Love Me Tender

SteynonLine ^ | January 5, 2025 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

Elvis Presley would have turned ninety this Wednesday. In real life, alas, he never made it halfway. But we remember him at this shingle, with the biggest hit song he supposedly wrote.

These days more or less every pop star is expected to come up with his own songs. It wasn't always that way: Once upon a time, songwriters wrote songs, and singers sang them. Very occasionally, a singer ventured onto the writer's turf: Frank Sinatra genuinely wrote a handful of songs, including the much covered "This Love of Mine", and made a significant enough contribution to the even more covered "I'm A Fool to Want You" that Joel Herron and Jack Wolf insisted he be given a co-author's credit. In a looser age of pop composition, surely then Elvis Presley, coming midway between Frank and the self-composing Beatles, must have penned a ditty or two over the years?

Well, like Sinatra, Presley had a house composer in his bodyguard. Frank's muscle was Hank Sanicola, a music-biz jack-of-all-trades who served as Sinatra's co-writer on "This Love of Mine" and his Christmas song "Mistletoe and Holly". Presley's muscle was a guy called Red West. For a dilettante songwriter, Red did a pretty good job on a late-Elvis number called "If You Talk in Your Sleep". Before that, one day in 1961 Elvis said to Red, "How about coming up with a song called 'That's Someone You Never Forget'?" He was thinking about his mother, Gladys, who'd died a couple of years earlier. Red did most of the rest of the work, but a good title is half the song...

[Repeal The 17th]

“...shingle...”
?????

[SaveFerris]

(shingle)

Kamala did the proofreading

🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴

Not enough ☕☕☕☕

Could be my phone 📱 with autocorrect 🤣🤣🤣

[Repeal The 17th]

Don’t blame Twotone.
It is spelled that way in the article.

[jocon307]

Thanks for posting these! They are great fun to read. I did know “love me tender” is “aura lee”, both are good. It really is a lovely tune!

[Sicvee]

I’ve read dozens of books on Elvis and most of this was entirely new to me. It is absolutely amazing the depth of Steyn’s knowledge of musical history of the last 200 years in Britain and The US.

[SaveFerris]

No I understand that

I’m saying that they didn’t proofread it before publication

[Inyo-Mono]

I’ve read dozens of books on Elvis and most of this was entirely new to me. It is absolutely amazing the depth of Steyn’s knowledge of musical history of the last 200 years in Britain and The US.

Same here, been a fan of Elvis since the '50s and this was quite a revelation. Very interesting article.