ELVIS PRESLEY - “All Shook Up”
(12th July 1957)
Look! It’s Elvis!
The boogie-woogie piano forming this song’s undercarriage sounds so generic to me* that I get the best results from listening to it like a riddim, a bolt-on beat for Presley to freestyle over. Helpfully, that way of hearing it also draws full attention to Elvis’ voice.
By this time Presley was already a superstar in the UK, he’d just not gone to #1 yet. Why did “All Shook Up” manage it? Because nobody had sung the word “love” like Elvis does here - half thrusting, half swallowing, with that half-breath after it acting like a full stop. Politely carnal, respectfully smouldering - “I’m proud to say she?s my buttercup” - and as passionately humble as an ideal 50s man should be, Elvis-love seems as natural here as the histories tell you it was. Plus for the UK there was an exotic element - what, pray tell, was a “fuzzy tree”? (I should save this for his ‘58 hits, but I wonder if Elvis joining the army actually made him sexier for UK fans? The oversexed over-here US G.I. had had a generation to seep into folk memory, after all.) 7.
*(with one exception: that occasional drumbeat, which sounds like a plimsoll hitting a tabletop. Cool!)
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Lena on October 9th, 2006
Yes, and doesn’t he mention a volcano here too? Politely carnal indeed…
blount on October 10th, 2006
tom you know the story behind the writing of this song right?
Marcello Carlin on October 10th, 2006
What, the one about Otis Blackwell writing it but Presley getting a co-writing credit anyway?
When I was very young I thought the song was about some bloke called Moshukup.
The Suzi Quatro version used to make me feel like a fuzzy tree in my long-gone youth…