History of Heartbreak Hotel

 

Elvis's first #1 record would eventually spend over six months on Billboard's Top 100 pop chart. It wasn't an overnight success, however. The history of Heartbreak Hotel shows that the nation was actually slow in embracing what would become recognized as one of the most important recordings of the rock era.

Elvis committed to the song from the beginning

Elvis first heard the song in November 1955, just after Colonel Parker had sold his contract to RCA Victor. According to biographer Peter Guralnick, Mae Axton, the song's co-writer with Tommy Durden, played a demo for Elvis, who liked it immediately and announced it would be his first single for RCA. The first session for his new label was still two months away, but in the interim Heartbreak Hotel received its initial exposure during Presley's stage shows throughout the South at the end of 1955.
 Elvis's historic recording occurred on January 10, 1956, at RCA's Nashville studios. The label's commitment to their new artist was reflected in the quality of the musicians who were assigned to work the session. In addition to Elvis's regular band of Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D.J. Fontana, two top Nashville musicians, guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer, were in the studio. According to Presley recording session authority Ernst Jorgensen, "It would have been hard to say what genre 'Heartbreak Hotel' was written in—perhaps it was more like a blues than anything else—but Elvis and his band had been doing it live for months, and they knew what to make of it. With just a few takes and a change in the lyrics ('they pray to die' became simply 'they could die'), Elvis's first hit was in the can."

RCA began shipping the new single to distributors nationwide on January 27, 1956. It would be over a month, however, before the record appeared on Billboard's Top 100. There was a lot of work to do before the country's disc jockeys and record buyers accepted the odd sounding tune. The day after the record shipped, Elvis got his first national TV exposure on Stage Show, hosted by the Dorsey Brothers. For some reason, Elvis did not sing Heartbreak Hotel on the show or on his second Stage Show appearance on February 4. (Jorgensen speculates that RCA withheld permission for its use on those two shows.)