Elvis Stole My Job

In the 1950s Elvis Presley became famous all over the world for his moves, his crazy clothes, his hairdo, his music, and his singing style. Before Elvis, only African-American blues and rhythm and blues singers would move that way on stage, wore those crazy clothes, and sang that type of music in that style etcetera. So he basically "stole their job" so to speak. For this album, I handpicked 30 songs by African-American artists that in my opinion are the best example that Elvis was was great but the guys he copied were often even better. The majority of the performers here were Presley's idols: Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, who's music of the 1940s and early 1950s already sounded like Elvis at Sun, Roy Brown, Wynonie Harris, Roy Hamilton, Chuck Willis, and Brook Benton were all Elvis' chief vocal inspirations. He also really dug Lloyd Price, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, Arthur Gunter, the Clovers, Smiley Lewis, Billy Emerson, etcetera. He performed and recorded their songs. Otis Blackwell wrote many hit songs for Elvis like "Don't Be Cruel! And "All Shook Up" and Presley sang them exactly like Otis on the demo records. The remaining artists maybe are not directly linked to Elvis but their resemblance to Elvis on the songs I selected for this compilation is uncanny. If you are an Elvis fan, you probably already heard some of the tracks on this album (I simply could not leave them out) but I bet you never heard most of them. I really tried to focus on stuff no other "Elvis-related" compilation ever used before.