10 years ago today, I posted my first Deep Album Cuts playlist. And even though I consider these things fun and easy to make, it's still pretty wild that I've made 300 of them. And I haven't even come close to running out of artists I want to cover, as evidenced by the fact that I'm just now getting around to one of the biggest names in popular music history. 

I thought about tackling Elvis Presley for Vol. 200, but I'm kind of glad I wound up doing it now, after reading a couple books about Presley and writing a couple pieces about Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. Here's the funny thing, though: I decided months ago that I'd post Vol. 300 on the column's anniversary, January 8th, and that it would be Elvis Presley, but I only realized than a week ago that January 8th is Presley's birthday. He would've turned 88 today. 

1. Tryin' To Get To You

2. So Glad You're Mine

3. Hot Dog

4. Santa Bring My Baby Back (To Me)

5. Dixieland Rock

6. Dirty, Dirty Feeling

7. Shoppin' Around

8. I'm Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs

9. Put The Blame On Me

10. Almost Always True

11. Gonna Get Back Home Somehow

12. Slowly But Surely

13. You'll Be Gone

14. Tomorrow Night

15. Tomorrow Is A Long Time

16. By And By

17. A House That Has Everything

18. Your Time Hasn't Come Yet, Baby

19. Wearin' That Loved On Look

20. Twenty Days And Twenty Nights

21. It's Your Baby, You Rock It

22. When I'm Over You

23. It Won't Seem Like Christmas (Without You)

24. Sylvia

25. I've Got Confidence

26. If You Don't Come Back

27. Talk About The Good Times

28. Love Song Of The Year

29. Woman Without Love

30. Love Coming Down

31. It's Easy For You

Track 1 from Elvis Presley (1956)

Track 2 from Elvis (1956)

Track 3 from Loving You (1957)

Track 4 from Elvis' Christmas Album (1957)

Track 5 from King Creole (1958)

Track 6 from Elvis Is Back! (1960)

Track 7 from G.I. Blues (1960)

Track 8 from His Hand In Mine (1960)

Track 9 from Something For Everybody (1961)

Track 10 from Blue Hawaii (1961)

Track 11 from Pot Luck (1962)

Track 12 from Fun In Acapulco (1963)

Track 13 from Girl Happy (1964)

Track 14 from Elvis For Everyone! (1965)

Track 15 from Spinout (1966)

Track 16 from How Great Thou Art (1967)

Track 17 from Clambake (1967)

Track 18 from Speedway (1968)

Track 19 from From Elvis In Memphis (1969)

Track 20 from That's The Way It Is (1970)

Track 21 from Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old) (1971)

Track 22 from Love Letters From Elvis (1971)

Track 23 from Elvis Sings The Wonderful World Of Christmas (1971)

Track 24 from Elvis Now (1972)

Track 25 from Elvis (The "Fool" Album) (1973)

Track 26 from Raised On Rock / For Ol' Times Sake (1973)

Track 27 from Good Times (1974)

Track 28 from Promised Land (1975)

Track 29 from Today (1975)

Track 30 from From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976)

Track 31 from Moody Blue (1977)

Elvis Presley's self-titled first album included a few songs from the Sun Studio sessions produced by Sam Phillips that started it all, including "Tryin' To Get To You," a rare example of Presley playing piano in the studio ("I'm Still Here" being another example from the later years). 1965's Elvis For Everyone! was conceived to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Presley contract with RCA, and it featured unused songs recorded across that entire decade, including "Tomorrow Night," recorded at Sun Studio in 1954. Eventually, most of the 20 or so songs Presley recorded at Sun were released together on the 1976 compilation The Sun Sessions, which tends to appear on "greatest albums of all time" lists above any proper Presley album. 

Of course, it's kind of hard to judge Presley by the standard of artistry set by The Beatles and other later rock acts -- he may be The King of Rock'n'roll, but in most respects he was a pre-rock pop idol who navigated his career more like someone like Frank Sinatra ("You'll Be Gone" is one of the very few songs with an Elvis Presley writing credit, and co-written with his longtime 'Memphis mafia' friend and bodyguard, Red West). Many of his best songs were issued as non-album singles, and it sometimes feels like his LPs were an afterthought. But unlike a lot of his contemporaries, Presley didn't pad out his albums with covers or re-recordings of his own songs, so he recorded a really impressive volume of original songs, of a huge range of quality, and I was pretty pleased to come up with a great set of music here, but the time I narrowed the playlist down to the final selection, I really loved listening to it, despite the fact that listening to quite a few of these albums was a chore. 

Nearly half of Presley's 39 studio albums were soundtracks for his films (although some of his most famous movies like Jailhouse Rock and Viva Las Vegas only had soundtrack EPs). I didn't have room for every album in my self-imposed 80-minute limit, but I still fit in songs from 31 albums, which is the most I've ever covered in a deep album cuts playlist. All the albums I skipped were from those silly '60s soundtracks (Girls! Girls! Girls!, It Happened At The World's Fair, Kissin' Cousins, Roustabout, Harum Scarum, Frankie and Johnny, Paradise Hawaiian Style, and Double Trouble). There are some tracks on those that I really enjoy, but it made more sense to cut them than, say, Presley's two Christmas albums and  three gospel albums, all of which are among his highest selling LPs, the latter of which also being responsible for all three of Presley's Grammy wins. 

On Presley's second album Elvis, he recorded "So Glad You're Mine," another song written by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, whose "That's All Right" was Presley's debut single. "So Glad You're Mine" also boasts one of my favorite Scotty Moore guitar leads, with "Shoppin' Around," and "Slowly But Surely" being other great Moore showcases. He even gets a nice fuzztone going on "By And By" from Presley's first gospel albm. 

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog." And after Presley's cover became a #1 hit, Leiber and Stoller wrote a number of songs specifically for Presley, including hits like "Jailhouse Rock" and album tracks like "Hot Dog" and "Dirty, Dirty Feeling." But after a couple of years, Leiber and Stoller were asked by Colonel Tom Parker to sign a blank contract (with terms he'd fill in after they signed), and they told him to fuck off, which ended their hot streak of collaborations with Presley. Somehow, though, 1973's Raised On Rock featured a couple of previously unreleased Leiber & Stoller compositions, "If You Don't Come Back" and "Three Corn Patches" (although I guess it's hard to say when the songs where written, but this was around the same time L&S produced one of their last major hits, Stealers Wheel's "Stuck In The Middle With You"). 

"Tomorrow Is A Long Time," is a song written by Bob Dylan in 1963, which had been recorded by Ian And Sylvia and Judy Collins before an Odetta version caught Elvis Presley's attention in 1966 (a Dylan was eventually released in '71). Presley's version appeared in The Outsiders, and Dylan himself called it "the one recording I treasure the most." Presley also later recorded "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." One of the most notable songs written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice that wasn't part of a musical is "It's Easy For You," which they wrote for Presley. It was the closing track on Moody Blue, the album released in summer 1977, a month before his death. 

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