Is Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ a real place?
‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is now one of the most iconic songs in rock and roll history and is seen as the hit that thrust 21-year-old Elvis Presley into national and international consciousness for the first time. At the time Presley recorded the song, though, it was just a devastatingly gloomy ballad about a suicide, co-written by a schoolteacher.
John Cale’s elongated version of the song perhaps conveys the full extent of its true darkness, with its dirge-like quality and the painful minor seventh chord in the middle of the line “Feeling so lonely, I could die”, signifying a moment of suicide. The suicidal tendencies of the song’s narrator have their roots in reality, too.
When local blues guitarist Tommy Durden went to Jacksonville school teacher Mae Boren Axton with an unfinished song he had knocking around, asking for her help to finish it, he brought a copy of the Miami Herald newspaper with him. “Tommy came over and showed me a story in the paper,” Axton later explained in her book Country Singers as I Know ‘Em, “about a man who had rid himself of his identity, written a one-line sentence, and then killed himself.”
The handwritten sentence read, “I walk a lonely street.”
Axton was so moved by the story that she agreed to help Durden finish his song, turning it into a mournful piece about a place “down at the end of lonely street” called ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. Axton took a demo version of the song to her friend Colonel Tom Parker in Nashville, Tennessee.
Parker just happened to be the manager of a young singer to whom Axton had introduced him the previous year based on a chance meeting in Jacksonville. A singer who was about to shake up the entire history of popular music.
So, why a hotel?
According to Ace Collins, the author of Untold Gold: The Stories Behind Elvis’s #1 Hits, the unidentifiable suicide victim reported in the October 1st, 1955, edition of the Miami Herald had thrown himself from a hotel window in the city. This aspect of the story would go on to inspire the famous song’s title.
A 1983 BBC documentary seemed to verify Axton and Durden’s story as to how it came about during an interview in which they showed the documentary makers the original newspaper article that reported the man’s suicide. The newspaper front page, which apparently contained the article, was later reexamined by historians, who suggested it had been doctored.
And so, at the very least, we’ll never know if the details of the story behind the song are actually true since neither Durden nor Axton is still around to answer these accusations of fabrication. Was there even a hotel involved in the man’s suicide? If there was, no one has ever been able to specify which hotel it was.
One thing we can be sure of is that there was a real Heartbreak Hotel until several years ago. Only, it was named after the Elvis song, and not the other way around. It overlooked the singer’s Graceland estate in Memphis, Tennessee.
Sadly for fans, that hotel has now closed and been replaced by the unimaginatively titled Guest House at Graceland. Heartbreaking.
