If you want to understand Elvis Presley’s best albums, you need to start with a simple fact: John Lennon said ‘Before Elvis there was nothing.’ That’s not hyperbole. It’s a compressed history of popular music in seven words.
Presley didn’t invent rock’n’roll, Bill Haley and His Comets had already cracked the code of what made teenagers lose their minds, with Rock Around The Clock landing as an international smash. But Haley was a chubby, middle-aged man who looked like someone’s dad. What Elvis brought was something else entirely: sex, danger, and a face that belonged on a cinema screen. The hysteria he generated at gigs in the 1950s wasn’t just enthusiasm. Girls hurled themselves at the stage. Seats were left urine-soaked. This sweet southern kid from the Memphis projects became public enemy number one, and all because he liked to swivel his hips.
From Sun Studio to RCA: The Deal That Changed Everything
Presley cut his first records at Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service, known to everyone now as Sun Studio, in 1954. Phillips saw something in the kid that nobody else had seen quite so clearly, but by 1955 it was obvious Elvis had outgrown Memphis. Phillips sold his contract to the RCA Victor label in Nashville for $35,000, a figure that, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the highest price ever paid for a pop artist at the time. After Heartbreak Hotel and Hound Dog came out on RCA, there wasn’t a soul on the planet (John, Paul, George and Ringo included) who didn’t know exactly what an ‘Elvis Presley’ was.
After his stint in the US Army ended in 1960, Presley’s career lost momentum, until the 1968 Comeback Special blasted it back into life. What followed was the Vegas jumpsuit years, a slow decline in physical health, and yet some genuinely fantastic music. The ‘Fat Elvis’ image has stuck, but it obscures a catalogue far richer than the caricature suggests. Here’s where to start.
Elvis Presley’s Best Albums, Ranked and Revisited
From Elvis In Memphis (1969) is the one to reach for first. Cut at American Sound Studios with the Memphis Boys, a crack session outfit that included bass genius Tommy Cogbill and guitarist Reggie Young, this country-soul masterpiece found Presley putting everything he had into tracks like In The Ghetto, Long Black Limousine and Wearin’ That Loved On Look. The non-album singles Suspicious Minds and Kentucky Rain appear on the 2009 CD reissue. It’s the sound of an artist who knew exactly what was at stake.
The Sun Sessions (1976) compiles the recordings from Phillips’s studio and amounts to the true birth of rock’n’roll. That’s All Right, Blue Moon Of Kentucky and Mystery Train, driven by Presley’s acoustic rhythm guitar, Scotty Moore’s country jazz picking and Bill Black’s thumping upright bass, are the DNA of everything that came after. It’s worth remembering that southern racists denounced Elvis as a degenerate at the time, and even Frank Sinatra weighed in, calling the kid a ‘vulgar nincompoop’. The kids disagreed.
Elvis Presley (1956), his RCA debut, is where most listeners first encountered the full force of what he could do. A mix of RCA sessions and Sun leftovers, it put his versions of Carl Perkins’s Blue Suede Shoes, Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti and Ray Charles’s I Got A Woman alongside earlier Sun cuts. The public bought it straight to number one in both the US and the UK. The Clash later ripped off its cover art for London Calling in 1979, which tells you something about how the record landed.
Elvis’ Golden Records (1958) is worth singling out from the hundreds of compilations that followed: it was the first rock’n’roll compilation ever assembled, and it’s flawless. Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock, All Shook Up, these are the songs that made Mick, Keef, Page and Plant want to pick up instruments in the first place.
The Complete ’68 Comeback Special: The 40th Anniversary Edition (2008) captures a TV special that aired on NBC in December 1968, now better known simply as the Comeback Special for what it did to Presley’s then flatlining career. Watching him belt out Tiger Man in a skin-tight black leather suit is just one highlight. The segments where he jams with Scotty Moore and Bill Black are priceless. His rendition of If I Can Dream remains jaw-dropping.
Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite (1973) and Elvis Country (I’m 10,000 Years Old) (1971) round out a catalogue that refuses any single genre. The latter is a lesser-known concept album paying tribute to the artists who shaped him, Willie Nelson’s Funny How Time Slips Away gets a reading that keeps the repeat button busy. The former features An American Trilogy, an overwrought tribute to the Deep South that somehow earns every one of its orchestral crescendos.
Start anywhere on this list. Every record leads somewhere else worth going, and none of them sound like anything that came before Louder (or before Elvis) existed.
