Back in 1964, Elvis Presley made a movie called “Viva Las Vegas.” It’s still one of his most loved films. His co-star was Ann-Margret, a young actress and singer who could dance and light up a screen just as easily as he could. The two of them clicked right away, on camera and off, and you can feel it when you watch them together.
For one scene they recorded a tender love song called “Today, Tomorrow and Forever.” If you’ve seen the movie, you know Elvis sings it on his own.
But that wasn’t the only version they cut.
On the same day, the two of them sat down and sang it as a duet, trading the lines back and forth. That take never made it into the film. It never made it onto the soundtrack either. And then it simply disappeared.
For years fans traded rumors about it. Some swore the duet was real and sitting in a vault somewhere. Others figured it was just a nice story that grew in the telling. Nobody outside the record company could say for sure, because nobody could produce it.
Then it turned up.
The recording was real, and it had been resting quietly in RCA’s archive the whole time. The people who dig through old Elvis tapes for a living finally came across it while doing research, and almost 40 years after that afternoon in the studio, they put it out. It arrived in 2002 on a box set named after the very song, “Elvis: Today, Tomorrow & Forever.”
Roger Semon, the man at RCA who helped produce Elvis’s catalog, talked about the find on CNN. He said the duet had been “part of an ongoing research that we’ve had and only recently did we discover this duet that had long been rumored.”
Both versions were taped on July 11, 1963, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood. So the duet wasn’t some later experiment or a patched-together thing. It was there from the very start, Elvis and Ann-Margret singing to each other in the same room, and it just took the world a long time to hear it.
The clip below is that lost duet. Listen to the way their two voices answer each other.
The lost Elvis and Ann-Margret duet of “Today, Tomorrow and Forever”
What makes it special isn’t only that it was missing for so long. It’s the two people singing. Elvis and Ann-Margret stayed close for the rest of his life, and this recording catches them young, right at the start of all that, having fun with a pretty song.