On September 9, 1956, Elvis Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
The audience was enormous.
An estimated 60 million people watched the broadcast, representing about 82.6% of the television audience watching TV that night. At the time, it was the largest single television audience Elvis had ever faced.
And Elvis was only 21 years old.
He was already famous before Sullivan. Earlier that year, he had appeared nationally on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, The Milton Berle Show and The Steve Allen Show.
But Sullivan was different.
The program was one of the biggest television shows in America, and appearing there placed Elvis directly inside millions of family living rooms at once.
There was another unusual detail.
Ed Sullivan was not even there.
He was recovering from injuries suffered in a serious car accident, so actor Charles Laughton hosted the program instead.
And Elvis was not in the regular New York studio either.
He performed from CBS Television City in Hollywood, where he was working on his first movie, Love Me Tender.
Elvis Presley Performs “Don’t Be Cruel”
Elvis opened with “Don’t Be Cruel” before singing the still-unreleased movie ballad “Love Me Tender.”
Later in the broadcast, he returned for “Ready Teddy” and finished with “Hound Dog.”
The reaction was immediate.
Teenagers screamed inside the studio while tens of millions watched from home.
The Ed Sullivan archive now describes the broadcast as reaching approximately one-third of the entire U.S. population, an astonishing number for a single entertainer appearing on one television program.
Elvis would return to Sullivan twice more, on October 28, 1956 and January 6, 1957.
But the first appearance became the landmark.
It showed just how quickly Elvis had gone from a regional Southern performer to a national phenomenon.
Only two years earlier, he had been an unknown teenager recording at Sun Records.
Now 60 million people were watching him on the same night.
If anyone wanted proof of how enormous Elvis Presley had become in 1956, one number said almost everything: 82.6% of the television audience was watching.