Florida tours . That spring she had conducted one of the earliest interviews with him to publicize his Florida dates and was totally taken with both his character ( he confided to her how much he wanted to succeed in order to help out his mother and father ) and his talent . When she presented the song to him in Nashville , she promised him it would be his first million-selling hit .
The song had come about through a peculiar combination of circumstances .
It was an odd , almost morbid composition , which Axton had written with songwriter Tommy Durden after Tommy showed her a newspaper story about a man who had committed suicide and left a note saying , “ I walk a lonely street .” “ It stunned me ,” said Mae . “ I said to Tommy , ‘ Everybody in the world has somebody who cares . Let ’ s put a Heartbreak Hotel at the end of this lonely street .’ And he said , ‘ Let ’ s do .’ So we wrote it .” And Mae gave a third of the writer ’ s credit to Elvis because of what he had said to her in Florida .
It was a strange choice by any kind of conventional wisdom : gloomy , world-weary , definitely at odds with the irrepressibly vibrant image that Elvis had projected from the start . In theory it was not an altogether comfortable fit , and Sam Phillips pronounced the finished product a “ morbid mess ,” but Elvis clearly believed in it and put everything he had into it , and whatever Steve Sholes ’ or Nashville division head Chet Atkins ’ personal reservations , the heavy overlay of echo , and Bill Black ’ s gloomy bass , along with Scotty Moore ’ s sharp dramatic accents on guitar , created a powerful , emotion-laden effect .
And that was what they spent the rest of the afternoon on .
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