Fifty-seven years ago today, on Nov. 11, 1969, Elvis Presley put out a new single called “Don’t Cry Daddy.”
It was a tender one. Mac Davis wrote it, and Elvis recorded it that January at American Sound, a studio right there in Memphis. The B-side was “Rubberneckin’.” By January 1970 the song had climbed to No. 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
If you haven’t heard it in a while, start with the record itself, because almost three decades later his daughter would sing every word of it right alongside him.
Elvis’s original “Don’t Cry Daddy” from 1969
In 1997, Lisa Marie Presley made a video of herself singing along with her father’s original recording. It was cut together with footage of Elvis singing the same song, so father and daughter seem to share the moment.
Fans had never heard her sing before. Not once. And she wasn’t ready to stand on a stage and do it in public yet, which is why she chose a video instead.
But she didn’t make it alone.
The man in the studio with her was David Foster, the Grammy-winning producer. He’d been her friend for about ten years by then. He had also produced Natalie Cole’s Grammy-winning album of songs by her own father, Nat King Cole. So if anyone understood a daughter singing with a famous dad, it was him.
Foster worked with her on the track in the studio. When it was done, he wanted to release it.
Lisa Marie said no. She told him the song was just for the concert and would never be sold.
“That’s not how she wanted to come to the public,” Foster told the Associated Press in 2003.
She explained her thinking in the same story. “I think there was a high risk of people possibly trying to say, ‘Hey, do a bunch of covers, your father’s covers, or do a duet album.'”
Years later Foster still hadn’t forgotten it. He told PEOPLE, “I clearly remember the day we were in the studio together doing a duet with her father, ‘Don’t Cry Daddy,'” and he called it “kind of profound in its own way, that she would be singing a duet with her father.”
The video was made for a 1997 Elvis concert at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis. Elvis’s old 1970s band played live that night with James Burton, Jerry Scheff, Glen D. Hardin and Ronnie Tutt on stage while Elvis sang from a big screen. Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie’s mother, stepped up to introduce her daughter’s “virtual duet.”
Here’s the duet that crowd saw, Lisa Marie’s voice right next to her dad’s.
Lisa Marie singing along with Elvis in 1997
It went over so well that they played it a second time.
The duet was never officially released. Lisa Marie kept her word on that.
Foster didn’t stop nudging, though. He later sat her down for a talk about her music. “I think it was kind of as much a parental talk as it was a music business heart-to-heart talk,” he said. “I always knew she was musical and had talent, and she always talked about it but never did anything about it.”
Eventually she did. Her first album, “To Whom It May Concern,” came out on Capitol on April 8, 2003. It opened at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and went gold the next month.
Foster summed her up simply. “She just was a hard worker and infectious and fun and irreverent.”