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
Please, Please, Please
1956 · From Please Please Please
Syd Nathan hated it and fired Ralph Bass for cutting it, then rehired him when it reached R&B's top five.
★ 6.6
You Make Me Feel So Young
1956 · From Songs for Swingin' Lovers
A 1946 film tune reborn in Riddle's arrangement on the album that topped Britain's first LP chart, Sinatra audibly beaming.
★ 6.3
★ 6.2
The Killing
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
1956
Kubrick was twenty-seven and this is where he became Kubrick: a racetrack robbery told out of order, doubling back to catch each man's hour, thirty years before that felt like a style.
★ 6.2
I Could Have Danced All Night · 1956
Saxophone Colossus
1956
St. Thomas is a calypso his mother sang him as a child. A critic later analyzed one solo bar by bar to show it was composed.
★ 5.9
The Peculiar Institution
Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
1956 · 435 pages
Stampp argued in 1956 that Southern slavery was a profitable labor system sustained by violence, not the benign paternalism white historians taught. The plantation legend never recovered its standing in American history departments.
★ 5.9
Songs for Swingin' Lovers
1956
The trombone solo in I've Got You Under My Skin was played by a man standing on a box to reach the microphone.
★ 5.9
Brown Eyed Handsome ManChuck Berry
Brown Eyed Handsome Man
1956 · From After School Session
Berry wrote it after watching an arrest in California, then cut it in Chicago with Johnnie Johnson and Willie Dixon.
★ 5.9
Love Me Tender
1956
A Civil War ballad from 1861, reworked by Ken Darby and sung on Ed Sullivan weeks before the single arrived.
★ 5.9
The Organization Man
1956 · 429 pages
Whyte went into corporations and the new suburb of Park Forest and found Americans trading the old ethic of individual striving for belonging. The organization wanted the whole man, and got him.
★ 5.8
Giant
Directed by George Stevens
1956
James Dean died before it was finished and his last scenes had to be dubbed: three hours of Texas oil money, filmed as a family argument that runs thirty years.
★ 5.7
Come Go With Me
1956
Airmen stationed in Pittsburgh, a demo cut in a DJ's basement, and bass singer Clarence Quick's nonsense-syllable hook.
★ 5.6
The Sweet Science
1956 · 267 pages
Liebling covered Rocky Marciano knocking out an aging Joe Louis, writing the trainers and cornermen with as much relish as the champions. He set the standard American boxing writing still works from.
★ 5.6
Elvis Presley
1956
Five of the tracks were leftovers from his Sun sessions. The Clash copied the sleeve, pink and green lettering and all, twenty-three years later.
★ 5.6
The Ten Commandments
Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
1956
American television has run it every Easter for over fifty years: DeMille parted the Red Sea with gelatin, dumped water and a reversed film, and nobody has topped the sheer nerve of it.
★ 5.5