Elvis remembered

Progressives might disagree, but the rehabilitation of Elvis Presley’s artistic reputation began in earnest with the publication of William F. Buckley Jr.’s novel Elvis in the Morning in 2001. (Charlie Rose: “Mick Jagger said about this book, ‘It’s the best Elvis novel I’ve ever read.’” Buckley: “Well, I think there are only two.”)

The novel followed on the heels of Buckley’s having written in National Review that “[Presley] had the most beautiful singing voice of any human being on earth.” For such an august conservative to weigh in so heavily on behalf of the musician most associated with unleashing the decidedly nonconservative forces of teenage frenzy, something had to be in the offing.

Something was—namely, the growing recognition that by focusing on his many and colossal failures as a human being instead of his many and colossal talents, the gatekeepers of pop culture (a culture that might never have existed without Presley) had done Presley an injustice.

Reparations ensued, usually taking the form of thoughtfully curated box sets, fan-club bootlegs, documentaries, or special editions of his solidest albums. Elvis Presley: The Searcher, the new, two-part Thom Zimny HBO documentary, and its eponymous RCA/Legacy soundtrack represent the culmination of these efforts.

Zimny creatively blends still and motion footage, much of it obscure, of Presley and the environments that shaped him, while historians (Bill Ferris, Bill Malone), famous Presley legatees (Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Robbie Robertson, Emmylou Harris), Presley’s forebears (Rufus Thomas, Ike Turner), his contemporaries (Sam Phillips, Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana), his wife Priscilla, his father, and Elvis himself provide insightful, seamlessly edited voice-over narration.

The film focuses on Presley the artist. The inevitable references in the documentary’s second half to Presley-the-man’s dependency on prescription pills, his divorce, and his manager’s control-freakish ways occur only insofar as such problems affected Presley’s ability and freedom to record and to perform. Even his devotion to his mother Gladys is presented respectfully, shorn of Freudian analysis, and in a context that makes it seem as normal as it probably was.

The film, naturally, also features lots of music, both Presley’s and the gospel, blues, bluegrass, and country that he absorbed and transformed into the most popular and seminal sound ever to emerge from the American South’s cultural miscegenation. Most of the music, however, functions as segues and therefore appears only in snatches. The full versions can be heard on the soundtrack, available as an 18-track single disc and as a 76-track multidisc-plus-40-page-book box.

The single disc begins with a live medley of “Trouble” and “Guitar Man” and ends with “If I Can Dream” from Presley’s 1968 NBC TV special, and the first two discs of the deluxe edition do too. But the deluxe edition also features seven gospel numbers (the stunning “Run On” from 1967’s How Great Thou Art among them) to the single disc’s none, making the former a fuller and more accurate record of Presley’s influences and enthusiasms.

There’s also a third disc. Were Presley alive, it would certainly be his favorite.

Bookended by samples of Mike McCready’s atmospheric original score, it contains original-artist versions of songs that Presley would go on to cover (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”) as well as cover versions of his hits (the Orlons singing “Heartbreak Hotel,” Tom Petty singing “Wooden Heart”). And there’s still more gospel.

The clincher, however, would be all 66 seconds of “Home Sweet Home,” recently unearthed from the vast Presley archives.

It’s sung by his mother.