Record album:Elvis Presley

The work of perhaps the most influential single performer in 20th-century American pop music, this 1956 record features the legendary tunes "Heartbreak Hotel" and "Blue Suede Shoes," which launched Elvis Presley's career. Elvis was the first white cross-over artist to popularize a traditionally black musical sound, and his first single for the Memphis-based Sun label characterizes that split with covers of blues singer Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right" on one side and Bill Monroe's bluegrass "Blue Moon of Kentucky" on the other. Follow-up recordings for Sun culminated in the 1955 #1 country single "I Forgot to Remember to Forget" with "Mystery Train" on the B-side. Elvis' early career was marked as much by the fears he aroused as by his wild popularity. When RCA signed Elvis in December 1955, he moved into the national media spotlight, singing and dancing his way to the heights of popularity on television and in the movies. And along with the fame came controversy: afraid of the influence of his explicit sexuality on the country's burgeoning youth culture, prudish TV producers filmed Presley only from the waist up on his 1957 "Ed Sullivan Show" appearance.