“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley

Elvis Presley cut "Hound Dog" for RCA in July 1956, and the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller twelve-bar blues came out the other end as a full-tilt rock 'n' roll riot, all snapping snare and hollered vocal, over in a flash and impossible to shake. Of the more than 250 recordings of the song, this is the one everybody knows.

The numbers are frankly absurd. In 1956 it ruled the pop, R&B and country charts in America all at once, and it spent 11 weeks on top of the pop chart, a run nobody matched for 36 years. It sold about 10 million copies worldwide, more than anything else he ever put out, and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1988. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame counts it among the songs that shaped rock and roll.

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