Heartbreak HotelElvis Presley
Heartbreak Hotel
1956
Elvis's first RCA single, all cavernous echo and empty rooms, the loneliest number one ever cut.
★ 9.6
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1956
Showing 83 works across all media from 1956
Hound Dog
1956
Leiber and Stoller wrote it for Big Mama Thornton; Elvis took it, sped it up, and set it on fire.
★ 9.5
The Searchers
Directed by John Ford
1956
Other directors have been stealing from this western for seventy years: Ford put John Wayne's racism on screen without excusing it, and framed his story in a much-copied doorway.
★ 9.0
I Walk the Line
1956 · From Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar
Cash slipped paper under his guitar strings for that snare tick, and hums to find each new key.
★ 8.8
Smoke Stack Lightning
1956 · From Moanin' in the Moonlight
One chord, no changes, Sumlin's guitar circling, and Wolf's howl answering the trains whose sparks named the song.
★ 8.5
Don't Be Cruel
1956
Blackwell gave Presley half the writing credit; the Jordanaires hum behind a vocal so relaxed it barely seems to try.
★ 8.2
Long Tall Sally
1956 · From Here's Little Richard
Blackwell built the lyric to run too fast for Pat Boone, and Richard shouted it out at Cosimo Matassa's J&M.
★ 7.8
Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins)
1956
Cash suggested the phrase, Phillips talked him into changing one word, and Sun got its first million seller.
★ 7.7
Roll Over Beethoven
1956 · From Chuck Berry Is on Top
His sister Lucy monopolized the family piano for classical, so Berry wrote his rebuttal, with Johnnie Johnson answering back.
★ 7.7
Blueberry Hill
1956
Nobody in the room had the lyrics, so Bunny Robyn spliced three broken takes into Domino's biggest hit.
★ 7.6
In the Still of the Night
1956
February 1956, a New Haven church basement, and a song Parris had written on Army guard duty.
★ 7.5
Why Do Fools Fall In Love
1956
Herman Santiago built it from a neighbor's love letters; Lymon, thirteen, took the lead and the credit fight ran decades.
★ 7.3
I Put a Spell on You
1956
Intended as a blues ballad until the producer brought wine; Hawkins said he never remembered recording it.
★ 7.3
Be-Bop-A-Lula
1956
Cut in Nashville as a B-side, flipped by radio, and Cliff Gallup's guitar breaks took it to number seven.
★ 7.1
Orange and Yellow
1956 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Two rectangles with feathered edges, built from thin washes so the color seems lit from behind rather than laid on.
★ 6.9
Blue Suede Shoes (Elvis Presley)
1956 · From Elvis Presley
Scotty Moore and Bill Black behind him in New York, and Presley made RCA hold the single for Perkins.
★ 6.9
The Power Elite
1956 · 442 pages
Three sets of men run America, the sociologist Mills argued: corporate chiefs, politicians, and generals drawn from the same schools and clubs. The New Left took its name and its target from him.
★ 6.8
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
1956 · 262 pages
Mizoguchi stammers, and the beauty of Kyoto's Golden Pavilion stands between him and every living thing. Mishima builds the 1950 arson by an acolyte into a case for destroying what you cannot possess.
★ 6.6