Lonely streets and artistic criminals: The mystery of Elvis Presley’s 1956 masterpiece
When a young Elvis Presley stepped into the sweltering studios of RCA in Nashville, 70 years ago, he could not have known that the song he was about to lay down would remain such a ubiquitous aspect of the musical landscape well into the next century. Yet, that wasn’t the only unknown when it came to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
Presley’s inaugural number-one single, and the song that cemented his newfound position as a defining star of the newly emerging rock and roll world, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is arguably the most important song ever recorded by ‘The King’. It followed him throughout his career, along the way inspiring a multitude of cover versions spanning the spectrum from Willie Nelson to John Cale, and it remains a key touchstone for the rock and roll realm to this day.
For a song of that stature, you might assume that its origin story has been dissected, researched, and confirmed beyond all belief, but there is still an overriding sense of mystery surrounding the inspiration behind ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.
It was steel guitarist Tommy Durden and Nashville music legend Mae Boren Axton who were responsible for the writing of the track, but the exact spark of inspiration is disputed. The story that is often trotted out as fact is that the pair were inspired by a news article about a man who had committed suicide by jumping from a hotel window, leaving a note that read “I walk a lonely street”, inspiring the lyrics “It’s down at the end of Lonely Street, at Heartbreak Hotel”.
Case closed, you may assume. However, that report was initially said to have come from The Miami Herald, but swathes of Elvis obsessives have scoured the archives of that particular paper and have found nothing close to that suicide story. On closer inspection, too, the exact contents of suicide notes aren’t often included in news reports of deaths, further clouding the origins of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and the lonely street that it stands upon.
An alternate story is one of the criminal Alvin Krolik, as explored by Rolling Stone back in 2016. After a failed marriage and a fledgling career as an artist, Krolik turned to armed robbery, heading for El Paso, Texas, and attempting to hold up a liquor store. In the end, his career as a criminal was about as successful as his previous ventures, and the liquor store owner shot him nine times, leaving him to die on the floor of the store.
In the wake of his demise, various enterprising journalists romanticised his story as one of love, loss, and loneliness, with various reports using the phrase “lonely street”, perhaps due to the fact that his unpublished memoir included the line, “This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street”.
It isn’t difficult to imagine that tale reaching Durden and Axton, and the pair might very well have viewed Krolik’s attempted robbery as a kind of suicide attempt, given the fact that the liquor store owner had reportedly killed eight other attempted thieves in the years preceding Krolik’s attempt.
Regardless of the exact origin of the pair’s inspiration for ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, it seems as though the song is rooted in death, suicide, and loneliness, all of which are rather morbid topics for a chart-topping rock and roll classic. Perhaps that mystery is what has kept the song alive for so many decades.
