Private Presley's Hot 100: Elvis From 1958 to 1962
The Billboard Hot 100 was born on August 4, 1958, and Elvis Presley was already on it. Of course he was. "Hard Headed Woman" and its flip side "Don't Ask Me Why" both sit on that first chart, so the biggest star in American music was present for the very first frame of this archive. There's just one catch. He wasn't around to enjoy it. That summer Elvis was a private in the United States Army, drafted in the spring and weeks away from shipping out to Germany. The chart that would define pop music for decades started up while its brightest name was wearing fatigues in Texas.
That accident of timing shapes everything about how Elvis looks in these pages. His first great burst, the Sun Records years and the 1956 explosion, happened before the Hot 100 existed, so none of it is here. What we get instead is the second act: a soldier's leftovers, a homecoming, two years of near-total command, and then a long, slow thinning-out that runs almost to the end of the archive. It's a stranger, sadder, and in some ways more interesting story than the one everybody knows.
Records from the Stockpile
"Hard Headed Woman" tells you a lot in a small space. It peaked at #4 here and was gone after eight weeks, which is the profile of a record that had done most of its business before this chart existed. "Don't Ask Me Why" managed #34. Then, for three months, nothing new at all.
Colonel Parker had a plan for the Army years, and the plan was inventory. Elvis had squeezed in a recording session on leave before he left for Europe, and RCA doled those sides out one at a time while he was gone. "I Got Stung" debuted on November 3, 1958 and reached #8. "One Night" arrived a week later, got to #4, and hung on for 17 weeks. In March 1959 came the pair that came closest: "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such As I" stalled at #2, and "I Need Your Love Tonight" made #4.
Then, on August 10, 1959, "A Big Hunk O' Love" took over #1 from Paul Anka's "Lonely Boy" and held it for two weeks before The Browns' "The Three Bells" took it away. That's remarkable. The man was stationed overseas, not touring, not on television, not doing anything a pop star is supposed to do, and a record he'd cut more than a year earlier went to the top of the country anyway. Absence, it turns out, was a decent promotional strategy.
But a stockpile is finite. "My Wish Came True," which debuted the week after "A Big Hunk O' Love" and peaked at #12, was the last of the cache. After July 1959, the archive shows no new Elvis single for nearly nine months. For a man who had lived at the top of the charts since 1956, that's a long silence, and it fell right in the middle of the Hot 100's first full year.
The Homecoming
He came home in March 1960, and the chart felt it within weeks. "Stuck On You" debuted on April 4, 1960 and reached #1 on April 25, 1960, ending the nine-week reign of Percy Faith's "The Theme From 'A Summer Place.'" It's a fitting handoff. The plush instrumental that had ruled all spring stepped aside for the man who'd made things happen in the first place. "Stuck On You" stayed four weeks, until the Everly Brothers' "Cathy's Clown" took over on May 23.
What came next is the heart of this story, and it's not the Elvis of the popular imagination. The hip-swiveling rockabilly kid didn't come back from Germany. A crooner did. "It's Now Or Never," a pop rewrite of "O Sole Mio," debuted on July 18, 1960 and took #1 on August 15, 1960, relieving Brian Hyland's "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini" after its single week. It held for five, and it stayed on the chart for 20 weeks in total, longer than anything else he charted in the period.
And then the biggest one of all. "Are You Lonesome To-night?" was a sentimental parlor song from the 1920s, a good chunk of it spoken rather than sung, about as far from "Hound Dog" as a man can travel in four years. It debuted on November 14, 1960 and reached #1 on November 28, 1960. It was still there on January 2, 1961. Six weeks in all, across the whole of that Christmas season, before Bert Kaempfert's "Wonderland By Night" moved in. No Elvis record in this archive held the top longer.
Add it up. Three singles gave him 15 weeks at #1 between late April 1960 and the first week of 1961. That's more than most careers get in total, and he did it in the year he got out of the Army. I don't think the sequence gets enough credit. We talk about 1956 as the year Elvis conquered America. On the evidence of the Hot 100, 1960 was the year he did it again, with a different voice, and hardly anyone noticed the trick.
Two More, and the Slow Fade
The run had a little more in it. "Surrender," another Neapolitan melody dressed for American radio, debuted in February 1961 and spent two weeks at #1 starting March 20, 1961, sandwiched between Chubby Checker's "Pony Time" and the Marcels' "Blue Moon." The rest of 1961 was crowded but not quite chart-topping: "I Feel So Bad" and "Little Sister" both peaked at #5, "(Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame" reached #4, and "Can't Help Falling In Love," probably the best-loved song of the whole period, stalled at #2 over a 14-week run that began in December 1961.
The last #1 of the stretch was "Good Luck Charm," a bright, slightly weightless single that debuted on March 17, 1962 and took the top on April 21, 1962, replacing Shelley Fabares' "Johnny Angel." Two weeks later the Shirelles' "Soldier Boy" moved in, and I've always enjoyed that a song about a boy going off to serve was the one that ended the run of the man who had. That autumn "Return To Sender" climbed to #2 and sat on the chart for 16 weeks, and there the sequence closes. Six number ones between August 1959 and April 1962. Twenty-one weeks at the top.
Then the movies took over. You can practically read the filmography off the chart: "Follow That Dream" (#15), "Kissin' Cousins" (#12), "Viva Las Vegas" (#29), "Tickle Me" (#70), "Spinout" (#40), and, heaven help us, "Do The Clam" (#21). The good records grew rarer. "(You're the) Devil In Disguise" hit #3 in 1963 and "Crying In The Chapel" did the same in 1965, but between and after them the peaks drift into the 20s and 30s, and by 1967 an Elvis single could debut, peak at #92, and vanish after a week, which is exactly what "That's Someone You Never Forget" did. In the Hot 100's first four years he'd put six records at #1. In the seven years that followed, he put none.
The 1968 television special pulled him back. "If I Can Dream," its closing number, reached #12 that winter, and "In The Ghetto" climbed to #3 the following spring. On November 1, 1969, "Suspicious Minds" spent a single week at #1, taking over from the Temptations' "I Can't Get Next To You" and yielding to the 5th Dimension's "Wedding Bell Blues" the week after. One week. It was his seventh number one in this archive, and his last. "Burning Love" got to #2 in 1972, "Way Down" managed 21 weeks on the chart in 1977, the year he died, and a single called "The Elvis Medley" limped to #71 in 1982, the final entry under his name.
One hundred and six charting titles. Seven number ones. Twenty-two weeks on top, and 21 of them earned by a soldier's leftovers and a homecoming crooner between the summer of 1959 and the spring of 1962. That's the Elvis this archive knows: not the kid who invented the thing, but the grown man who came back from Germany and, for about two years, owned the chart that had started without him.
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