Sammy Davis Jr. Told Elvis He Could Never Sing This Song — What Elvis Did Next Changed Music History ht

 

 

 

Memphis, Tennessee. January 20th, 1969. Elvis Presley is standing in a recording studio. Not a Hollywood sound stage, not a Las  Vegas showroom. A recording studio on the corner of Thomas Street and Chelsea Avenue in Memphis. A place called American Sound Studio. In a neighborhood that the people who worked there described with a simple word, rough.

 Broken glass on the pavement outside. A building that looked like it shouldn’t be making hit records, but was making more hit records per square foot than almost anywhere else in America at that moment. Elvis is 33 years old. He has been famous for 13 years. He has made 31 movies. He has been number one on the Billboard chart.

 He has made more money in a single week than most Americans will earn in a lifetime. And for the last several years, none of that has been enough. The music hadn’t been right. The Hollywood years, the formulaic soundtracks, the disposable singles, the films that he himself described as humiliating. The chart positions had been declining.

The audiences were still there, but something had shifted. Something had gone quiet in Elvis that the people who loved him could feel, but couldn’t quite name. That something had started to come back in December of 1968, when Elvis stood on a small black stage in Burbank, California and sang with a ferocity and an honesty that nobody had seen from him in years.

The NBC comeback special. If I Can Dream. The moment when the voice, fully restored and fully present, reached the back of every room that was watching. But a television special is one night. What Elvis needed now was a record, a real record, the kind that changes the conversation. On January 20th, 1969, a tape was  placed in front of Elvis Presley.

On that tape were two songs written by Mac Davis. Don’t Cry, Daddy and In the Ghetto. He recorded Don’t Cry, Daddy with relatively little difficulty. In the Ghetto would take 23 takes. But before we get to what happened in that studio, we have to go back to the story of why this song almost never found Elvis at all.

Because the story of In the Ghetto is not just the story of a record. It is the story of a friendship, a conversation, and nine words that redirected the most important song of Elvis Presley’s comeback. Mac Davis was a songwriter from Lubbock, Texas who had grown up watching things he couldn’t fully understand.

One of those things was a friend, a boy he had played with as a child whose family lived in a different part of town. A dirt street section where the houses sat closer together. Mac Davis didn’t have a word for it when he was 5 years old. By the time he was a working songwriter in the 1960s, the word had entered American vocabulary, ghetto.

He had been trying to write the song for years. The original title was The Vicious Circle, about a child born into poverty without a father, who grows up without the things that might redirect him, who dies young just as another child is born to begin the cycle again. He tried and tried to make the phrase work as a lyrical foundation and could not find a single word that rhymed with it in a way that didn’t sound forced.

Eventually, the word ghetto provided the opening  he had been looking for. And the song that emerged was unlike anything charting on American radio in 1968. That was the problem. Mac Davis believed at the time that In the Ghetto should be recorded by a black artist. He thought the authenticity  of lived experience would give the song its necessary weight.

 He took it to  Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers. Medley passed. The song did not find a home. And then it found its way towards a man named Sammy Davis  Jr. Sammy Davis Jr. and Elvis Presley had been friends since 1957, when they met on the set of Elvis’s  film Loving You. Sammy was 31, Elvis was 22.

 They were the two biggest entertainment  phenomena in America at that moment. Both operating at the center of a cultural transformation that  neither of them had entirely planned. Sammy described the friendship this way. Both of them were rebels in their own ways, and they had gravitated towards each other.

 They rode motorcycles  together. They went to each other’s shows. Sammy did impressions of Elvis, including a version of Hound Dog that Elvis found so funny that he was reported to have laughed until he couldn’t catch his breath. What the two men shared, beyond the performances and the parties, was an understanding of what it cost to be what they were.

Sammy had overcome racial violence, industry resistance, the particular burden of being the black member of a group of white entertainers at a time when that position required constant navigation. Elvis had overcome poverty, condescension, the establishment’s persistent attempt to contain what he was doing with music.

They recognized something in each other. Not the same experience, but something that rhymed with it. The accounts of what happened next are disputed in their specifics. Mac Davis, in a 2010 interview, said that he took the song to Sammy after Elvis had already recorded it. Producer Jimmy Bowen remembered things differently, placing Sammy’s encounter with the song before Elvis’s recording.

Linda Thompson, Elvis’s girlfriend from 1972 to 1976, wrote in her memoir about a conversation Elvis personally told her. A conversation in which Elvis described Sammy being offered the song and passing on it. Whatever the exact sequence, the  story that Elvis himself carried and shared is this. When Sammy Davis Jr.

 was given In the Ghetto, he said he couldn’t record it. Not because he didn’t believe in the song, but because he believed in it too much to misrepresent it. He had not grown up the way the child in the song had grown up. He had not lived that life. To sing it as if he had, to claim that emotional authority, would be inauthentic.

And then he said something else. I can’t do this song because I never lived this way, but I will tell you who did. Elvis Presley. Nine words spoken in private between two men who understood each other. And a record  that has never lost its relevance. That is the story. Not the chart position, the friendship.

 Not the comeback, the recognition. One man seeing clearly what another man carried and saying simply and without hesitation,  him. The song belongs to him. If you want to  keep watching this kind of history, the stories underneath the stories, the friendships  and conversations that the official accounts leave out, subscribe to the channel.

 There are more of these and we are going to keep documenting them. And if In the Ghetto meant something to you the first time you heard it, what Elvis’s voice did to that lyric, tell  us in the comments. This community was built for exactly that kind of conversation.