On December 9, 1955, Elvis Presley performed “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time, although he would not record the song until a month later in January 1956. The song would eventually become a hit, but many listeners did not know that the song came from a tragic story.
“It’s gonna be my first hit.”
According to Ernst Jorgensen’s Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, the performance on Dec. 9 was at a club near Swifton, Arkansas before a full house of 250 people. The 20-year-old Elvis was already a regional star but he had yet to appear on national television. Having just moved from Sun Records to RCA, he sensed he was on the brink of something big.
That night in the Arkansas club, he played the songs he’d recorded for Sun and a few covers. Then, he introduced the new song, “I”ve got this brand new song and it’s gonna be my first hit.”
He was right. “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley’s first Gold Record, selling more than a million copies. Rolling Stone Magazine has it listed as one of the greatest fifty songs of all-time. And when then presidential candidate Bill Clinton made his famous appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, he chose “Heartbreak Hotel” to play on his sax.
There’s something joyous about the way the song sounds, despite its sad lyrics. But there’s an even darker story underneath the inspiration for the song.
The Suicide That Inspired “Heartbreak Hotel”
Mae Boren Axton wrote the lyrics for “Heartbreak Hotel.” At the time, she was a schoolteacher and songwriter who would later be the mother of country singer and actor Hoyt Axton. The son would grow up to star in Gremlins and write “Joy the the World” (“Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) as well as another song that Elvis would later sing, “Never Been to Spain.”
One day in 1955, Mae Axton and her friend Tommy Durden read a story in the Miami Herald about a man who had committed suicide. The man had no identification, and he only left a note with a few words on it: “I walk a lonely street.”
Axton, inspired by the note, sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” locating the hotel of heartbreak on the street where the man walked. Tommy Durden wrote the music, and the song was complete in only one hour.
Nobody remembers the name or the life of the unfortunate man who wrote the suicide note. And of course, he never got to see that his final act of great agony led to poetry — and to millions of people screaming joyously and dancing to his final words of despair.
I bet he would have liked to have seen it.
And that is the story behind the song.
[July 2015 Update: See the comments below about a forthcoming book featuring new research on the story behind “Heartbreak Hotel.”]
(Some related Chimesfreedom posts)
The two Bob Dylan songs below, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Idiot Wind,” show a drastic range of human emotions. Like several of Dylan’s songs, these two were inspired by his first wife, Sara Lownds, who is also the mother of Jakob Dylan of the Wallflowers. The songs reflect the vast divide between being in love and being angry at one you once loved.
It’s difficult for the modern listener to fully appreciate what Charley Patton’s music must have meant to people who lived when it was made. First is the problem of time. Although we can connect to music before our time, there’s something different between being there in the moment and listening through the earpiece of time. A young kid who today hears Elvis Presley for the first time might enjoy the music, but can the music really have the kind of meaning it must have had for a listener in 1954 hearing him for the first time?
