Elvis Presley – Trying To Get To You (68 Comeback Special)

Elvis heard it once in a Memphis record store, and it became the one song he never stopped singing — because his father asked him to record it.

Sometime in 1954, a young Elvis Presley stood in a Memphis record store and heard a record by an R&B vocal group called the Eagles — a Washington, D.C. quintet, not the California band that would come later. The song was “Trying to Get to You,” and something in it caught him hard enough that he carried it into Sun Studio and made it his own. He would go on singing it for the rest of his life, all the way to his final tour in 1977. There was a reason it stuck: his father, Vernon, had loved the Eagles’ original, and reportedly asked his son to record it.

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“Trying to Get to You” was written by the R&B songwriting team of Charles Singleton and Rose Marie McCoy, who turned it out in 1954 among a run of hits for artists like Ruth Brown and Nat King Cole. When McCoy first heard the unknown kid from Memphis cut it, she wasn’t impressed — she said later the writers thought he was terrible, that they didn’t understand what he was doing, though she came around fast once the records started selling. What Elvis heard in it was a song about pure distance and longing: a man traveling over mountains and through valleys, running night and day, driven by a single letter and a single purpose.

He recorded the definitive version at Sun on July 11, 1955, in one of the most productive single days of his early career — the same session yielded “Mystery Train” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Scotty Moore played guitar, Bill Black the bass, Memphis drummer Johnny Bernero sat in, and Sam Phillips ran the board.

The piano Sam Phillips erased

The recording carries a small hidden story. On an earlier attempt, Elvis played piano on the track himself, but his playing wasn’t up to Phillips’s standard, so the producer simply erased the piano from the master — leaving only the voice, Scotty Moore’s guitar, Black’s bass, and the drums. Moore’s guitar solo took the place of the saxophone break on the Eagles’ original. Stripped down that way, the performance puts everything on Elvis’s voice, which climbs and strains and holds in a way that shows exactly why a nineteen-year-old from Tupelo was about to change American music. The track first reached listeners on his 1956 debut album for RCA, an LP that spent ten weeks at No. 1.

Back in black at the ’68 Special

The performance on this page comes from thirteen years later, and it is one of the emotional high points of Elvis’s career. During the 1968 television special that revived him — the show now known as the ’68 Comeback Special — Elvis sat down among his old bandmates in a tight black leather suit and returned to the songs that had made him, “Trying to Get to You” among them. Long-time fans and collectors tend to rank this version alongside the sit-down show’s most passionate moments, Elvis throwing himself into a deep cut he clearly loved rather than a required hit. The song was never a single, never a chart entry — it was simply one he kept coming back to, year after year, for his own sake as much as anyone’s. What you’re watching is not the 1955 record but that 1968 return to it, a man in his thirties reaching back for a song he’d first fallen for as a teenager in a record shop.