Before Elvis Sang Them, They Were Just Songs

You won’t hear Elvis Presley’s voice anywhere on “The King’s Record Collection,” but the 14-song retrospective is one of the most important and revealing Presley albums ever released.

It’s an invaluable document in illuminating the landmark contributions of rock’s most celebrated figure--and also, surprisingly, one of its most underrated.

Despite Presley’s unprecedented fame, it’s easy for today’s young pop fans to remember him as a Las Vegas caricature and assume that his success was a matter of being in the right place at the right time during the birth of rock in the ‘50s.

Presley is viewed by many as simply a young singer with a feel for R&B; and country music at a time when the two fields were merging into a blues-dominated style that magically echoed the vitality and aspirations of a new generation of teenagers.

Timing certainly was crucial in Presley’s rise, and his good looks and his shrewd manager, Col. Tom Parker, also played essential roles in the process. The Memphis teenager also benefited greatly from his skin color in an era when records by African Americans encountered resistance on mainstream radio and TV.

In truth, however, Presley’s early impact and eventual influence in rock were built around one paramount fact: He was also a remarkably gifted singer and musical auteur who made a series of brilliant records.

One reason for the misunderstanding of Presley’s role in pop culture is that few fans today have heard the singer’s most defining work: the tracks he recorded for Sun Records in Memphis before the gold rush of RCA hits that began in 1956 with “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Those early Sun singles, which were made when Presley was 19 and 20, were so trailblazing in their mix of country and blues that radio programmers were confused about what format they fit.

The reason “The King’s Record Collection” is important is that it enables us to listen to the original versions of several of the key songs that Presley recorded for Sun, including Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and Arthur Gunter’s “Baby, Let’s Play House.”

The album also includes original versions of some songs that Presley recorded during his early days at RCA, including Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” and Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes.” (A separate, less important volume of “The King’s Record Collection” showcases some recordings that Presley redid later at RCA.)

All these records have been available for collectors and pop historians who were willing to track them down on albums by the individual artists. But they are brought together for the first time in a single, convenient package by Hip-O, the oldies wing of Universal Music.

As such, the album serves as one component in a crash course in Elvis history. You can play one of the album’s songs, then follow it with Presley’s version of the song--seven of which can be found on RCA’s “The Sun Sessions” album and five more on RCA’s “Rocker” package.

The results are frequently astounding.

Far from being timid in re-creating the tunes, Presley--working with producer Sam Phillips--redesigned them. He not only frequently changed the tempos, but also often revised the words, sometimes throwing out whole verses to give the song more compactness and punch.

Most of all, Presley brought a youthful sensibility and independence to the music, and it was that attitude that truly defined rock ‘n’ roll.

Rock historian Greil Marcus searched out the original versions of these songs in 1975 and wrote about them in “Mystery Train,” perhaps the most insightful book ever written about rock music.

“It is often said that if Elvis had not come along to set off the changes in American music and American life that followed his triumph, someone very much like him would have done the job as well. But there is no reason to think this is true, either in strictly musical terms or in any broader cultural sense.”

Marcus then proceeds to document how Presley gave his own stamp to some of the songs in the Sun recordings, stressing both Presley’s talent and ambition.

Thanks to this new album, you can now examine the different versions yourself and also see the changes in several recordings that Marcus didn’t deal with. (Unfortunately, the collection omits the original version of “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” which Marcus argues is one of the most notable Sun tracks.)

The Hip-O package begins, appropriately, with the original versions of “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the two songs that Presley recorded for his first Sun single.

The singer turned the former from a somewhat generic blues tune into a defiant statement of youthful self-affirmation, not unlike the spirit that Bob Dylan would later assert in such tunes as “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

In “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” Presley shifted the bluegrass standard from a waltz to an up-tempo tune, giving the song new dynamics and character.

During the early Sun sessions, Presley sang with the abandon, joy and desperation of someone sensing, quite rightly, that his whole future was riding on these moments. By the time he got to RCA, he was more confident and relaxed, and there’s not as much difference between his versions of such songs as “Money Honey” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and the Drifters and Lloyd Price recordings found on “The King’s Record Collection.” That’s probably because the songs were never intended as more than album tracks.

But “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” were designed as RCA showcase numbers, and Presley turned them both into signature tunes.

With “Hound Dog,” Presley threw out some of Thornton’s playful novelty touches, including simulated dog barks. On “Blue Suede Shoes,” he was dealing with a song that had already been released by an old Sun label mate, and Presley seems transported back to the Sun studio himself, injecting an urgency that went far beyond that on Perkins’ original.

It’s almost as if Presley was testing his authenticity on the song after moving to a bigger label and bigger audience. In Perkins’ rendition, you can hear the innocence and desire of a hopeful young singer anxious for his first hit. In the Presley version, you hear someone who finds himself at the center of a pop revolution--and brings all the cockiness and authority of that moment to his work.

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com