"...then, in mid 1968 he taped a television special in a black leather suit, in front of a select live audience, opening with "Guitar Man" and closing with a mild social-conscience song, "If I Can Dream".
But it wasn't until Greil Marcus brought out the recording of that performance for me, almost three years later, that I realized how significant it had been.
Marcus has spent as much time listening as anyone who is liable to be objective, and he believes Elvis may have made the best music of his life that crucial comeback night.
It's so easy to forget that Elvis was, or is, a great singer.
Any account of his impact that omits that fundamental fact amounts to a dismissal".
Robert Christgau, Dean of American Rock critics, in his 1973 book "Any old way you choose"
Some of you all never been down South too much...
I'm gonna tell you a little story, so you'll understand where I'm talking about
"...Elvis’ range was about two and a quarter octaves, as measured by musical notation, but his voice had an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts, grunts, grumbles and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear.
His voice can not be measured in octaves, but in decibels; even that misses the problem of how to measure delicate whispers that are hardly audible at all.
Lindsay Waters in her essay "Come softly, darling, hear what I say"
Some of you all never been down South too much...
I'm gonna tell you a little story, so you'll understand where I'm talking about
"...In "Hawaiian Wedding song", (1960), Elvis takes particular advantage of his voice's strong lower middle and higher note registers, made particularly difficult because of the need to sing in cascading notes.
Elvis meets the challenge on every occasion, his performance being absolutely meticulous, with not a hint of vocal strain".
BMG's review of his album "Blue Hawaii"
Some of you all never been down South too much...
I'm gonna tell you a little story, so you'll understand where I'm talking about
"But the core of the album, and perhaps the core of Elvis' music itself, are the soulful gospel-flavored ballads.
Well, it's often seemed as if Elvis bore more than a passing resemblance to soul singer Salomon Burke.
The way in which he uses his voice, his dramatic exploitation of vocal contrast, the alternate intensity and effortless nonchalance of his approach, all put one in mind of a singer who passed this way before, only going the other way.
And here he uses these qualities to create a music which, while undeniable country, puts him in touch more directly with the soul
singer than with traditional country music.
It was his dramatic extravagance, in fact, which set him apart from the beginning, and it is to this perhaps as much as anything else -- to the very theatrics which Elvis brought to hillbilly music -- that we can trace the emergence of rock & roll".
Noted author Peter Guralnick, reviewing the album "Elvis Country", for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1971
Some of you all never been down South too much...
I'm gonna tell you a little story, so you'll understand where I'm talking about
"He would probably be considered a baritone, but he could reach notes that most baritone singers could not. Much of his abilities emanated from a very intense desire to execute a song as he wanted to do it, which meant that he really sang higher than he would normally be able to. When the adrenalin is going, and the song is really pumping, you can get into that mode where you can actually do things, vocally, that you couldn’t normally do. So he had a tremendous range because of his desire to excel and be better, and that’s why he could do a lot of things that most people couldn’t."
Terry Blackwood, lead singer of the Gospel group, the "Imperials"
Perhaps the only other voice to touch me ( Luciano Pavarotti's voice being the first), was the voice of Elvis Presley; to watch him perform as I did along with Carl (Palmer), and Keith (Emerson), both in 1971 and again later in 1976 was an absolutely awesome and breathtaking experience; like Pavarotti, Presley had the power to reduce most people to tears very quickly and indeed to move them to think very carefully about their inner spiritual beliefs; as far as singing is concerned, the human voice is a matter of the expression of passion in the understanding of the human condition and, upon seeing both of them perform, I very quickly came to realise that they were each capable of expressing more feeling, with their voices, than I had ever thought possible".
Greg Lake, lead singer and bass player for the UK progressive rock super-group "Emerson, Lake and Palmer", as published on www.greglake.com, on September 7, 2007.
"Elvis was my first musical influence; his was a-once-in-a-lifetime voice which, if one were to classify it in pitch, was that of a lyrical baritone; the F-4 in the classic opening to "Hurt" (1976), with its B-4 ending on various live versions of the song (1976-77), the G-4's in "It´s now or never" (1960), "Unchained melody" (1977), and "Rags to riches" (1971), the latter with its B-4 ending, when sang live in 1977, the A-4's at the end of "Surrender" (1961), "How great thou art" (1975), and "American trilogy" the latter with its G-4 landing at various times from 1973 onwards, and, finally, the sustained C-5's on "America the Beautiful" (1976), and on the live version of "Big Boss Man" , his highest note ever, in 1975, are very powerful, fantastic examples of Elvis as his best, at the higher registers"
Tobias Sammet, lead singer, vocal virtuoso, and primary songwriter of the German Power Metal band "Edguy", as well as the creator of the metal opera "Avantasia", as published on March 29, 2008, on www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ0Rhm59vsY
"Elvis' lowest effective note was a low-G, as heard on "He'll Have To Go" (1976); on "King Creole" (1958), he growls some low-F's; going up, his highest full-voiced notes were the high-B's in "Surrender" (1961) and "Merry Christmas Baby" (1971), the high-G at the end of "My Way" (1976 live version), and the high-A of "An American Trilogy" (1972); using falsetto, Elvis could reach at least a high-E, e.g, as in "Unchained Melody" (1977), so, it was very nearly a three-octave range, although more practically two-and-a-half"
George Barbel, as a follow up to a question on what was Elvis' range, as published in All Experts.com, on 20th May, 2007.
"Elvis Presley`s talent as a musical artist was double barrelled and more; his voice, on the one hand, was extraordinary for its quality, range and power, as well as being a unique stage performer with instinctive natural abilities in both areas; he was the master of a wide and diverse range of vocal stylings and ventriloquist effects, from the clear tenor of his C&W heroes, to the vibrato of the Gospel singers he loved, his voice invariably possessing an aching sincerity and an indefinable quality of yearning virtually impossible to pigeonhole".
From the U.S Department of the Interior`s paper on criteria for greatness as a vocalist, which, together with all aspects of his life and legacy, led to the inclusion of his home, Graceland, in the National Register of Historic Places, in 2006.
"I spoke to over 140 songwriters whose work was recorded and most remarked about the uncanny ability of Elvis Presley to capture the essence and make it his own; like a musical geneticist, he drew from every strand of DNA in a songwriter's work, which ultimately helped shape his own distinctive personal interpretation; just listen to the wide stylistic swath of genre-hopping material he recorded during his career - from Junior Parker's amphetamine-paced rockabilly classic "Mystery Train" and the poppin-perfect panache of Otis Blackwell's "All shook up", to the down and dirty blues swagger of "Reconsider baby" and the operatic grandeur of "It's now or never"-; and then there were more controversial and socially conscious anthems ("If I can dream" and "In the guetto"), and introspective 70's fare like "Separate ways" and "Always on my my mind"; right away, you can hear the breath of a master stylist who breathed new life into every song he cut"
Author Ken Sharp, in the introduction to his book, "Writing for the King: The songs and writers behind them", as published in American Songwriter.com
"Elvis Presley caught the public's imagination through two things: his unique ability to synthesize all American music styles and his fantastic interpretive qualities as a vocalist; that he managed to keep the public's attention after the music began to suffer, is due to his remarkable charisma, an unparalleled force that was stronger than any ten other men in his peer group; (while) it's the charisma that allowed him to get away with covering substandard songs like "A Little Less Conversation," (1968), it's his musical ability alone that elevated it to a status it didn't deserve, creating something so endearing that the simplest of remix jobs could make it sound contemporary, a quarter-century after his death; he may always be a punchline to some people, but the continuing evolution of our fascination with the King has to do with his ability to reinvent himself every time he's heard; even, apparently, from beyond."
Robert Fontenot, music historian and critic at www.about.com, commenting on JXL's re-mix of "A little less conversation", which topped the world's charts in 2002.
So many great opinions on Elvis, his voice and charisma!
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