Most hit records don’t sit around for years before anyone hears them. This one took four and a half years, and it almost didn’t make it out of the studio at all.
It started on the evening of Oct 30, 1960, at RCA Studio B, 1611 Hawkins Street in Nashville. The session began at 6:30 PM and ran right through the night. That all-night session gave us “His Hand in Mine,” the first of three gospel albums Elvis put out in his lifetime. “Surrender,” cut the same night, went on to hit No. 1 in 1961.
This short travel video takes you to Studio B for the Elvis story behind it, so you can see where it all happened.
A visit inside RCA Studio B in Nashville
By then they’d been at it all night. The last block of the session ran from 5 to 8 AM, in the early morning hours of Oct 31, 1960. That’s when Elvis turned to one more gospel number.
With him were the Jordanaires, his backup singers. Producer Steve Sholes was running things.
They tried it three times. The first take was a long false start. The second was another false start. The third made it all the way through.
But nobody was happy with it. Neither Elvis nor the Jordanaires were satisfied, and the session log marked it “No Master.” One record of the session says the log noted “that a satisfactory master was not completed.” So the song was left off the album.
You can hear how that first attempt went, false start and all, in this recording from the session.
Take 1 from that morning, the long false start
So what was the song?
It was “Crying in the Chapel.”
RCA held onto it for years. Then on April 6, 1965, the label finally released take 3, the one that got all the way through, in its “Gold Standard Series.”
Fans loved it. “Crying in the Chapel” became Elvis’s first million-seller since “Return to Sender” in 1962. It climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Easy Listening chart. It went to No. 1 in Britain, too. Later it was added as a bonus track on his 1967 gospel album “How Great Thou Art.”
The take nobody liked in 1960 is the one that sold a million, so listen for yourself and see if you hear what they were worried about.
The 1960 take RCA finally released in 1965
The chapel in the song was real, by the way.
Songwriter Artie Glenn wrote it after spinal surgery. His son Larry later told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “My Dad, Artie Glenn, wrote the song after he prayed and repented at the Loving Avenue Baptist Church” in Fort Worth, Texas. Artie’s brother Foy remembered it well. “Artie told me he walked to the front of the church with tears rolling down his cheeks,” he said. “I told him that God gave him that song,” Foy added.
Artie’s 17-year-old son Darrell was the first to record it, back in 1953. This is that original, years before Elvis ever sang a note of it.
The very first recording, by the songwriter’s teenage son
It’s a long road from a small church in Texas to a tired studio in Nashville at dawn. And then, after years on a shelf, to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Elvis and the Jordanaires weren’t happy with it that morning. Funny how things turn out, because take 3 is the very one that became the hit.