In April 1956, a 21-year-old Elvis Presley was booked into the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. He was billed as the “Atomic Powered Singer.” He had just had his first national hit with “Heartbreak Hotel.” Teenagers across the South and Midwest were already screaming at his shows.
Las Vegas sat and stared at him.
The audience was the problem. Vegas showrooms in 1956 were full of middle-aged adults having dinner and gambling — people who had come to see crooners and comedians. A young man in a loud jacket shaking his legs at them was not entertainment. It was baffling. Newsweek famously described him as going down “like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party.”
Elvis Presley – 23 April 1956 – Frontier Hotel ~ Las Vegas, Nevada
His own drummer, D.J. Fontana, admitted afterward that they tried everything they knew and nothing worked. Usually Elvis could win a room over. Not that one. The two-week booking is generally regarded as the first real flop of his career.
But here is the part that turns the story around. He loved Las Vegas anyway, and he stayed in town after his own shows to watch other acts. One night he went to see a lounge band called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who did a jokey, rocked-up version of a song originally recorded by the blues singer Big Mama Thornton.
It was called “Hound Dog.” Elvis thought their version was hilarious, watched them do it night after night, and took it home.
Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show (First appearance)
Three months later, on 9 September 1956, he sang it on The Ed Sullivan Show. Roughly 60 million Americans watched — around one in three people in the country. Sullivan himself was recovering from a car crash, so the actor Charles Laughton introduced him.
He went from silence in a casino to the biggest television audience in America in five months. And the song that did it was one he picked up in the town that had just rejected him.