1961 Elvis Presley: Are You Lonesome Tonight?

First opera and now Shakespeare - Presley was certainly ramping up the cultural references since his Army discharge. Not that Shakespeare wrote 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' of course (that was Lou Handman and Roy Turk in 1926), but he did provide inspiration for soliloquy that Elvis muses over mid way through it ("You know someone said that the world's a stage, and each must play a part.")*

Told from the first person, 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' is all about the hurting. A relationship has broken up and Elvis is left wondering if their former partner is feeling as miserable as they are. To emphasise the mood, the arrangement is sparse to the point of ambient; a lightly strummed guitar, The Jordanaires behind him barely there and Presley's vocal itself delivered with the intense solemnity of a hymn. .

Here, Presley manages to sound like a man on a slow burning fuse that could lead to internal or external explosion, a barely suppressed rage that dares the other to tell him she's happy enough on her own. Even the spoken interlude, something that could have been a banana skin to upend it all, becomes the sound of a confiding friend ("Honey, you lied when you said you loved me"), that makes you listen without questioning.

Again, it's impossible not to draw attention to his innate versatility through a direct comparison between this and the mambo Italiano of 'It's Now Or Never', particularly his interpretive skill on the closing couplet where he stands up to be counted on the "Is your heart filled with pain, shall I come back again?" as a man begrudging a favour before crashing back down with the closing with the questioning "Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?" in a hushed whisper that's too scared to receive an answer in case it's the one he doesn't want to hear. And at the risk of shooting my arrow wide into the field of pretension, it's a coda that always reminds me of the rage and humility that closes George Herbert's poem 'The Collar':

"But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe:
And I reply’d, My Lord".

Presley's output at this time gives the impression of a man who's lost his way with the variety of styles he adopts appearing as the scattershot of a blunderbuss. And yet despite this, at this stage they still manage to hit more targets than they miss; Presley wasn't the first or last to record this song, but in portraying the lyric of love as something akin to religious devotion he created a gem of a single that couldn't be more closely identified with him if he'd written it himself. There's an infamous live version of this where he laughs like a fool throughout before ending with "That's it, man, fourteen years right down the drain...boy, I'll tell ya." Well not quite, but it would be nine years hence (with 'In The Ghetto') before he'd produce a single as good as this again.

* "All the world's a stage, and all men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts." from 'As You Like It'.