Look at Elvis Presley’s life month by month, and you’ll see one month after another bring turning points. September. He met the woman he would marry in September. He made his most famous television appearance in September. He went home to Tupelo in September. And in September 1956, he broke records nobody has broken since.
9 September 1956 — Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, singing “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” and “Ready Teddy.” Around 60 million Americans watched — roughly one in three people in the country.
13 September 1959 — stationed in the Army in Germany, Elvis met a 14-year-old girl named Priscilla Beaulieu at his rented house in Bad Nauheim. They married eight years later.
27 September 1957 — he returned to the Mississippi-Alabama Fair in Tupelo, the fairground where he had sung at the age of ten, and gave a benefit concert that raised over $14,000 for a youth center.
Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show, September 9, 1956
30 September 1965 — he met Tom Jones for the first time on a film set in Hawaii, and walked across the room singing Jones’s own song at him.
9 September 1970 — he played the Phoenix Coliseum. It was his first road concert since 1961 — nine years off the touring circuit.
But the most extraordinary September was 1956, and the numbers are absurd. Early that month RCA released seven old Elvis tracks as new singles, and by 5 September they were selling at 12,000 copies a day each. After he sang “Love Me Tender” on Sullivan, dealers were swamped overnight. An RCA advert in Billboard on 29 September announced 856,327 advance orders for the single — a week before it was even released — adding that by the time you read this it would be over a million. Variety estimated he would sell ten million records in his first year with RCA.
Elvis Presley 1957 Seattle Press Conference
One September day captures the cost of it all. On 1 September 1957, Elvis was in two countries and three cities — waking in Vancouver, playing Tacoma at 2 pm, then Seattle at 8 pm.
At that Seattle press conference, he said something worth remembering: “I haven’t any time for anything I like. On the move every minute. I’ve only averaged three hours sleep a night the last week.”