By 1975, Elvis Presley was 40, and his body was giving out. Years of relentless touring, a punishing diet, and a long dependence on prescription medication had caught up with him. The man who had built his entire act on movement could no longer do it.
So he made a trade. He stopped dancing and put everything into his voice. And the results are some of the most extraordinary singing of his career.
Elvis Presley – How Great Thou Art – Live Las Vegas December
Take the night of 13 December 1975 in Las Vegas. He performed “How Great Thou Art” — the hymn that had already won him a Grammy — and stopped the room dead. The audience reaction was so overwhelming that he went back and sang the huge closing section again, purely because they wanted more of it.
Then there is “Hurt.” He had recorded it earlier that year, and it is a brutal song to sing — it demands a three-octave range and ends on a long climbing crescendo. At a Long Beach concert in April 1976 and in shows across that period, the version he delivered live carried a rawness the studio recording never had. The pain in it was not acting.
Elvis Presley – Softly, As I Leave You
That same December night produced something stranger and sadder. Elvis performed “Softly As I Leave You” — but rather than singing it, he spoke it while his backing vocalist Sherrill Nielsen sang behind him. And before he did, he told the audience the story he believed was behind the song: a dying man in a hospital bed, writing a final goodbye to his wife as she slept in a chair beside him.
The Las Vegas showroom went completely silent.
He had eighteen months left. He could no longer do the kicks or the spins, and he knew it. So he did the only thing left, and it turned out to be the thing he was best at all along.