Elvis Put Two Songs on One Record — Then They Started Competing With Each Other for No. 1
By the summer of 1956, Elvis Presley was already causing chaos everywhere he went.
He was only 21 years old, but “Heartbreak Hotel” had already made him a national star.
Television audiences were growing.
Teenagers were screaming.
Parents and critics were arguing about him.
Then Elvis released a record that did something extraordinary.
It had a hit on both sides.
On July 13, 1956, RCA Victor released “Don’t Be Cruel” backed with “Hound Dog.”
At first, most of the attention went to “Hound Dog.”
That made sense.
Elvis had already been performing the song onstage, turning it into one of the wildest moments in his live show.
His version was loud, aggressive and completely different from the blues recording Big Mama Thornton had made famous several years earlier.
When Elvis performed “Hound Dog” on television, his movements became part of the controversy surrounding him.
The song quickly raced up the charts.
But sitting on the other side of the same record was “Don’t Be Cruel.”
And slowly, something unexpected began happening.
Listeners started flipping the record over.
“Don’t Be Cruel” had been written by Otis Blackwell, one of the songwriters who would become closely associated with Elvis’ early RCA sound.
Compared with the attack of “Hound Dog,” it was smoother.
Elvis sang with a relaxed confidence.
The Jordanaires added soft backing vocals.
Scotty Moore’s guitar, Bill Black’s bass and D.J. Fontana’s drumming created a rhythm that was unmistakably rock and roll but still comfortable enough for pop and country audiences.
America suddenly had two enormous Elvis songs on the same piece of vinyl.
And they began competing with each other.
“Hound Dog” initially received the greater attention on some of Billboard’s pop listings.
Then “Don’t Be Cruel” overtook it.
During September 1956, the record was dominating Billboard’s overlapping pop, country and R&B charts — an especially remarkable achievement at a time when those musical worlds were still treated as separate markets.
It is important to remember that there was no Billboard Hot 100 yet.
Billboard published several separate national charts based on record sales, jukebox plays and radio airplay.
So a 1956 “No. 1” story was more complicated than the single Hot 100 ranking familiar today.
But the overall picture was unmistakable.
Elvis was everywhere.
On September 9, just days before the September 15 chart week, he made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Nearly 60 million Americans watched.
One of the songs he performed was “Don’t Be Cruel.”
The television exposure only made the record bigger.
For weeks, the two-sided single refused to disappear.
Taken together, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” occupied the top of Billboard’s major pop sales chart for an extraordinary 11-week run.
By the end of 1956, the record had sold more than four million copies.
Elvis’ official site describes it as the biggest-selling single record of his career.
But the numbers only explain part of why the record mattered.
The two songs showed two different sides of Elvis Presley.
“Hound Dog” was dangerous.
Raw.
Defiant.
It was the Elvis who frightened parents and drove teenagers into a frenzy.
“Don’t Be Cruel” was different.
It was warm, rhythmic and almost playful.
It proved Elvis could dominate a record without sounding explosive.
Put them together, and the single showed exactly why he was becoming so difficult to categorize.
Was he country?
R&B?
Pop?
Rock and roll?
In 1956, the answer was increasingly:
all of them.
And that was part of the revolution.
On September 15, 1956, the charts reflected something much larger than another Elvis hit.
A 21-year-old singer from Memphis had crossed musical boundaries that the record industry had spent years keeping apart.
Even more remarkably, he had done it with two songs printed on opposite sides of the same record.
Most artists spent their careers searching for one hit.
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Elvis had two.
And for a while, his biggest competition was himself.
