Trio of Releases Show Presley’s Influences

Elvis Presley’s influence and his influences are both saluted in a series of new compact disc releases.

Item 1: “The Million Dollar Quartet” (RCA Records, 67 minutes)--Though available since 1988 as an import CD from England’s Charly Records label, this package marks the first time the 1956 summit meeting of Elvis and fellow Sun Records artists Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins has been released domestically. The album, which captures one of the most celebrated moments in rock history, is a collector’s treasure.

Presley, who began his recording career in 1954 at Sun, had already moved on to RCA Records and become a national sensation when he dropped in at Memphis’ Sun studio in December of 1956 during a Perkins recording session. Cash and Lewis were also on hand.

During a break in the recording, the four sang gospel, country and rock tunes--from “Peace in the Valley” and “Crazy Arms” to Chuck Berry’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” to “Don’t Be Cruel”--for more than an hour. Early in the good-natured jam, Sun’s Sam Phillips turned on the tape machine and captured the session.

Because Cash’s voice is hard to discern on most of the album, it has been widely assumed that he left the session after a few minutes. But Cash said recently that he was present during the entire jam. The reason he’s hard to hear, he said, is that Presley and Lewis, who took turns at the piano, played the songs in a higher key than Cash prefers, so he simply sang some background parts.

One of the highlights of “The Million Dollar Quartet” is when Presley tells the others about seeing Jackie Wilson, then a member of Billy Ward & the Dominoes, doing a version of “Don’t Be Cruel” in Las Vegas, apparently as part of a Presley medley.

“He had already done ‘Hound Dog’ and another (song or two of mine) . . . and he didn’t do too well, you know. He was trying too hard. . . . But man, he sung (‘Don’t Be Cruel’). . . . I went back four nights straight and heard that guy.”

Item 2: “Mystery Train” (RCA Records, 40 minutes)--Part of the appeal of this score to Jim Jarmusch’s moody but wickedly funny film is that it features both Presley’s 1955 version of the title track and bluesman Junior Parker’s original 1953 version.

In addition, the album offers Presley’s mid-’50s version of Rodgers and Hart’s “Blue Moon” as well as such other Memphis gems as Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart,” Bobby (Blue) Bland’s “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time” and Roy Orbison’s “Domino.”

(Fans of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the colorful early rock showman who plays the enigmatic hotel manager in “Mystery Train,” will be interested in “Voodoo Jive,” a best-of Hawkins package just released by Rhino Records. It includes Hawkins’ landmark “I Put a Spell on You.”)

Item 3: “Mystery Train/Junior Parker, James Cotton, Pat Hare” (Rounder Records, 38 minutes)--Elvis is shown on the cover of this album, along with Parker and Bobby (Blue) Bland, though he isn’t featured on the album itself. But it does include nine songs (five of them previously unreleased in North America) by Parker, one of Presley’s many blues influences. The Parker tunes include “Mystery Train” and “Love My Baby,” described in rock historian Colin Escott’s liner notes as one of the first examples of black rockabilly.