REMEMBERING ELVIS PRESLEY 5/5 VOCAL STYLE AND RANGE

Vocal style and range

The general development of Presley's voice is described by critic Dave Marsh as "high and thrilled in the early days, lower and perplexed in the final months.

 Marsh credits Presley with the introduction of the "vocal stutter" on 1955's "Baby Let's Play House."

 When on "Don't Be Cruel" Presley "slides into a 'mmmmm'

 that marks the transition between the first two verses," he shows "how masterful his relaxed style really is." Marsh describes the singing on "Can't Help Falling in Love"

to be of "gentle insistence and delicacy of phrasing," with the line "'Shall I stay'" pronounced as if the words are fragile as crystal."On the operatic "It's Now or Never"

 Presley "was reaching for something more than he had ever attempted before," and, according to discographer Jorgensen, later the same year the melody to "Surrender",

a number also based on an Italian original, "Torna A Sorrento", "required an even greater demonstration of vocal powers".

Jorgensen calls the 1966 recording of "How Great Thou Art" "an extraordinary fulfillment of his vocal ambitions," as Presley had "crafted for himself an ad-hoc arrangement in which he took every part of the four-part vocal, from [the] bass intro to the soaring heights of the song's operatic climax," in the process becoming "a kind of one-man quartet.

Guralnick finds "Stand By Me"

from the same sessions "a beautifully articulated, almost nakedly yearning performance," but, by contrast, feels that Presley reaches beyond his powers on "Where No One Stands Alone"

on which "he was reduced to a kind of inelegant bellowing to push out a sound" that Jake Hess would have no problem with. Hess himself thought that while others may have a voice as great or greater than Presley's, "he had that certain something that everyone searches for all during their lifetime"

 Guralnick attempts to pinpoint that something: "The warmth of his voice, his controlled use of both vibrato technique and natural falsetto range, the subtlety and deeply felt conviction of his singing were all qualities recognizably belonging to his talent but just as recognizably not to be achieved without sustained dedication and effort".

Presley's singing to his own "necessarily limited, both rhythmically and melodically," piano accompaniment, such as can be heard on the 1967 recording of "You'll Never Walk Alone",

 for Guralnick are always special occasions, because "it was always a measure of his engagement when he sat down at the keyboard to play"

 Describing his piano technique as "staccato style," Jorgensen finds that on "Without Love"

from the 1969 sessions, "his gospel-flavored treatment took it to a level of spirituality rarely matched in his career" Presley also played the instrument on the "impassioned version" of the sessions' next song, "I'll Hold You in My Heart"

 of which Guralnick writes that "there is something magical about the moment that only the most inspired singing can bring about, as Elvis loses himself in the music, words no longer lend themselves to literal translation, and singer and listener both are left emotionally wrung out by the time the song finally limps to an end"

Marsh praises his 1968 reading of "U.S. Male", "bearing down on the hard guy lyrics, not sending them up or overplaying them but tossing them around with that astonishingly tough yet gentle assurance that he brought to his Sun records."The performance on "In the Ghetto"

 is, according to Jorgensen, "devoid of any of his characteristic vocal tricks or mannerisms," instead relying on "the astonishing clarity and sensitivity of his voice" Guralnick describes the tenderness in the singing of the same song of "such unassuming, almost translucent eloquence, it is so quietly confident in its simplicity" that one is reminded of the Sun period, "offering equal parts yearning and social compassion." On "Suspicious Minds"

from the same sessions Guralnick hears essentially the same "remarkable mixture of tenderness and poise," but supplemented with "an expressive quality somewhere between stoicism (at suspected infidelity) and anguish (over impending loss)"

Music critic Henry Pleasants observes that "Presley has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary compass ... and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion"

 He identifies Presley as a high baritone, calculating his range as two octaves and a third, "from the baritone low G to the tenor high B, with an upward extension in falsetto to at least a D-flat. Presley's best octave is in the middle, D-flat to D-flat, granting an extra full step up or down"

 In Pleasants' view, his voice was "variable and unpredictable" at the bottom, "often brilliant" at the top, with the capacity for "full-voiced high Gs and As that an opera baritone might envy". Scholar Lindsay Waters, who figures Presley's range as 2¼ octaves, emphasizes that "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"

 Presley was always "able to duplicate the open, hoarse, ecstatic, screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless sound of the black rhythm-and-blues and gospel singers," writes Pleasants, and also demonstrated a remarkable ability to assimilate many other vocal styles.

Elvis Presley - Live 1977 - Last Concert

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