slack. In this way, rock-and-roll music, in the beginning, was more or less kept to a cottage industry.
It is impossible to overemphasize the important role Sam Phillips played in developing Elvis Presley's original style and artistry. When Phillips started Sun Records, his intention was to record the local blues artists who could not get a fair deal at the other southern recording studios. After a time, Phillips began recording white country artists who were interested in trying something new. By combining their country sound with a steady beat and adding the unrestrained qualities of rhythm and blues, a new, accessible style resulted. If you doubt the success of Phillips’ formula, here are just some of the artists whose careers were launched within a year's time: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and, of course, Elvis Presley. Phillips knew what he was doing, and the new style he and these country boys developed was dubbed ‘rockabilly’. The rockabilly sound eventually became nothing more than a stylization of double-time beats with hiccup vocals drenched in echo, but in its original form it was much more powerful. It was "blacker" than contemporary rockabilly with a definite feel for the lyrics.
The legacy of Elvis' Sun records will probably last as long as the recorded evidence exists. Unfortunately though, his fame outgrew the label that spawned him, and his new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, lured him into a contract with RCA Records. RCA bought Elvis' contract from Phillips for a total of $40,000, with the intention of making Elvis Presley a pop star. His first single, "Heartbreak Hotel", was released in early 1956, and suddenly Elvis Presley became the embodiment of rock and roll. The song went to #1 on the national pop charts and stayed there for eight weeks. As far as middle America was concerned, Elvis could have come from Mars because nobody, especially a white nobody, had ever made music like that. And that...that..."dancing" that he does, if you could call it dancing, to that niggra jungle music...he's a pervert...and on and on and blah, blah, blah. Teenagers who were starving for a means of expression and suffocating at the hands of an outdated morality were sensing liberation, and Elvis Presley personified their sense of freedom.
"Heartbreak Hotel" was written by Mae Axton, (Hoyt Axton's mother) with Tommy Dunden and featured a rare songwriting credit to Elvis himself. It had a dark, somber, bluesy mood that Elvis was able to capitalize on by singing with a dramatic flair, using a full range of dynamics to get the point across. The atmosphere on this song is so thick you could cut it with a knife. It really does sound as though Elvis is singing in front of a blinking, neon Vacancy sign. His voice is so far out front in the mix that if his talent was anything less than extraordinary, the record would be a disaster. As it is, his vocal performance is something to behold, as he flaunts the fact that he has no precedent. The record sounds great as much for what it’s missing as for what it contains. A modern studio could try for days, but the sound of records like this is simply not reproducible. The sound and lyrical content seem, in retrospect, to be quite mature for a teenage anthem. It is great not just because it was Elvis' first national hit, but because it was a landmark performance. It established rock and roll (and everything rock and roll stood for) as a force to be reckoned with.
 
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