By 1976, Elvis Presley was in a bad way. He was 41, exhausted, and his health was failing. He had not set a new record in almost a year, and there were serious doubts about whether he could even be persuaded to enter a recording studio again. So RCA gave up trying and came to him. They parked a mobile recording truck outside Graceland, ran cables through the windows, and turned his own living room — the famous carpeted Jungle Room — into a studio.
What happened over those few nights in February 1976 is genuinely hard to listen to, because most of it is the sound of a great singer running on empty. He kept disappearing upstairs during sessions. On one occasion he vanished before the session had even started and flew to Denver — for a funeral and a hamburger. On several nights the songs had to be transposed into lower keys to protect a voice that was no longer what it had been. The band would sit and wait.
Then, on the fourth night, they put a song called “Hurt” in front of him.
Hurt – Elvis Presley
It was not a new song. It was a rhythm and blues record from 1955 by a singer named Roy Hamilton — and Roy Hamilton was one of Elvis’s heroes. Elvis had idolized him since he was a teenager, and the two men had actually met and become friends in 1969, when they happened to be recording in the same Memphis studio. Elvis was so in awe that he quoted a Hamilton song in an acceptance speech two years later. Hamilton died shortly after they met, aged only 40.
The song itself is brutal to sing. It demands a three-octave range and ends with a long, climbing crescendo that lasts well over half a minute. It is the kind of thing a singer at full strength approaches carefully. Elvis, at his weakest, went straight at it.
Hurt | Elvis Presley (Live Music Video)
There were no lowered keys this time. According to Rolling Stone, he attacked the opening bars with what they called a primal roar — and suddenly the voice everybody thought had gone was back in the room. The historian Ernst Jorgensen, who has cataloged Elvis’s entire recorded output, described it as a performance of spellbinding ambition and sincerity, drawn from a troubled and exhausted man. Rolling Stone put it more simply: the King had returned.
It is widely regarded as the greatest thing he recorded in the whole of the 1970s, and plenty of fans will tell you it is the best singing he ever did on any record.
The rest of the story is where it hurts. The high did not last. Two nights later, on 8 February, Elvis did not come downstairs. The musicians waited for hours before being sent home. Look at what he chose to record in that room, and the pattern is unmistakable — over half of the songs are aching ballads about loss and regret, with titles like “Solitaire,” “Never Again” and “Love Coming Down.”
He kept singing “Hurt” on stage right through 1976 and into 1977, and on the good nights he could still hit every note of it. There is a version filmed for television, just weeks before he died, in which he reaches the full three-and-a-half octaves. He was eighteen months from the end, and he could still do that.