Just take a walk down Lonely Street

When the well-dressed young man checked into the hotel in Miami, nobody knew who he was.

That would not have been unusual. In a city as large as Miami in 1955, almost anybody you met on the street would be a stranger.

But when the young man was found dead in his hotel room the next day, the victim of suicide, his mystery only deepened.

Before taking his own life, he had willfully destroyed any papers that might have identified him. He had even cut out all tags in his clothing, destroying any clue that might have tracked him back to a store or a dry cleaners.

All he left behind was a suicide note of only five words: “I walk a lonely street.”

The Miami Herald ran an article about the young man’s suicide, hoping that somebody might come forward to identify him, but nobody did.

Still, for a man so lonely that there was nobody on earth to share his life, it is ironic that his death has reached untold millions through the history of rock ‘n roll music.

It took the work of two unlikely strangers to bring the young man’s story to fame. One was a DJ in Jacksonville, Florida, named Tommy Durden. The other was a 40-year-old Jacksonville schoolteacher named Mae Boren Axton, who worked part-time as a music publicist.

The two were discussing the heart-breaking article in the Miami Herald when Mae commented that everybody has somebody who cares about them, and that when those people learned of the young man’s death, they would be devastated. To those people, Mae said, that hotel on that lonely street would forever be remembered as Heartbreak Hotel.

“That would make a good song,” said Durden.

And 30 minutes later, it was.

They made a quick demo of the song, which Mae took with her to the Disc Jockey Convention in Nashville in early November of 1955. There she ran into music agent Bob Neal and a young 20-year-old that he was managing—a lad named Elvis Presley.

She played the song for them, and Elvis was immediately taken by it. He had just signed a contract with RCA records, and he insisted on recording it.

RCA executives were skeptical because the song sounded nothing like what they had planned for Elvis. They wanted much lighter, snappier fare from the young artist, but Elvis persisted. He had first played the song in public on December 9, 1955, in Swifton, Arkansas, declaring that it would be his “first hit,” even though he hadn’t recorded it yet.

RCA allowed Elvis to record the song a month later on January 10, 1956, but only if he agreed to record other songs that the execs felt were more promising.

Elvis made his national television debut on January 28 on CBS’s variety program Stage Show, but network execs refused to allow him to play the song, which had been released only the day before. He appeared again a week later, but was again not allowed to play Heartbreak Hotel.

Finally, a week later, on February 11, 1956, Elvis was allowed to sing the song in his third TV appearance.

Less than three weeks later, Heartbreak Hotel entered the Pop Chart at #68. It also entered the Country and Western chart much higher—at #9.

By the end of May, the song was #1 on both charts, and it also peaked at #5 on the Rhythm and Blues chart, and #2 on the Pop Singles chart in the United Kingdom. It became Elvis’s first gold record, and was the top-selling single of 1956.

For the next 20 years, Elvis made the song a featured part of virtually every live set he played.

In 1995, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and Rolling Stone Magazine named it #45 on the list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Other music critics have credited the song with changing the course of modern music history. Some have even argued that, with its brooding teenage angst, it is the first true rock ‘n roll song.

Today, there is a real Heartbreak Hotel, right across the street from Presley’s home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee.

And one can only hope that visitors to the hotel’s 128 rooms have a better stay than the lonely young man who started it all, way back in 1955.

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