“Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley

"Heartbreak Hotel" came out in January 1956 as Elvis Presley's first single for RCA Victor, and it still sounds like a man singing from the bottom of a well. Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden wrote it, with Presley sharing the credit, after a newspaper story about a lonely man who leapt to his death from a hotel window; Axton brought it to him at a Nashville country convention in November 1955.

He cut it that January with the Blue Moon Boys, Chet Atkins on guitar and Floyd Cramer on piano, over an eight-bar blues drenched in reverb meant to echo his Sun sides. It became his first million-seller, sat atop Billboard's Top 100 for seven weeks, and he kept it in his act right up to a final performance in Baltimore in 1977.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.