The tragedy that surrounds ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Elvis Presley’s first number one song
Everyone’s familiar with the grovelly, downtrodden beat of the famous lyrics: “I’ll be so lonely baby/ Well, I’m so lonely/ I’ll be so lonely, I could die,” that catapulted Elvis Presley from heartbreak into ecstasy of the rock and roll world.
But in many ways, the essence of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is taken for granted as something entirely fictional and quasi melodramatic, as many romantic odes in music tend to be. Yet despite the song affording the ‘King of Rock‘ the very first sweetly intoxicating tastes of his regal status, the reality was rooted in something far darker and desperate than the success would lead you to believe.
Indeed, the story of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was completely true, and handed to Presley in sonic form as a rather twisted manifestation of a real tragedy. The track had been written in October 1955, merely five months before it was released, by two of the singer’s earliest superfans. Mae Boren Axton was a high school teacher, and Tommy Durden was a singer-songwriter from Jacksonville, Florida, who had been caught up in the star’s aura right from when he first hit the scene.
Subsequently, Axton had read a newspaper report about a man who tragically took his own life after checking into a hotel room a few hours earlier. The only trace he left behind was a note that simply read: “I walk a lonely street.” But somehow being drawn in by this devastation, Axton imagined this would make a perfect muse for a song suited to her favourite newfound star.
Taking the idea to her friend Durden, the teacher said, “Everybody in the world has someone who cares. Let’s put a ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ at the end of this lonely street,” who subsequently breathed life into the song that became known and beloved all over the world.
After a fight to get the track in front of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, he became instantly enamoured, as did the star himself upon hearing it. As such, the decision to take this unsuspecting song up from two rookie songwriting fans and make it into his own was easy – and he never looked back.
Granting Presley his first in an eventual slew of number ones across the course of his career, when ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ first entered the charts on March 3rd, 1956, it felt like a golden ascension to stardom; as if he was on cloud nine. But in many ways, if we were to reframe the lens of ‘The King’s entire career through the real view of his first hit, it was a legacy born out of exploiting tragedy for personal gain.
While no one is going to dismiss or diminish the impact that Presley made in terms of spearheading the rock and roll landscape as we know and love it today, it is a pretty stark set of conditions to consider the fact that, in certain respects, an entire modern genre of music was built on the foundations of one man’s suicide. Startling and terrifying as it may be, it also foreshadowed the thunderous darkness that the canon would come to embody far later down the line. Presley was at the helm of it all.
