Today (September 27) marks the release of a new Elvis Presley 5-CD box set, Young Man with a Big Beat, which includes a previously-unreleased version one of his most memorable songs, Love Me Tender.
The box set was created by one of the leading Elvis experts, Ernst Mikael Jørgensen, author of Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, and focuses on the year 1956, when Presley went from an up-and-coming country singer to one of the biggest pop music stars in the United States.
The box set includes one live disc of 10 songs recorded at a concert in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1956, in front of a crowd of 7,000 – offering a glimpse of a star in the making.
“You hear Elvis singing the hits, and yet, it shows that other Elvis – that Elvis who was so different from the recording artist Elvis," Jørgensen says. "When he’s onstage he eases people. You can hear him go bananas when he twists his legs, he changes the lyrics, he mocks his own songs and his own talking.”
The package has an 80-page timeline that chronicles Presley’s year of dominance, with press interviews showing the transition from insecure artist in early 1956 to a more confident star later that same year.