78. Elvis Presley, "The Sun Sessions"

 

If you look closely you can see exactly where Elvis appropriated rock from black people!  I'm just kidding, you don't have to look hard at all, it's right in the first song, "That's All Right Mama," recorded in 1946 by black blues artist Arthur Crudup.  In 1954, Elvis Presley was in Sun Studios in Memphis with a band called the Blue Moon Boys when, as legend has it, they started messing around with this song between takes and owner Sam Phillips told them to stick with it.  The result is probably the first white person rock and roll record, maybe the first rockabilly record, you get the picture.

But the real genius of Presley (and his backing band, especially guitarist Scotty Moore, who probably doesn't get enough credit for being the Buzz Aldrin to Elvis's Neil Armstrong) was the ability to take any song from any genre, run it through the Rockabillificator, and come out with an indisputably Elvis Presley song.  He did it with "Mama," and with "Blue Moon of Kentucky," a Bill Monroe bluegrass song, and others.  

Here's the original "Baby Let's Play House," by Arthur Gunter, recorded in 1954:

And then behold, once it's put through the Rockabillificator:

See what I'm getting at?  The knack they had was certainly not songwriting, it was adapting a song to their sound.

This is where we should talk about Elvis' voice because it is a weird, wild instrument.  If you're a kid in 1956 and you're used to Eddie Fisher and Perry Como this must have been like a bomb going off.  Elvis takes his voice and makes it croon and swing and sound insolent and turned on and whatever else you can imagine.  It's really remarkable.

This particular collection was compiled by RCA and issued in 1976 and was an immediate hit.  The recordings themselves are kind of all over the place; "I Don't Care If the Sun Don't Shine" sounds kind of flat and scratchy, while "I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" is way clearer and better mixed.  There's also the classic "Mystery Train," which sounds like fog in a Southern forest at 2 a.m. looks. (It was, of course, originally written and recorded by a black blues artist, Junior Parker.)

Elvis died about a year after this came out, in August 1977.  

Is this album in my personal Top 500? I can most definitely say yes.