In May of 1967, Elvis Presley went into a Nashville recording studio to make a gospel album. This was not a project that attracted much industry attention. Elvis was between films. The pop charts of 1967 belonged to other artists, other sounds, other cultural conversations. The music coming from Nashville’s recording studios that year was moving in directions that did not include the kind of gospel record Elvis had decided to make.
The album that came out of those sessions was called How Great Thou Art. It won the Grammy Award for best sacred performance in 1968. It was the first Grammy Award Elvis Presley ever won. This fact alone tells a story worth examining. The most commercially successful recording artist in the history of American popular music up to that point had never won a Grammy award before his gospel album.
He would win the Grammy for best sacred performance two more times in his career. He would never win a Grammy for anything else. What this says about the music industry of that era is one story. What it says about what Elvis Presley was made of, what the core of the music was underneath all the other things the music had become, is a different story and the more interesting one.
The How Great Thou Art sessions in Nashville were produced by Felton Jarvis, who had taken over as Elvis’s producer at RCA after Chad Atkins stepped back from the role. The musicians were the Nashville session players who populated the recordings of that era among the most skilled and versatile studio musicians in the world, capable of adapting to whatever a session required.
What the sessions required in this case was something those musicians had not always been asked to provide. Maximum space, maximum dynamic range, the ability to drop to almost nothing and then build to full volume following wherever the voice led. Because what Elvis did in those sessions, by the accounts of the musicians and engineers who were present, was different from what he did in the pop sessions.
In the pop sessions, he was a professional recording artist completing a product. He was meticulous and efficient. He knew what he was doing and he did it with the precision of someone who had been making records for 15 years. In the gospel sessions, he was doing something else. The musicians used the word inhabited, that he inhabited the songs rather than performed them.
that the difference between Elvis singing How Great Thou Art and Elvis singing a film soundtrack song was the difference between a man doing his job and a man doing what he was made to do. Elvis Presley had been singing gospel before he was singing anything else. He had grown up in the Pentecostal church in East Tupelo, Mississippi in a congregation where the music was physical and emotional and direct in a way that the formal traditions of other denominations were not.
The singing in those services was not decorative. It was the point. The act of singing, of opening the body to the music and letting it move through you and out of you, was the religious act itself. He had attended the all-night gospel singings at the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis as a teenager, sitting in the front rows to watch the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesman Quartet, learning from them with the specific attention of a student who does not yet know he is in school.
The gospel musicians he admired, Jake Hess of the Statesmen in particular, were not doing what the charts required. They were doing what the music required. They were holding notes until the notes became something the words couldn’t carry. They were moving between keys in ways that the formal vocabulary of music theory names, but that the ear learns before theory does.
When Elvis Presley sat in front of Sam Phillips in 1953 and 1954 and made the recordings that became the Sun Records catalog, the thing Sam Phillips was hearing, the directness, the emotional immediacy, the refusal to put any distance between the feeling and the expression was the gospel tradition applied to a different kind of music.
The gospel never left. It was what everything else was built on. The Grammy Award for best sacred performance in 1968 was not the award that Elvis’s management or record label had been building toward. It was not the metric by which the commercial success of the album had been evaluated. Elvis Presley had never won a Grammy for anything before this album.
He had sold more records than almost any artist in the history of the industry. He had been nominated. He had not won. The specific category best sacred performance is worth examining. The Recording Academy in giving Elvis Presley his first Grammy in this category was recognizing something that the pop categories had declined to recognize.
The argument could be made that this was the industry catching up to what the musicians who worked with Elvis had known for years. That the gospel dimension of his voice was not a stylistic choice or a commercial calculation. It was the original source material. It was what he had been before anything else.
Jake Hess of the Statesman Quartet, the man Elvis had watched from the front rows at the All Night singings in Memphis as a teenager, attended the sessions for How Great Thou Art. He was present for some of the recordings. What he said afterward was consistent with what the other musicians present said.
That Elvis Presley singing gospel was Elvis Presley doing the thing that the music in him had always been organized around. The title track, How Great Thou Art, the Swedish hymn, originally composed by Carl Boberg in 1885, was recorded at a session in May of 1967. The arrangement built from spare beginnings, guitar, bass, sparse piano, and expanded with the specific architecture of a gospel arrangement, the Imperial’s quartet behind Elvis’s lead vocal, the full orchestra entering as the song climbed.
What Elvis did with the song is documented on tape. It is available to anyone who wants to hear it. What the people in the studio that night describe, the quality of the performance in the room as opposed to what survived the recording process is something that does not fully transfer. There were multiple takes.
By the later takes, the studio had changed in the way that studios change on certain nights. The professional distance between the musicians, the engineer, the producer on one side, and the performer on the other had collapsed into something more immediate. The people present were no longer doing their jobs in the ordinary sense.
They were listening. The Imperials, the gospel quartet, who were providing the vocal background, had worked with many artists. The reaction they described to what Elvis was doing with the song that night was not the reaction of professional session musicians completing a booking. It was the reaction of singers recognizing something in another singer that rarely appeared in a recording studio.
He held the final note of the final chorus for a length of time that exceeded what the arrangement called for. Nobody stopped him. May 1967, Nashville. A recording session that the industry was not closely watching. A Swedish hymn from 1885, a Nashville orchestra, the Imperials behind him, and a voice that on that particular night in a recording studio in Tennessee found the music it had been organized around since before anyone knew what that voice was capable of.
Elvis Presley won three Grammy awards in his career. All three were for gospel recordings. The music industry gave him everything except recognition for what was most fundamental to what he was. The people in the studio that night in Nashville knew. The musicians who were there knew. The Imperials knew.
And the recording is still there. Anyone who wants to know can hear it for themselves. How Great Thou Art remained for many years one of the bestselling gospel albums in American recording history. The audience that bought it was not exclusively the audience that had been following Elvis since that’s All Right or since the Ed Sullivan appearances. It was broader than that.
a religious audience that had not previously been listening to Elvis Presley, encountering a voice that the gospel tradition immediately recognized as native to itself. Elvis would return to gospel throughout his career. the 1971 album, His Hand in Mine, the gospel section that became a permanent feature of the Las Vegas concert set list.
The quartet singing that he and the Memphis Mafia would do at Graceand in the evenings, informal, unscheduled for no audience other than the people in the room. The gospel was not a project or a phase. It was the constant. Everything else, the rock and roll, the films, the Las Vegas concerts, the televised specials, was built on top of it and drew from it in ways that were not always visible to the people who were observing from the outside.
The Grammy was recognition of what the gospel always had been, not a side of Elvis Presley, the foundation. There is a tendency in the retrospective accounting of Elvis Presley’s career to begin the story with that’s all right and build toward either the heights of 1956 or the tragedy of 1977. But the gospel was there before that’s all right.
It was there in the Tupelo church. It was there in the front rows of the Ellis auditorium. It was there in the way Sam Phillips described what he heard when Elvis first sang in front of a microphone. Not a style, but an approach, a refusal to put distance between the feeling and the expression that the gospel tradition had put in him before he understood what it was.
How great thou art is not a chapter in the story of Elvis Presley. It is a window into what the whole story was about. The musicians who were in that Nashville studio in May of 1967, the ones who used the word inhabited, the ones who put down their charts and looked up from their music stands, understood something about Elvis Presley that the sales figures and the film credits and the charted singles had spent years obscuring.
They understood what the music was.
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