BLUE HAWAII
– Postcard production and… the beginning of the Presley formula-
(part 8)
“Elvis Presley – Blue Hawaii”… The slowly ending second day of work on the songs for “Blue Hawaii” was crowned by two recordings. Based on the old (the first known version is from 1906) French melody “Alouette”, “Almost Aways True” by Fred Wise and Ben Weisman and a new version of the hit “Moonlight Swim”.
Recalling the progress of work on the second of the above-mentioned titles in a conversation with Albert Hand, founder of the British magazine “Elvis Monthly”, Presley said: ” we had a lot of fun recording it “.
The song was to be used in the scene where Elvis’ Chad Gates drives a car and sings to the melody played on the radio (the same technique was used earlier in the film “Wild In The Country” with the song “I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell” and a little later in the film “Kid Galahad” with the recording “Raiding The Rainbow”). He is accompanied by the tourists sitting next to him – teacher Abigail Prentice and four teenagers under her care.
Watching this scene, especially today, many modern fans might therefore get the mistaken impression that “Moonlight Swim” was just another new song written specifically for Presley’s film. In fact, it’s worth recalling that the aforementioned composition by Sylvia Dee (lyricist and novelist) and Ben Weisman was already quite well-known for several years before “Blue Hawaii” finally hit theaters.
The first to record and popularize it was American singer Nick Noble in July 1957. In his version, the song even reached number thirty-seven on the American charts.
Soon after, other artists followed suit. Two more versions were released that same year. The first one belonged to Tony Perkins (i.e. Anthony Perkins, actor and singer known primarily for the “Psycho” film series) and the last one to Des O’Connor (or rather Desmond Bernard O’Connor, because that was his real name) – an English singer, comedian and TV presenter.
None of the above recordings ever achieved the spectacular success or even approached the popularity of Presley’s version. Perkins’ version only placed forty-third on Billboard’s Hot 100, while O’Connor’s version failed to even enter the British charts.
On screen, Elvis was accompanied on the song by five women. In reality, however, the female vocals were not recorded until March 1961. Loulie Jean Norman, Dorothy McCarty, Virginia Rees, and Jackie Allen (yes, the final recording does not feature the voices of the actresses featured in the film, but the voices of the chorus girls) dubbed them into the finished song during a session at the Paramount Scoring Stage on March 28, 1961.
In practice, this meant that Elvis, having recorded the basic version of “Moonlight Swim” almost a week earlier, had to get a feel for the song so that he could land his vocals in the right place. This didn’t always work, and often led to many funny mistakes. Ultimately, Weisman and Dee’s composition was recorded in four, mostly complete takes.
“Moonlight Swim” was the last song Elvis recorded on the second day of the session at Hollywood’s Radio Recorders. When he left the studio a few minutes after 10 p.m., the singer had already recorded most of the material required by the script. Only three songs were left to complete the soundtrack.
However, they were recorded only after a break of several hours. On Thursday, March 23, 1961.
Without a doubt, the most important and time-consuming recording of the final day of work on the soundtrack to “Blue Hawaii” was the ballad “Can’t Help Falling In Love”. Currently one of the most beautiful love songs of all time and one of the most covered songs in the history of pop music.
“ The next time the Aberbach brothers came to us, they said, ‘Elvis is making a new movie called Blue Hawaii,’ ” Luigi Creatore, one of the hit’s co-writers, recalled in an interview (quoted by David English in his excellent book The Making of Blue Hawaii). “ In one of the scenes in the script, Elvis comes back from Europe with a music box, which he gives to his fiancée’s grandmother. ‘We need a song for the music box sequence,’ they said. ‘We need a European sound. That’s why we’re coming to you with it.’ Hugo (Peretti, author’s note) was great with different melodies and had that European feel. ‘Okay, we’ll try,’ we said, even though the song was still in the planning stages. We had no guarantee that Elvis would record it.
We wrote ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ in two or three days. We worked on it from seven in the morning until ten. We didn’t even know the name of the song (it wasn’t given to us). We just had an idea in our heads of the scene it was supposed to be in and that the melody had to have a European sound .”
The piece on which George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and the above-quoted Luigi Creatore based their ballad was an old, eighteenth-century * French composition, “Plasir d’ Amour”, with music by Johann Paul Aegidius Martini and words taken directly from a poem by the popular French poet, Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, included in his novel “Celestine”.
The work of the French composers quickly gained popularity and soon had its English version. As “The Joy Of Love” the piece was not only performed many times by various opera singers but with time it was also released on records. One of the first currently known recordings comes from 1902 and was made by Emilio de Gogorza. Born in 1872 in Brooklyn, New York, a baritone singer.
The English text, however, was not the same one sung by Elvis Presley almost six decades later. The latter performed the famous ballad with new subtitles – especially for the film, with words by the aforementioned Georg Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.
Apparently completely unaware that “Can’t Help Falling In Love” (which was initially titled “I Can’t Help Falling In Love”) would soon become his next worldwide hit (and one of the most important songs in the history of popular music), Elvis put on a marathon in the studio while he was working on it. Suffice it to say that before the recording engineer, Thorne Nogar, finally turned on the equipment, Presley and his band rehearsed the song for over half an hour. The recording was then repeated twenty-nine more times!
Finally, from all the recorded takes, two were selected, which were described respectively as the film master version – with the characteristic introduction played on celeste (take twenty-third) and the album master version with the piano introduction already well-known to all listeners (take twenty-ninth).
Exhausted from nearly two hours (!) of recording “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” Elvis finished work on the soundtrack for his eighth film by recording two takes of the bluesy “Beach Boy Blues” by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett and five takes of the rock ‘n’ roll “Rock-A-Hula Baby” by Fred Wise, Ben Weisman and Dolores Fuller.
Two days later Elvis was on his way to Hawaii…
- The composition is dated to 1784. Some sources also indicate the year 1785.
Elvis Presley – Blue Hawaii… Article written and provided by Mariusz Ogieglo (EP Promised Land) http://www.elvispromisedland.pl/
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