In 1954, a nineteen-year-old truck driver in Memphis asked a gospel quartet called the Songfellows for a tryout. Gospel was the music he loved most in the world. He sang it in church as a boy. He knew every hymn by heart. So he stood in front of them and gave it everything he had — and they turned him down. He went home and told his father the worst sentence a young singer can hear: “They told me I couldn’t sing.” That boy’s name was Elvis Presley.
It wasn’t even the only door slammed in his face that year. A Memphis bandleader named Eddie Bond let him try out too, then told him to keep driving trucks, because he was never going to make it as a singer: two rejections, one year, same message: find another dream.
Instead, Elvis walked into a small studio called Sun Records — and everything changed. The shy kid nobody wanted became the King of Rock and Roll, with 104 Top 40 hits and a face known in every country on earth.
The Gospel Side Of Elvis
Here’s the part almost nobody knows. Elvis was nominated for a Grammy 14 times. He never won a single one for rock. Not for “Hound Dog.” Not for “Jailhouse Rock.” Not for “Suspicious Minds.” Not one. By 1967, nine years into the Grammy Awards, his record was a painful 0-for-9. The man who invented the sound of modern music couldn’t win an award for it, because the people handing out trophies still didn’t take rock and roll seriously.
Then his luck finally turned — and it turned in the last place you’d expect. His first Grammy ever came for a gospel album. It was called How Great Thou Art, built around an old hymn, and it won Best Sacred Performance.
Thirteen years after a gospel group said he couldn’t sing, gospel handed Elvis the first award of his entire career. Five years later, he won again for another gospel record, “He Touched Me.”
His third and final Grammy is the one that hits hardest. On March 20, 1974, Elvis played Memphis — his hometown — for the first time in 13 years. He’d turned down other cities on that tour because he wanted the live album recorded at home, in front of his own people. 12,300 fans packed the Mid-South Coliseum that night. And the song from that concert that won him his last Grammy? “How Great Thou Art” again.
Elvis – How Great Thou Art (1972)
Three Grammys in a lifetime. All three for gospel.
But the story isn’t finished. The Songfellows — the group that rejected him — were the junior quartet of the Blackwood Brothers, Elvis’s favorite gospel singers. In 1958, when his beloved mother died, Elvis sent a plane to bring the Blackwoods to sing at her funeral. And in August 1977, when Elvis himself was laid to rest, James Blackwood stood up and sang “How Great Thou Art.” The song that won him every award he ever got. Sung over his casket, by the family whose group once said he couldn’t sing at all.