More than 55 years have passed since Elvis Presley’s first single topped the pop charts in 1956. “Heartbreak Hotel,” the nation’s No. 1 Billboard hit for eight consecutive weeks, along with subsequent successes like “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender,” marked the beginning of a revolution that changed the trajectory of popular music. By the end of that pivotal and remarkable year, the 21-year-old Presley was already a global sensation.
The young singer’s dramatic rise is exhaustively chronicled in a new five-CD box set, “Young Man with the Big Beat” (RCA/Legacy), which includes all of Presley’s 1956 master recordings, in addition to studio outtakes, live recordings and several extended interviews, among other extras.
For producer Ernst Jorgensen, who has been charged with the care of RCA’s Presley archives for more than two decades, it was a chance to reassert the true size and scope of Elvis’ impact on the world he knew.
“He was No. 1 on the singles chart for half of that year,” Jorgensen explained. “This was totally unique, and it changed the record business forever. And I thought that the idea of just picking one year to demonstrate how significant the early success of Elvis Presley was would be a fun task to do. We thought it would be wonderful to tell this story again, because there are so many people out there who have forgotten how big Elvis was.”
Presley’s rise was sudden and dramatic.
Born in Mississippi in 1935, he’d moved to Memphis, Tenn., with his family by 1948. Imbued with a love of music, including rhythm & blues, country and gospel, his first recordings for Sam Phillips’ Memphis-based Sun Records were issued in 1954.
By late 1955, already a big regional hit, Elvis was signed to RCA Records, which spent $35,000 — a figure that was simply unheard of at the time — to buy the young singer’s contract from Sun.
While Presley today remains almost singularly identified with rock ‘n’ roll, that was hardly the case back then. The young singer’s rise into the commercial stratosphere actually received a big boost from legions of country-music DJs at Southern radio stations.
Those same DJs named Presley “Most Promising C&W Artist” in November 1955, after keeping his Sun singles — including tunes like “That’s All Right” and “Mystery Train” — in heavy rotation from the beginning.
“Heartbreak Hotel,” Elvis’ first RCA single, received enormous benefits as a result.
The madness of 1956 is documented in an extensive 80-page book that accompanies the “Young Man with the Big Beat” box. Including many previously unpublished photographs, it offers a complete discography and a day-by-day account of those pivotal months.
