On July 18, 1953, a teenager by the name of Elvis Presley arrived at a Memphis recording studio. He carried a beat-up guitar and had $4 in his pocket — enough to make his first recording. The music world would never be quite the same.
The recording session would produce one single acetate disc, an artefact that has been called “the holy grail of rock’n’roll history”. When it was bought at auction in January for $300,000 by an anonymous buyer it seemed destined for some tycoon’s private collection.
Now, however, it has been revealed that the buyer was the musician Jack White, and that he is going to reissue Elvis’s earliest tracks on vinyl on April 18, to mark World Record Store Day.
The original disc carries two ballads, My Happiness and That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.
The King may have been a teenager when he made it — more a prince, perhaps — but the haunting voice captured on the crackly 10in acetate record is unmistakable.
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Legend has it that the Presley family did not have a record player so the young Elvis went to the home of a friend, Ed Leek, to listen to it. Elvis left the record at Leek’s house, and Leek kept it for 60 years before leaving it to his niece, who put it up for auction.
White, best known for his band the White Stripes, will release the tracks in a campaign to safeguard the future of the world’s independent record stores in the digital age. White is also a champion of vinyl, a medium that continues to be popular with audiophiles.
“It’s the movie theatre compared to the iPhone,” White recently told Billboard magazine of the difference between digital music and a vinyl record.
White will reissue the Elvis tracks in two forms. First, on April 18, his record label, Third Man Records, will offer a limited-edition 10in 78rpm disc.
“From reproducing the typewritten labels . . . to being packaged in a plain, of-the-era sleeve, the utmost attention to detail has been paid to create an object so close to the historic original as to almost be indistinguishable from one other,” Third Man Records promises.
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Later in the year, a 7in 45rpm record featuring restored versions of the two Elvis songs will go on sale.