My baby's long and tall - shaped like a cannonball

Continuing my trip back through the 1957 album charts.

12/05/57 : Rock N' Roll Number 2 - Elvis Presley 

Eight weeks skipped over this time - seven of them had TKAI at #1 and Oklahoma! took the other week, so it's fair to say musicals owned the summer of '57.  But, don't worry - Elvis is back for his third appearance of the year (and it would have been four if I could have found his best-of).  And I'm hoping this will be more like the first Elvis album I met quite a few years ago now...

Yeah, it is.  It's definitely early Elvis with the instrumentation being very simple - but it's mostly very effective and there are some nice changes in tempo throughout the album.  I liked "Rip It Up", "When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again" and "Paralyzed" and most of the rest of it pretty enjoyable but I have to say "Old Shep" really is very rubbish.

This week we're at #3 in the charts at the end of a mere three week run with this being as high as it got, which seems oddly unsuccessful.  Particularly so when you see it managed a second run in '62 which was 17 weeks long, in which it also peaked at #3.  The rest of the top five this week were TKAI, Oklahoma!, Nat King Cole (a new entry) and High Society (the first time we've seen it this year).

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album but very little of any interest - who needs to know who was at each recording session?  It does tell us the album did very well in the US though - debuting at #1 and selling a million copies.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - Amazon hasn't really tried very hard this year, has it?  I didn't mind this at all - the good bits are very good and most of the rest of it is very listenable (except for "Old Shep").

21/04/87 - A most peculiar album
14/07/57 - Yet more Frank!

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