Sad Story of “Heartbreak Hotel”

[luisam]

The Sad Story Behind “Heartbreak Hotel”

 

On December 9, 1955, Elvis Presley performed Heartbreak Hotel for the first time at a club near Swifton, Arkansas before a full house of 250 people. He would record the song a month later in January 1956 and the song became a hit. The 20-year-old Elvis was already a regional star but he had yet to appear on national television. Having just moved from Sun Records to RCA, he was on the brink of something big. That night in the Arkansas club, he played the songs he’d recorded for Sun and a few covers. Then, he introduced the new song:

”I’ve got this brand new song and it’s gonna be my first hit."

Rolling Stone Magazine has it listed as one of the greatest fifty songs of all-time. And when then presidential candidate Bill Clinton made his famous appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, he chose “Heartbreak Hotel” to play on his sax.  He was right. “Heartbreak Hotel” became Elvis Presley’s first gold record, selling more than a million copies.

There is something joyous about the way the song sounds, despite its sad lyrics about a dark story underneath the inspiration for the song: a newspaper article about the suicide of a lonely man who jumped from a hotel window!

The author of lyrics is Mae Boren Axton; she was a schoolteacher and songwriter and by the way, mother of country singer, author and actor Hoyt Axton. The son would grow up to write several great songs made famous by others like “Joy to the World” (“Jeremiah was a bullfrog…”) and “Never Been to Spain”; also stared several movies, (Gremlins, Liar's Moon, Black Stallion) and had parts in TV series.

Apparently, the man had destroyed all his identity papers and he only left a note with a few words on it: “I walk a lonely street.”  The legend tells that one day in 1955, Mae Axton and her friend Tommy Durden read a story in The Miami Herald about a man who had committed suicide.

Tommy Durden wrote the music, and the song was complete in only one hour. Axton approached the popular singing duo The Wilburn Brothers, and offered them the chance to record "Heartbreak Hotel". However, Doyle and Teddy Wilburn declined, describing the song as "strange and almost morbid". Axton, however, agreed to a publishing deal with a company called Tree Publishing. With a publishing deal in place, Axton arranged through Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker to present the song to Presley at a country music convention in Nashville and Presley agreed to record it.  Mae Axton, inspired by the note, sat down and wrote the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” locating the hotel of heartbreak on the street where the man walked.

Now, there is another version about the origin of the famous line. In 2016, an article Rolling Stone Magazine suggested that the story in reality originated from a report about a painter and petty criminal, Alvin Krolik, whose marriage had failed and who wrote a partial autobiography including the line "This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street." Krolik's story was published in news media, and received further publicity after he was shot and killed in an attempted robbery in El Paso, Texas. On August 25, 1955, El Paso Times reported Krolik's death under the headline "Story Of Person Who Walked Lonely Street".

In any case, nobody remembers the unfortunate man who wrote the line and whose sad finale led to poetry — and to millions of people screaming joyously and dancing to his final words of despair.

 

 

 

 

By the way, browsing YouTube while searching for a video with Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel", I found this strange and funny video of Johnny Cash apparently from 1959. At that time he was 27 years old and was touring as an opening act for Elvis Presley. His video, singing "Heartbreak Hotel" is, according to his own words “an impersonation of a rock and roll singer impersonating Elvis is what this really is.”