Back Where It All Started

Song 209: This week's playlist addition is Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, written by Mae Boren Axton and Thomas Durden. How did I get well past the 200 mark on the playlist without including an Elvis track? Well, I'll admit that I didn't listen to Elvis at all as a kid. I caught Hound Dog a time or 2, and strangely enough, I thought Elvis sounded like a hick, in a way that the country singers I heard at the time didn't. Later, in my final year in HS, I got a copy of the official Beatles biography, and I discovered, to my surprise, how much Elvis had influenced them. I thought the Beatles had invented RnR, but from then on, I started to read and learn more about the '50s rockers, and later the blues crowd from the same era, and earlier. At the time, RnR radio played current records, with an occasional oldie from maybe 6 months or a year previous, so in the early '70s I read a lot about the early days of RnR but heard very little of the music. That included reading about this really rocking tune that had launched Elvis's string of hits back in 1956, but then suddenly, one day in the spring of 1974, living in Atlanta, I heard this very song on my car radio. At that magic moment, I understood Elvis as the RnR guy he had started out to be, and over the next few years, I heard a bunch of other records that filled in more of that part of his legacy, including Little Sister, My Baby Left Me, Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up and That's All Right, all of them cool rocking tunes. This song, though, would be the most important one of the bunch, as the first one to take him to the top of the charts. Interestingly enough, one of the two writers on this tune, Mae Boren Axton, was the mother of Hoyt Axton, who wrote Greenback Dollar (Song 201) and The Pusher (Song 202).