A Little Less Conversation: Elvis The Musician

I'm no Elvis expert. If pressed, I can sing a few lines of “Hound Dog,” but before reading Last Train to Memphis, that was the only song of his I’d heard. Since I’ve never taken an interest in his music, it’s a credit to Peter Guralnick’s skill as a writer that I’ve been humming Elvis tunes nonstop for the past two days.

In the second segment of Last Train to Memphis, I was captivated by Guralnick’s portrayal of the songs Elvis performed and recorded. Rather than taking a sterilized, impersonal approach to Elvis’s musical career, Guralnick tries to communicate the essence of each song. After reading Guralnick’s vivid description of “Baby, Let’s Play House,” which Elvis opens with “an ascending, hiccoughing stutter that knocked everybody out with its utterly unpredictable, uninhibited, and gloriously playful ridiculousness,” I couldn’t resist the urge to listen to the song myself (179).  This wasn’t the only time Guralnick described Elvis’s music in such riveting detail: he waxes poetic when recounting Elvis’s recording session at Sun Studio, especially the final take, a rhythm and blues song called “Trying to Get to You.” In Guralnick’s words, “There was a floating sense of inner harmony mixed with a ferocious hunger, a desperate striving linked to a pure outpouring of joy, that seemed to just tumble out of the music” (205). Once again, I found myself on youtube, needing to hear the song for myself.

Guralnick not only captures the unique sound of Elvis’s music, he includes excerpts from lyrics to many of the songs themselves. Elvis’s rewrite of the line “You may have religion” in “Baby, Let’s Play House” to “You may drive a pink Cadillac” may seem arbitrary, but reveals Elvis’s creative power (and interesting set of values J). In addition, Guralnick’s inclusion of a line from “Heartbreak Hotel” – “bellhop’s tears keep flowing and the desk clerk’s dressed in black” – allows the reader to assess the song’s morbidity instead of just taking the author’s word for the song’s “powerful, emotion-laden atmosphere of upbeat despair” (230,239).

One could argue that by trying to convey a sense of the music Elvis produced, Guralnick sets himself up for failure. After all, music is ineffable, and there is no objective way to describe a song. Many have tried and failed to describe Elvis’s musical style. One such singer, Buddy Bain, when trying to explain his impression of Elvis’s style, merely says, “I did mine just plain, and he did his, ‘Well-uh, uh-uh’ – you know, like he did” (162). However, Guralnick’s familiarity with Elvis’s music and commitment to expressing it in all its variety transports the reader into the recording studios and concert halls of the 1950’s. 

During the reading, whenever I would grow bored of the descriptions of contracts and negotiations between Elvis’s managers, I would be drawn back by Guralnick’s interspersed personal accounts of Elvis’s music. Although there is much to be said about the technical aspects of Elvis's career, he was a musician first and foremost and I appreciate the author’s emphasis on the way his music sounded.