If you ever saw Elvis in concert, you know how the night ended: with one slow, sweet love song that sent everybody home happy.
That ending wasn’t an accident. The idea came from one of his oldest friends, and it came with a clever little trick built in.
That friend was Charlie Hodge.
Charlie was born in Decatur, Alabama, in 1934. Before he ever worked with Elvis, he sang in gospel quartets, first with Bill Gaither and then with the Foggy River Boys. He met Elvis backstage in Memphis in 1955, and their paths crossed again in 1958 at Fort Hood, Texas, while Elvis was serving in the Army.
They became close. On stage, Charlie sang harmony and played guitar. He was also the man who handed Elvis his water and his scarves during the show. Off stage, he lived at Graceland for 17 years.
Here’s Charlie himself, talking about the Elvis he knew.
Charlie Hodge remembers his friend
Charlie brought something else to the table: road experience.
Before Elvis made his big return to Las Vegas in 1969, Charlie had been touring the Nevada clubs in Reno, Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe with Jimmy Wakely. Wakely was a country singer and a star of cowboy movies back in the 1940s. On those tours, Charlie said, he was “learning pacing, timing and all that which became Elvis’ show.”
He put it simply: “And just my experience on the road with Jimmy Wakely gave me what I needed to do for Elvis later.”
So when Elvis was getting ready for Las Vegas, Charlie helped him lay out the show.
One day during rehearsal, Elvis had a question. Charlie told it this way: “‘How are going to finish a show like this?’ Elvis said one day during rehearsal.”
Charlie had an answer ready.
“if you ended with a ballad like ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’, I said. ‘Then into a hard rock walk-off with a vamp. That way, they’ll never know you ended a concert on a ballad’.”
There was the trick. Elvis would sing the tender love song, and then the band would kick straight into a hard-driving vamp as he walked off. The crowd would leave with their hearts full and their feet tapping, never quite noticing the show had really ended on a ballad.
Elvis liked it. “‘That’s different, all right’, Elvis said.”
Charlie said he got the idea from his days with Jimmy Wakely. “I remembered Jimmy Wakely ending his show on a ballad like that, sometimes,” he said.
And it stuck. “‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ became his signature song, the one he ended on, and he never changed it.”
You can see it in action at the end of “Aloha from Hawaii,” Elvis’s famous satellite concert on Jan 14, 1973. He closed with the song that night and then threw his cape into the front rows. Here’s that closing song from Honolulu, so you can hear the ballad Charlie talked him into.
Elvis closes “Aloha from Hawaii” with the song, 1973
Charlie passed away in 2006, but every time that song comes on, a little piece of him is in it.
He said it best himself. “It was beautiful and now it was a part of Elvis.”