Review: Elvis Presley - His Hand In Mine (1960)

Tracks: 1) His Hand In Mine; 2) I’m Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs; 3) In My Father’s House (Are Many Mansions); 4) Milky White Way; 5) Known Only To Him; 6) I Believe In The Man In The Sky; 7) Joshua Fit The Battle; 8) Jesus Knows What I Need; 9) Swing Down Sweet Chariot; 10) Mansion Over The Hilltop; 11) If We Never Meet Again; 12) Working On The Building; 13*) Surrender; 14*) Crying In The Chapel.

REVIEW

In order to appreciate an Elvis gospel album from the early 1960s, you have to be much more of an early 1960s Elvis fan than a gospel fan. Like the several gospel songs that he’d already covered in the previous decade, or all those spiritually-themed Christmas tunes, this material is quite intentionally never treated by the artist in some special, solemn, distinctive manner simply because it deals with God’s Glory rather than any mundane subject. There are no huge choirs, no grand organs, no feelings of church-sanctioned holiness — if any of these songs had borrowed its lyrics from ʽLove Me Tenderʼ, you might never suspect anything fishy in the first place. In fact, for all his alleged spirituality and genuine fear of the Creator, Elvis certainly had a very intimate relationship with his Maker, sometimes bordering on the indecent, I’d say. (Then again, what can you expect from a guy who even tried to deviate Mary Tyler Moore from the right path in his last movie?) While he might not have been the first performer who took the idea of «loving the Lord» a little too literally, he certainly worked harder on this literal interpretation than anybody who came before him — or, perhaps, even harder than anybody after him as well. (Maybe it’s just the general confused atmosphere of 1960 that was responsible.)

This romantic relationship with the Lord is seen as a refreshing one by quite a few fans and critics alike, who take pleasure in the quiet and solitary nature of these recordings — sometimes going as far as declaring that His Hand In Mine might be one of the greatest gospel albums of all time. Such pronouncements are exaggerated in much the same way as, for instance, calling the Byrdsʼ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo one of the greatest country albums of all time: while both of these efforts are enjoyable in their own ways and display an intelligent grasp of the essence of the respective genres, major country accolades should probably be left for major country players and the principal gospel awards should be awarded to major gospel singers, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe or Mahalia Jackson. His Hand Is Mine is essentially an album of ballads, and if your tolerance level for Elvis’ ballads is relatively low, like mine, by the end of the first half of the record you will be wriggling on the edge of your seat, secretly hoping that perhaps along will come Leiber & Stoller and throw their old friend a bone, something like "everybody on the angelsʼ block, dance to Judgement Day rock".

From the most basic and formal point of view, this album is more immaculate than the Conception — perfectly sung, perfectly arranged, perfectly produced. Already on the title track you can hear Elvis doing his very best as a singer, utilizing nearly his entire vocal range and pushing The Jordanaires to do the same, while Floyd Cramer at the piano is busy blowing little silvery waves, lapping at the singers’ feet. It is the kind of arrangement that totally puts to shame the original by the Statesmen Quartet, itself no slouch for 1953 but feeling almost vaudevillish next to Elvis’ perfect little serenade for his perfect little Lord sitting up there in his perfect little skies. "Till the day he tells me why / He loves me so / I can feel his hand in mine / That’s all I need to know" — a great way to argue that pronouns really do not matter, because if you change "he" to "she" and "his" to "her" in this particular verse, there shall be no difference whatsoever.

However, as soon as the tempo speeds up and the King’s Nashville team begins goading him into a bit of spiritual ecstasy, things start feeling a bit too... old-timey? I’m sure The Jordanaires were delighted to back the man on their own song (ʽIʼm Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairsʼ was first recorded by them in 1952, when our hero was still in high school), and as a cuddly piece of catchy, fast gospel-pop, it is quite enjoyable, but throughout Elvis executes the same vocal restraint as The Jordanaires themselves did back in 1952, emphasizing melody and harmony over power and ecstasy — a far cry from the genuine African-American church atmosphere, though it would be naïve to suggest Elvis could be intentionally aiming to imitate such an atmosphere. Later on, the same moderate, «hush-hush» pattern of singing and playing will be present on ʽJoshua Fit The Battleʼ, ʽSwing Down Sweet Chariotʼ, and ʽWorking On The Buildingʼ; all of these songs play out like some covert church service taking place in a deep basement in some alternate version of America modeling itself after Stalin’s Soviet Russia — keep your voices down, brothers and sisters, the NKVD is always listening. Joshua fit the battle ’round Jericho is delivered almost in a fearful whisper, as if it were some incredible rumor passed around... which, come to think of it, it probably was in the first place, about three thousand years back in time.

Needless to say, this kind of restrained, «catacomb» approach has its own charms; but in 1960, the year when untamed rockʼnʼroll was in serious danger of being expurgated from the public conscience, it might have seemed to some that even the traditional red-hot flame of the gospel performance, for good company, was being put out in the same manner. «Sure weʼd be glad to raise Hell for the Lord, but itʼs getting late and we really donʼt want to wake up the kids, so keep the noise level down, please». In retrospect, now that we are able to look back on 1960 as the year in which rock’n’roll took a quick vacation rather than got a toe tag, such context should no longer be hurting the overall effect — after all, we got enough «loud» and «ecstatic» gospel recordings in our backlog to leave space for a few quiet and intimate ones, right?

Yet even so, I can’t help wondering how much more powerful those workouts would have been, had they been put on record before the Army — or, at least, had they been produced at some slightly less inhibited location, like Atlantic’s studios, for instance (LaVern Baker’s ‘Saved’, in terms of sheer energy, blows everything on this album out of the water — even if it does have a slightly comical sheen to it, which was absolutely not Elvis’ purpose). Sure, Elvis would have probably completely blurred the line between gospel and rock’n’roll, but (a) that’s a line begging to be blurred in the first place, (b) isn’t that better than blurring the line between gospel and soft country-pop, which he does on here instead?

Individual comments on individual tracks are very hard to produce; His Hand In Mine has two settings — slow / senti­mental and fast / playful — and each of these utilizes very similar arrangements and atmospheres. The crucial element for both settings are the interactions between the Apostle (St. Elvis of Tupelo) and the acolytes (The Jordanaires); the element that separates the two is Floyd Cramer’s expressive piano playing, functioning as the unseen presence of the Dove of the Holy Spirit on the slow setting — if justice were truly served, I’d say we should be seeing Floyd, rather than Elvis, sitting at that piano on the front cover. Meanwhile, for the fast setting what matters most is the steady, pumping groove of the rhythm section — let it be noted that the entire album features not a single instrumental solo, emphasizing the idea that singing God’s praise should be an exercise in collective humility rather than individual self-promotion. (That is, unless the individual in question happens to be St. Elvis of Tupelo himself).

Interestingly, although the official credits for the record list Scotty Moore on electric guitar and Boots Randolph on saxo­phone, I’m pretty hard pressed to find traces of either instrument on the record — both of them might be hiding somewhere out there in the shadows, but I’m sure that neither one nor the other ever manifest themselves expressly, presumably for fear of making the album less subdued than it was originally intended. On the positive side, there are no strings, either: the combination of drums, bass, acoustic guitar, and Cramer’s all-overriding piano leads is fairly tasteful, so that we might accuse Elvis of underselling the «gut power» aspect of the gospel genre, but never of crassly cheapening the gospel vibe or «selling it out» to the lowest common denominator.

And it does look like the lowest common denominator was not that impressed: His Hand In Mine only reached #13 on the charts, a far cry from the endless top spots of his 1950s LPs (even Christmas Album had hit #1, for Godʼs sake!) — a clear sign that «gospel Elvis» was not really going to cut it either for his younger followers (whose disappointment would be predictable) or for their parents. Theoretically, one could praise the move as a decidedly anti-commercial challenge on Elvis’ part — but this is only in retrospect; at no point in his personal history was Elvis actually encouraged by his superiors to make daring anti-commercial moves, and I am pretty sure that the RCA executives were secretly hoping that by now, the legend of Elvis was strong enough to make him sell like hotcakes even if he decided to join Glenn Gould for an improvised vocalize of the Goldberg Variations. On the other hand, the relative commercial failure of the album did not stop them from allowing the King to put out two more gospel albums over the next decade — after all, each such attempt could solidify and repair Elvis’ musical reputation in the eyes of all those who hated his movies.

On the whole, the critical reputation of His Hand In Mine seems to have significantly increased in recent decades, as part of a larger movement to re-assess and re-appraise Elvisʼ pop years; Rolling Stone and The All-Music Guide never fail to remind you now how Elvis was the greatest white gospel singer of his epoch. What they rarely mention explicitly is that the only principal difference between Elvis’ love ballads and gospel ballads may be a sense of extra seriousness and belief displayed on the latter, as opposed to relative «indifference» and «acting» on some of the former. But even this difference should not be overstated. When I hear Elvis crooning "I believe in the man in the sky", I get more of a feeling that he is trying to woo a crowd of bug-eyed gullible kids than reaffirming himself in his own faith, which is presumably what the song is all about in the first place. It’s tastefully suave and charming, but «depth» is not the kind of word that springs to mind while the song is weaving its smooth spider web around you.

For the record, the same Nashville sessions that yielded this LP in its entirety also produced ‘Crying In The Chapel’, an outtake that was shelved until 1965, when it became an unexpected «retro hit»; and a big secular hit in ‘Surrender’, a Pomus-Shuman reworking of the Neapolitan song ‘Torna A Surriento’. From a purely linguistic point, I admire the monde­greenish genius of turning Surriento into Surrender; from an aesthetic point, I hate Neapolitan songs with almost as much passion as Pavarotti sings them, so you can tell ‘Surrender’, much like ‘It’s Now Or Never’, is never going to become one of my favorite Elvis tunes of the decade. But this is just a reactionary reaction from someone who has never been able to make peace with the idea that for most people, «classical music» = «The Three Tenors»; on an emotionally detached level, it is hard not to admit that ‘Surrender’ features Elvis at his very technical best.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Elvis Presley