I will spend my whole live through loving you

Starting my trip back through the 1957 album charts.

29/12/57 : Loving You - Elvis Presley 

I don't mind this era Elvis, but I suspect a full album may prove to be a bit too much.

Actually, there's more variety across the album than I was expecting - which is good in some ways but he's already starting with the crooning, which I'm not a big fan of.  It does have "(Let Me Be) Your Teddy Bear" and "Party" on it though, which are fine tracks.  I also like his version of "Blueberry Hill" (but it's no Fats Domino effort) and at 12 tracks in 26 minutes you certainly can't accuse him of hanging around!

We're at #2 in the charts this week on his 19th week of a 24 week run, with it having peaked at #1 for three weeks.  The rest of the top five were soundtracks from The King And I (which was #1 at the end of 1956 and it's spent 31 weeks at the top in the intervening period, so we're going to be mentioning it a lot!) and Oklahoma! (this has only been in the chart for most of the year, as opposed to all of it), with Frank Sinatra (a re-entry which hadn't been in the charts for ten months) and Elvis completing the chart with a different album we'll be hearing VERY soon.

Wikipedia tells me this is actually (mostly) a soundtrack album - Loving You was his first film (of far too many).  I say "mostly" because they had to add a few more tracks to the album to bring it up to an acceptable length (all 26 minutes of it), including "Blueberry Hill", "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" and "True Love".  The album was, unsurprisingly, very popular in the US selling 500,000 copies and Wikipedia also points out that it re-entered the charts here in '77, unfortunately caused by his death.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - I'm sorry Amazon but I just don't believe that!  I suspect the reason is that very few people actually listen to specific Elvis albums these days other than the various best-ofs - but I actually quite enjoyed this as an album because it's of its time, but shows enough variety across the tracks to be interesting.

22/12/57 - Super-cheesy!
1956 - All done!

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