When a shy teenager made his first record on the golden yellow Sun label sixty years ago in Memphis it was the beginning of a revolution. Elvis Presley, then only 19 year-old was about to turn the musical world upside-down with his songs and inspire millions of other singers to follow his lead; for instance in Germany the 75
year-old Peter Kraus is still making tours. But even 37 years after the death of the one and only King of Rock’n’Roll his LP records are still being (or perhaps one should say being again) pressed as they were in 1956 when his first LP sold over a million.
Of more than 700 songs released during his lifetime there are 155 in this box that according to many of his fans are the best of Elvis rock.
The sound-track albums of mediocre films that appeared by the dozen after 1961 had very little to do with the real wild Rock’n’Roll.
These 10 CDs, each of which contains bonus material, lets you hear how Elvis rose to be a world-famous star still appreciated today by those of his generation and their grandchildren equally because he could sing everything convincingly from ballads and blues, country and spirituals down to Rockabilly and Christmas songs.
All his original albums released by RCA between 1956 and 1960 are in this box and among them there’s many a musical gem to be discovered that didn’t get to be a hit. The gripping “Reconsider Baby” for example shows how carefully Elvis had studied his Afro- American role models; he paid tribute to them already in several
titles on his first LP.
As well as Elvis’ first recordings at Sun Studios this box also contains three sound-tracks of his best films – “Loving You”, “King Creole” and “GI Blues”; these provide his fans with a complete archive of all the records the “King” made in the 1950s, from “Long Tall Sally” that sweeps you off your feet, to his version of Muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus and the emotional songs on his gospel LP “His hand in mine”. This was Elvis in top form, such as his public would not experience again until his tumultuous comeback in 1968.
For everyone playing these CDs today the catchphrase is still is as it was with the single Elvis recorded 60 years ago: “THERE‘S GOOD ROCKIN‘ TONIGHT!”