All this was unusually nice - the album appeared in all music stores in America on January 2, 1971, at the end of the Christmas celebrations and the New Year, a photo of a two-year-old and unusually serious Elvis in the whole envelope and on the right is a photograph with which the envelope was made - Elvis with mom and dad, with Gladys and Vernon Presley, Elvis in a farm hat for field work and in the most modest overalls over a shirt with a white turn-down collar and white cuffs rolled up, Elvis's parents, God knows how unassuming, or rather poorly, dressed.
It was all extraordinarily sweet.
Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old) - as if he did for everyone who has never heard of lobsters and Las Vegas - Presley Elvis Aaron, the king of rock and roll and a star of the greatest magnitude - closer, more accessible and understandable.
Elvis, so touching and at the same time insanely attractive to trembling knees, ceased to be an unattainable deity, easily made his way to any of his admirers in the kitchen and, leading a casual conversation with the owners, stunned with happiness, with undisguised pleasure feasted on sandwiches with fried bananas or peanuts just what else heaven has sent.
The rebellion of rock, which destroyed the tidal wave of the fifties and the respectable American stage, parted, and the foundations of the fathers, somehow suddenly fizzled out, the verse, with the pacifying snow of white Christmas, fell on the roofs of shacks and palaces - became just a page in world musical history.
And everyone bought the finest vinyl of the King, listened and listened to a rattle in the last tracks and did not think about the impossibly strange inscription on top of the main title - I'm 10,000 Years Old - why would it be and what about?
Eight years later, when Elvis had already gone to his planet, and the album Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old) was reissued, recognized gold, platinum and thrown away again (this was the case then - no matter how many prints they printed after the King left, they were swept away cleanly invariably) on the counters, the strange inscription worked.
Having lost what it was impossible to reconcile with the loss of, the world finally heard the clear and electrified sound of Elvis' voice.
Musical reading of rural songs, referred to in everyday life as country.
This is how the paradox of reading the meanings of a seemingly ordinary (one of many) Presley albums developed - he, as you know, was not the organizer of well-thought-out shows, in the studio he worked rather on a whim, snatching from the air what he once heard from his memory, ingrained into his skin that entered the blood - and ... just wrote it down.
Heap of songs.
The most different.
Sometimes to the obscenity of either childish and stupid, or adolescent-banal and simple (so many then thought, but they continued to listen frantically).
Leaving all the material to the will of his producer, the almighty Mr. Felton Jarvis, who never really mastered the technique of 16-track recording, but retained the magical flair of the live sound of the fifties and sixties.
Rural music.
"Valenki" in American style.
This (among other things) we owe to Felton Jarvis and Elvis Presley - a tandem of great looking, despite their repertoire, dinosaurs - even in those years they made a strange impression even on Chet Atkins, a conservative from the conservatives, with their deliberately ostentatious unwillingness to follow fashion.
And if Sinatra and Martin did this, with all their might, grabbing the crest of the wave, skillfully playing the good uncles from the fat North, being not averse to hitting (only in words) the progressive youth - if only tickets to their own shows were faster, - Elvis and Jarvis were not like that.
All these Make the World Go Away, I Really Don't Want to Know, Funny How Time Slips Away, The Fool, There Goes My Everything performed by almost any pop singer of that time would have put a reliable end to his career.
What about Elvis?
What about the two-year-old boy from the envelope?
In a jumpsuit with straps?
And the hat of the white rabble on one side?
He did not care about anything.
And he was in the utmost fervor.
For five days of the session (July 4-8, 1970) in Nashville (and he returned exactly here, not in the American Sound studio to Chips Moman - the King followed the roots) Elvis recorded 34 "masters", among which a dozen confidently pulled on the standards country, and managed to cover almost all shades of style - bluegrass, honky-tonk, western swing, rockabilly, countrypolitan.
The devil knows how he did it.
Little Cabin on the Hill is like a joyful river running, hurrying somewhere among the meadow grasses, in the middle of the summer expanse.
If you don't know English.
Or not listen to the text.
To the gallery page
This is all he, the same wanderer in the night, the inhabitant of a wretched hut on the slope of the mountains, this is all he, from century to century pulling the strap of both bitter life and ghostly bitter lost love.
Such was it ten thousand years ago.
So he remained - if anything, whom he lost - only with laughter through tears, otherwise imminent death.
The gods of the harsh lands do not favor the whiny ...
- Tonight I'm alone without you my dear
It seems that there's a longing for you still
Oh but I just keep it there so I won't be alone
In our little cabin on the hill
- Oh someone has taken you from me
And left me here all alone
To listen to the rain beat on our window pane
In our little cabin on the hill ...
And his wonderful Elvis laugh at the very end of the track - thank you, Mr. Felton Jarvis.
Or here Presley is climbing a mountain, such a mountain that only heavenly providence can send down - not bypass it and not bypass it.
Attack, assault - and was not.
From verse to verse
Liturgy to Despair.
Where and when did you hear that?
And did old Ernest Tubb think when he wrote Tomorrow Never Comes that there will be only one boy from Tupelo who can turn his soul inside out and knock out a tear? - bullshit? .. This is the same ... "And they fall silent.
- Oh you tell me that you love me
Yes you tell me that you care
That tomorrow we'll be married, oh
But tomorrow's never there
- Oh tomorrow never, never comes
Oh tomorrow never comes
Now you tell me that you love me, oh
But tomorrow never comes! ..
Elvis Presley never thought of a country concept album in his life.
The musicians who worked with him in that session (Felton Jarvis just changed the lineup and brought together the best of the best with Elvis) were at least amazed that Presley recognized the absolutely raw, in their opinion, doubles as brilliant and so praised them (musicians ) that they burned to the ground with shame.
Nobody understood anything.
All of them will tour with the King until the very last day ...
They will understand.
Years later.
When the sound of Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old), so orthodox and archaic, will knock out the soul and send shivers to all new generations who have come to Presley.
And then he needed just a little.
Something like that - to associate old stuff with new, to drive an aspen-maple, expiring count with sweet poison - into tediousness and pop music.
On September 22, 1970, Elvis returned to the studio in Nashville and recorded the opening, soulful and frivolous Snowbird - consisting of pain and light of the heart.
Without thinking, not reading deeply, what do we hear over and over again?
All the same eternal story of happiness gained and lost.
And the visions of Nature, she is only one, alternately changing the seasons, remains unaffected by human passions ...
Spread your tiny wings and fly away
And take the snow back with you
where it came from on that day
The one I love forever is untrue
And if I could you know
that I would fly away with you
Yeah, if I could you know
that I would fly away with you ...
And of course, he couldn't do without rock and roll.
Albeit in the most brutal country treatment.
No one will ever tell why the choice fell on Whole Lotta Shakin 'Goin' On, which made Jerry Lee Lewis famous.
It was not even an explosion - an abrasion eruption from the face of the earth.
What does Lewis, who is still with us, think of this?
Does reading Elvis warm him up, furious and partly insane - just like Jerry Lee in his youth? ..
I hope you understand - this is about Childhood.
About the time when it doesn't matter what is on you and what is on the plate, but only who is near, who is loved, for whom are your crystal-clear tears.
On Elvis's birthday, on the day when all sorts of bottom trash that does not stick to the silt will certainly pop up in the press, I play Elvis Country (I'm 10,000 Years Old) - and there is no age, no time, no distance for me.
I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago - a record was made with this song, it sounds in non-existent gaps between tracks, reminds: the world is still the same, you are still the same, so laugh, even though through tears.
All his life, from an early age, Elvis Presley had to wash his hands in muddy water.
He was not a boy of silver, he was a boy with tattered boots.
He was a good guy who could not be chewed by a show business sausage machine.
There he laughs, Elvis Aaron Presley, from each of his albums.
Laughs contagiously.
Above us, mired in vanity.
To the gallery page
Road dust is not on the hands.
But in souls.
Yes.
There you will also find this track - I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water.
The text is lovely and eater.
How could he, this shy boy from the South, sing songs like that?
Maybe because only that he lived ten thousand years and was so tired of returning in tears and sorrow that he became the Great White Clown?
A worthy epithet for someone who has chosen the path of serving people through happiness and laughter despite fear and death.
Happy birthday, Mr. Presley.
Thank you.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.