‘In The Ghetto’: The classic Elvis Presley was reluctant to make
When you’ve become an unstoppable hit machine, it can be difficult not to get knocked back by even the slightest dip in chart success. However, when your best-laid plans go against you for a lengthy period of time, the desperation for another glimmer of fortune becomes insatiable, and you’ll have to try anything to reach the dizzying heights of the top 10 again. In 1969, Elvis Presley had been without a top 10 hit for a total of four years, and people were wondering if he was ever going to reach his previous levels.
It wasn’t that Elvis hadn’t been hard at work, but throughout large portions of the 1960s, he was more committed to establishing himself on the silver screen, having achieved it all with his music in the decade before. This change of tact didn’t stop him from releasing music, and assisting him with some of the songs for his films was a songwriter called Mac Davis. However, they weren’t anywhere near as successful as his trailblazing chart-toppers from the 1950s, and something needed to be done to bring him back to former glory.
When Elvis announced his permanent return to music in 1968 with the Comeback Special live performance, he enlisted Davis to help him write some new studio material, and he immediately presented the King of Rock and Roll with a couple of songs from his vault that he thought would be perfect fits. ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’ was immediately snapped up, but a song called ‘The Vicious Circle’ was met with a little more ambivalence on the singer’s part.
The song told the story of a child born into poverty in Chicago and his mother having too many children to support on her own. As the child grows up and is still living in squalid conditions, by the end of the song, another child is born in the same situation, hence the original title of ‘The Vicious Circle.’ It was thematically far removed from anything else that Elvis had previously tackled in any of his hits, and while he thought the song was excellent and had potential to be a hit, he felt nervous handling such a heavy subject matter. Nevertheless, he took a gamble with the track, although by this point, it had been renamed ‘In The Ghetto’.
Speaking about how he wrote the song, Davis revealed in his Songwriters Hall of Fame induction speech that it was a simple song that came to him quickly after jamming with an old friend. “A friend of mine, Freddy Weller, who used to play guitar for Paul Revere And The Raiders, showed me lick on the guitar one day. I went home and fiddled around with it, I wrote the song and called him up at four in the morning and sang it to him. He knew I’d written a hit with his lick, but that’s the way it goes.”
However, while Davis said that writing the song came without any issues, there was a real struggle getting the record label, RCA, to release the song as a single, which they thought was too dreary and depressing. “It was a big brouhaha of him recording ‘In the Ghetto.’,” Davis revealed to Songfacts. “I think he had to fight to get that out as a single. RCA was afraid of it, and Col Parker was afraid of it, but Elvis believed in it, and he wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted to do a song that said something.”
While the song may have been a controversial choice for a single, it took Elvis to number three in the US charts, finally breaking his four-year duck. It was clear that he needed to take a risk with the song, and while it may be completely tonally different from any of his prior work, it was the boost his career needed after his announcement that he would be returning to music for good.
