Colonel Tom Parker managed Elvis for more than twenty years, and in all that time he almost never told Elvis what to sing. That was Elvis’s department. But there was one exception, one single song the Colonel asked him to record. It was his wife’s favorite, an old ballad called Are You Lonesome Tonight.
Elvis cut it in the small hours of an April night in 1960, at the famous RCA studio in Nashville. To get the mood just right, he had almost everyone leave the room and asked for the lights to be switched off, then sang it in near total darkness, spoken word section and all.
And when he was done, he wasn’t happy with it. Elvis told the producer to throw the take out. He said he couldn’t do the song justice.
The story behind Are You Lonesome Tonight
The producer, Steve Sholes, quietly ignored him. He kept the recording, and the version that came out of that dark studio survived instead of ending up on the cutting room floor.
Good thing too. Released later that year, the song Elvis wanted thrown away went straight to number one and sat there for six solid weeks. It’s now remembered as one of the most beautiful recordings he ever made.
An outtake from the 1960 recording session
Elvis spent that night certain he had failed a simple ballad. Millions of people have spent the decades since showing him just how wrong he was.