⊹ Elvis Presley, Reconsider Baby LP ~ 1985 ⊹
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⊹ Side A ⊹ Reconsider Baby ⊹ 1960 Tomorrow Night ⊹ 1954-55 So Glad You're Mine ⊹ 1956 One Night / alt take & original lyr ⊹ 1957 When It Rains, It Really Pours / alt take ⊹ 1958 My Baby Left Me ⊹ 1956 Ain't That Loving You Baby / alt take ⊹ 1958
⊹ Side B ⊹ I Feel So Bad ⊹ 1961 Down in the alley ⊹ 1966 Hi-Heel Sneakers ⊹ 1967 Stranger in My Own Hometown / alt mix ⊹ 1969 Merry Christmas Baby / alt edit ⊹ 1971
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{Text on Back}
Elvis Sings the Blues ㅤㅤI remember the first time i met the great bluesman, Howlin' Wolf, in 1966. he started talking about white blues singers, a new concept at the time. He liked Paul Butterfield, he said, also “that other boy—what's his name? Somewhere out in California, that ‘Hound Dog’ number.” He was talking about Elvis Presley. But surely Elvis couldn't be considered strictly a blues singer, somebody pointed out. Maybe not, conceded Wolf in that great hoarse growl of his, but “he started from the blues. If he stopped, he stopped it's nothing to laugh at. He made his pull from the blues”
ㅤㅤWolf was right, of course, but I never thought the world would come around to that point of view. Elvis Presley, Bluesman? It sounds a little far-fetched, even though this was the very title that my friends and I conferred on Elvis in fantasy as we were growing up and discovered, one by one, both the songs on this record and others like them—buried on albums, disguised as Christmas offerings, obscured as trh B-sides of singles. Elvis continued to sing the blues, obviously because he wanted to. No one was pushing him to record this sort of material, and it seemed to us over the years as if as if he was transmitting a kind of secret message, keeping faith with his roots and his fans as he delivered some of his most engaged, and engaging, performances (often in the midst of an utter wasteland of surrounding material) on songs that recalled his earliest sides. His first record (“Thats All Right”), after all, was a blues. The first source of cultural confusion that he provoked was primarily racial (when he went on the radio in Memphis immediately after the release of his first dingle, disc jockey Dewey Phillips immediately established the name of the high school from which he has recently graduated, simply to dispel the widespread assumption that he was black). And if he didnt exactly fit the stereotype—well, neither did Howlin' Wolf, neither does B.B. King, individuation is the essence of the blues. At its best this is truly a music of personal expression, not happy, not sad, not limited to any musical formula, but sui generis, engaging the singer on whatever terms he happens to choose. And in the end who could be more sui generis than Elvis Presley, a bluesman who yearned to be saved, a rocker who aspired to sing like Dean Martain, a convention-shatter who prized convention, a white man singing the blues?
ㅤㅤThe proof should be in the music—and it is. From the opening notes of Lowell Fulson's “Reconsider Baby” (introduced by Elvis' empathically strummed rhythm guitar) to the impassioned version of Charles Brown's “Merry Christmas Baby” that closes the album, what we get here is a singer who altogether absorbed, and altogether at home with his material—so much so that he doesnt want to let it go and in several instances just keeps mashing down on the lyrics, repeating a verse over and over (like Wolf, or his favorite gospel singers) until he has wrung every last ounce of emotion from it. There's every kind of blues here, from the intensity of “Stranger in my own home town”, a Percy Mayfield tune that Elvis transforms into a very personal metaphor even in the midst of some of the most screwy production work Chip Moman ever did (but it works!), to the irrepressible high spirits of “Ain't That Loving You Baby” (taken at a breakneck pace in this hitherto unreleased alternative version, which thankfully omits the Jordanires). There's the casual insouciance of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup's “So Glad You're Mine,” the breathtaking beauty of Lonnie Johnson's blues ballad “Tomorrow Night” (which in this also unreleased Sun demo version is taken almost a cappella) along with the tough R&B stance of “Down in the Alley” and “One Night” [(Of Sin)—yes, these are the original, unbowdlerized lyrics]. Sometimes the instrumentation is a little shaky, occasionally the production may falter, but Elvis is always idiomatic, lyrically at ease, rhythmically confident, and never doubting for a moment that when he growls “play those blues, boy,” his accompanists will respond in kind. When his voice fails him (on the “Hi-Heel Sneakers” session he seems to have had a cold, as well as to have pitched the song too low), he improvises like a bluesman, making a virtue out of necessity and creating out of his hoarseness a sense of wordless menace. The whole album is like that—you feel as if on each of these songs Elvis has been set free. There is no need to worry about image, there is no need to worry about effect. He remains on each of the cuts the same shiny-eyed teenager who showed up in the Sun studio in Memphis one day and declared to label ownership Sam Philips (who had himself declared already that he was looking for a white boy with “the N—ro sound and the N—ro feel”) that he was a “sucker” for the blues.
ㅤㅤIn the early '60s, when Elvis was out of style, he seemed to lose faith in himself and his music. Not surprisingly the signal for his regeneration was a series of blues singles (“Big Boss Man,” “Guitar Man,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” “U.S. Male”) that went largely unnoticed at the time, and the '68 TV Special, whos centerpiece was a nakedly intimate, almost embarrassingly spontaneous live concert he did with his original Sun sessionmates (now packaged on video as One Night with You), which focused not surprisingly on the blues. In the end I don't think there is any question that this is what Elvis will be remembered for: the feeling that he created, not necessarily the fashion. And that's what you get on this album in abundance: the lure feeling of Elvis' music, unencumbered by myth or self-consciousness, the very sound that first rocked the world.
—Peter Guralnick February 1985
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⊹ April 3rd, 1957 ~ Evening show in Ottawa Canada ⊹
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My favorite part about this LP, other than the sound (it sounds genuinely so full of life), is the credit given to original artists in the song names
One of the best ones I've found thrifting!!!
