Sixty-six years ago tonight, Elvis Presley walked into RCA Studio B in Nashville with hymns on his mind.
The plan was a gospel album. It would come out as “His Hand in Mine,” and the session that built it was a marathon. Work started at 6:30 in the evening on October 30, 1960 and didn’t wrap until 8 the next morning. Steve Sholes was the producer.
Elvis had familiar faces around him. The Jordanaires sang backup. The band included Scotty Moore, Hank Garland, Bob Moore, D.J. Fontana, Buddy Harman, Floyd Cramer and Boots Randolph. Most of the night was hymns, and “Mansion Over the Hilltop” below is one of the gospel songs Elvis recorded at that session, so it’s a good way to hear the mood in the room.
Elvis singing “Mansion Over the Hilltop,” a gospel song from that night
Then, somewhere between 10 PM and 1 AM, he did something you’d never guess from the album’s title.
He had just finished a gospel song called “He Knows Just What I Need.” Before moving on to the next one, “Mansion Over the Hilltop,” he stopped and sang a love song instead.
It was “Surrender.”
He sang it nine times that night. Take 4 was the one they kept, and it runs just 1:52. That’s a short record, but it’s a big one, and you can hear how far it sits from the hymns he’d been singing all evening when you play the master take below.
Elvis singing “Surrender,” the take that became the hit
So where did that sweeping melody come from?
Italy.
“Surrender” is an English rewrite of “Torna a Surriento,” which means “Come Back to Sorrento.” It’s an old Neapolitan song about Sorrento, a seaside town near Naples. Ernesto De Curtis wrote the music and his brother Giambattista wrote the Italian words.
The story behind the song is a sweet one. Tradition says it was written in 1902, when the mayor of Sorrento asked Giambattista for a song for Italy’s prime minister, who happened to be staying at the mayor’s seaside hotel. It was copyrighted in 1905. Either way, by the night Elvis sang it in Nashville, the tune was more than 50 years old.
The English words came from Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. They were the songwriting pair who also wrote “Save the Last Dance for Me” for the Drifters, and over the years they wrote 25 songs for Elvis. Here they kept the old Italian melody and gave it brand new lyrics.
If you want to hear where it all started, here’s the original Italian song, recorded by Luciano Pavarotti, the famous Italian tenor. Listen to the two back to back and see how quickly you catch the connection.
The old Italian song that became “Surrender”
“Surrender” didn’t go on the gospel album. It was held back and released as a single on February 7, 1961. On March 20 it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for two weeks. It went to No. 1 in the UK and Australia too.
And “His Hand in Mine” came out on November 23, 1960, a little over three weeks after that long night in Nashville, without the love song Elvis squeezed in between the hymns.