1960’s His Hand in Mine was, to that point, Elvis’s most consistently-selling album of the decade. It made sense to return to that well after six years of milking the original’s success, but this time the Gospel songs had much more of a “black/Pentecostal” flavor than the more traditional hymns of the first album. The slower songs were meditative and reverential, but when he cut loose on the up-tempo numbers is where the album really shined.
The title track, “How Great Thou Art,” was still a fairly new song to North American evangelicals, having only recently been made a staple of Billy Graham’s crusades. A few recordings had already been done by various Gospel singing groups (The Statesmen had a version that Elvis heard back in 1964) but no mainstream singer had yet to tackle the tune. Elvis poured everything into the song with a passion not seen since at least his first post-army recordings in May of 1960. Hundreds of times singing the hymn at his Graceland home paid off as he took over the production of the number and instructed the band and backup singers through his own unique arrangement. The result was a musical tour de force that won Elvis his first Grammy Award. Incidentally, it would also win him his second Grammy, for best sacred live recording, taken from his 1974 Memphis concert, making Elvis the only man to win two Grammy awards for two different recordings of the same song.
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Other Gospel standouts from the session included “Run On” and “By and By” with their foot-tapping beats and almost too-fast lyric-deliveries. These songs constantly felt like they were about to fly off the rails, but Elvis kept it together and made them memorable.
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“Where No One Stands Alone” was another slower-tempo’d hymn, but even more than “How Great Thou Art,” Elvis’s delivery here illustrated how much his voice had changed over the past six years. His silky smooth crooner sound is now almost entirely gone, replaced by a deeper, raspier and more natural sound than he was allowed to have in the recent under-produced, half-hearted soundtrack recordings. It helped too that, for the first time in years, Elvis had material in front of him he could be proud of and not embarrassed to sing.
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Nine non-religious songs were also recorded, and even though the writing and arrangements were not as strong as with the spirituals, they were a dramatic improvement from anything he’d recorded since at least 1963. His good spirits and the obvious feeling that high quality music was being made likely contributed to Elvis’s willingness to press on through some more challenging songs. In the end, the non-Gospel material was never compiled into a studio album; it was dispersed among various soundtrack records the way the 1963 songs had been, but the music speaks for itself and proved without a doubt that Elvis was never “gone,” he was just in forced-hibernation.
A personal favorite for Elvis, of the non-spiritual variety, was a Bob Dylan song, “Tomorrow is a Long Time.” It was said to be Dylan’s favorite cover of any of his songs by any artist. Like almost every musician of the 1960s, Elvis admired Dylan’s poetic songwriting style, and though many tried to emulate the inimitable Dylan, Elvis did not; he made the song his own and made it all better as a result.
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“Love Letters” was selected as the A-side single, backed by “Come What May” from the same session, and it peaked at #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it his best-charting single featuring two new songs since “Kissin Cousins/It Hurts Me” reached #12 in early 1964.
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When the mood would strike him during a jam session, Elvis would sometimes shout for his band-mates to “play it dirty,” indicating a desire to make the music the way R&B music was meant to be made: With an unpolished, improvised feel that was raw and pure. “Down in the Alley” carried that spirit through and through. Elvis had requested the song for the session and when he finally tore into it, he did so with the same raw, “dirty” style as any true blues singer would have done.
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And then there’s “Beyond the Reef,” which somehow slipped through the cracks at RCA and never received a formal release until the 1980s. The Hawaiian-inspired song once made famous by Bing Crosby was given a splendid performance by Elvis, but never made it onto the B-side of a single, or as a “bonus song” on a soundtrack. It’s a shame.
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A month later Elvis returned to Nashville to lay down three more songs: a soundtrack bonus (“I’ll Remember You”) for the upcoming Spinout album, that far outstripped its soundtrack, a new A-side single to which Elvis gave a truly haunting and memorable performance (“Indescribably Blue”), and another single with a holiday theme. RCA had been insistent on a new Christmas song for the holiday 1966 season, and basically made the recording a condition in exchange for the Gospel record Elvis wanted. The song selected was an original one, written by his road-associate Red West, “If Every Day Was Like Christmas.” It reached #2 on Billboard’s Holiday chart and became an instant-seasonal favorite.
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When you look back on the 1966 studio sessions, it’s easy to see them as a turning-point moment for Elvis. After reaching his nadir with Harum Scarum and Paradise Hawaiian Style, there were only two options available: Continue wallowing in the valley, or start climbing up to the top again. Elvis chose to climb, and even though much of the material recorded here failed to make an impact on the pop/rock music scene, the work that was put into them revived the passion that Elvis had almost lost. It helped that the session was produced for Elvis for the first time by Felton Jarvis. He would become Presley’s defacto producer from then on, but here was their first time working together, and Elvis always liked to give his best on a first impression. In years to come, the familiarity Elvis had with Jarvis would become a hindrance, when Elvis would be so burned out on anything to do with his career, but in this initial meeting, they produced magic together.
Many of the new songs he recorded here weren’t new at all, as Elvis insisted on singing songs he was in love with, the songs he’d been singing for years at home. That they were ten or even twenty years old didn’t matter; the new material he was presented failed to spark his creative flames the way the classics did. He recorded the new material of course, because Elvis was a true gentleman and professional (you’d have to be to agree to sing “Beach Shack”), but he often dismissed them immediately after finishing a master. The decade’s wear on him was still strong and the old players who had dragged him into the studio to record multiple takes of “The Bullfighter Was a Lady” and “Cotton Candy Land” were finding it harder and harder to coax more than a few takes out of him. Elvis was reaching the point where if the material wasn’t good, neither would be his effort.
