Seventy years ago today, on Sunday October 28, 1956, Elvis Presley stood on a New York stage and waited for the most famous handshake on television.
Ed Sullivan ran the biggest variety show in America. Every Sunday night, families crowded around the set to see whoever he brought out next. When Elvis first turned up on the show back on September 9, Sullivan wasn’t even there. He was home recovering from a car accident and another host filled in for him. So this night was the first time Sullivan himself got to walk out and introduce the young singer the whole country was arguing about.
Elvis came on right after a group of young singers from Ireland, the Little Gaelic Singers of County Derry. Then the band kicked in.
He opened with “Don’t Be Cruel,” already a monster hit that summer. The girls in the audience were screaming before he got a word out.
Here’s Elvis that night, sliding into the song that had the country wrapped around his finger.
Elvis opens the show with “Don’t Be Cruel”
Then came “Love Me Tender,” the soft ballad from his first movie, which was just about to hit theaters. Later in the hour, after a ventriloquist act, he came back out for a slower tune called “Love Me.” And that’s where the night turned into something people still talk about.
The camera crept in for a tight close-up of his face. For a second he just stopped. Then he smiled. And then, slow and easy, he lifted the corner of his upper lip into that little snarl.
The studio came apart.
As the Ed Sullivan Show’s own site tells it, “the camera moved in for a close-up of Elvis’ face, and then, as if on cue, he smiled and snarled his upper lip. The studio audience went wild.” It was such a small thing. A grin and a curl of the lip, and hundreds of people started screaming at once.
You kind of have to see it to get why.
Watch the close-up during “Love Me.” The scream starts the second his lip moves.
The close-up during “Love Me” that set the whole studio off
He saved “Hound Dog” for last, stretched out longer and slower than the record, making the crowd wait before he finally cut loose.
This is how he closed the night.
Elvis ends the show with a slowed-down “Hound Dog”
What makes these worth watching is that they’re the real broadcast, straight from the official Ed Sullivan Show channel, not some grainy copy. Seventy years on, you can sit and watch the exact moment a whole generation of teenagers decided Elvis belonged to them. And Sullivan, who had been nervous about booking him at all, would have him back on the show again.