What constituted as scandalous in the 1950s might seem laughably tame today, but it was enough to seriously threaten the careers of mainstream stars like Elvis Presley. Just one year earlier, the Boston Catholic Diocese banned The Everly Brothers from local radio because of a song about a young couple falling asleep in a movie theatre and missing their curfew. Years later, Don Everly would call the song a “harmless little ditty.” Phil Everly called it an “innocent little song.” And to be fair, it was.
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But society was far (far) more conservative back then. That meant fellow artists like Presley needed to toe the line between being sexual enough to attract the masses without going full-on salacious—by 1950s standards, anyway. During a January 1957 studio session at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, Presley and his band tracked several covers, one of which gave Colonel Tom Parker and RCA pause.
To their credit, “One Night (Of Sin)” laid out the song’s subject matter plain as day in the title. Dave Bartholomew and Pearl King wrote the track, which included lines like, “One night of sin is what I’m now paying for / The things I did and I saw would make the earth stand still.” If the church was going to get up in arms about The Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie”, with lines like “We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot,” then the same could be expected of the Presley number.
Elvis Presley Pushed Hard to Record the Song (Without the Scandalous Lyrics)
Unfortunately for Elvis Presley and his band, the one track the management didn’t want them to cut was the song they felt most comfortable performing. Other musical selections fell flat, either due to the fault of the backing instrumentalists or a lackluster vocal take from Presley. The band felt good about “One Night (Of Sin)”, and that translated to the mix. Determined to cut his version of the song, Presley pushed for his manager and RCA to renegotiate the publishing rights so that they could change the lyrics. In the end, “One night of sin is what I’m now paying for,” turned into, “One night with you is what I’m now praying for.”
Still plenty of room for sexual innuendo, but just saccharine enough to pass the inspection of a Puritanistic listenership. Of course, Presley at his best would imbue a sensuality into virtually anything he sang. “One Night” (its new title) was no exception. “Freed from worry about the song itself, he was all intensity and command,” Ernst Jorgensen wrote in Elvis Presley: A Life in Music.
RCA intended the song to be on the soundtrack for the 1957 musical drama, Loving You. However, the label ultimately decided to release the song as a standalone single on October 21, 1958. It was a chart-topping hit in the U.K. and Ireland. The song performed relatively well in the U.S., peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart. A version of the song with its original lyrics, which Presley recorded at the same January 1957 sessions, appears on the 1983 compilation album, Elvis: A Legendary Performer, Volume 4.
Photo by Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
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