Elvis Presley trusted his own ears. He chose almost every song he recorded, and the people around him knew better than to hand him one. There was a single big exception, and it came from the person who knew him best.
Priscilla Presley was Elvis’s wife through the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the mother of his daughter Lisa Marie. She wasn’t in the music business. But one afternoon she was out driving, and something she heard stopped her cold.
She was going down Sunset Boulevard, the famous Los Angeles street lined with clubs and record offices. A song was playing, sung by Mickey Newbury, a Nashville songwriter known for quiet, aching records. Priscilla knew right away that Elvis had to hear it.
Years later, in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, she told the whole story.
“I was driving down Sunset Boulevard, and I heard Mickey Newbury singing it, and I went ‘Oh, my God’ and made a U-turn and went back to the house. No one usually ever brought songs to him. Elvis picked out all of his songs, with the exception of movie songs which matched the scenes. No one ever said, ‘Hey, El, you got to do this song.'”
So she broke her own good sense and brought him one anyway. She made a U-turn, went back to the house and played it for him. She remembered the moment this way:
“So I said, ‘There’s a song I think you really should listen to.’ And he said, ‘Well, put it on.’ So I did, and he just sat there at the desk. He put his head down and kind of nodded to it. He closed his eyes and said, ‘Damn, damn good song.’ And the next thing I know, we’re back in Vegas, and he ate it up and spit it out.”
The song was “An American Trilogy.” It weaves three old American tunes, “Dixie,” “All My Trials” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” into one sweeping piece. Newbury had arranged them that way. In Elvis’s hands, with a full orchestra behind him, it grew into something enormous.
It became one of the biggest moments of his 1970s concerts. He sang it in Las Vegas, out on the road and in front of the whole world during “Aloha from Hawaii,” his 1973 concert beamed by satellite to more than a billion people. For a lot of fans, it’s the Elvis they picture when they close their eyes.
And it almost slipped right past him. If Priscilla hadn’t turned the car around that day, one of his signature songs might never have reached him.
Watch what she set in motion. This is Elvis singing the song she found on Sunset Boulevard, backed by that huge orchestra.
Elvis performing “An American Trilogy” live
The power in that performance is the same thing Priscilla heard in the car. She just knew it belonged to him. All these years later, it’s hard to argue with her.