The performance that almost cost Elvis Presley his entire career

[NinaFromCanadaEh]

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-perfor ... re-career/

Reuben Cross
@reumilcro
Wed 5 November 2025 21:00, UK
While he may be one of the most successful solo artists to have ever graced the world of music, Elvis Presley‘s career didn’t come about without a few minor setbacks early on that almost shattered his confidence to the point of no return.

Breaking through is perhaps the hardest part of any artist’s career, and when you feel as though you’re good enough to be catching people’s attention but unable to capture their hearts in the process, it will undoubtedly lead to moments where you question whether you’re making the right decisions in terms of your chosen career path, and for Elvis, things were no different. He wasn’t the instant hit that many make him out to be, and had plenty of missed opportunities at the start of his career that went disastrously wrong.

A couple of years prior to achieving his first number one hit in the US with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, he was handed the opportunity to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, which is something that many performers in the 1950s would have seen as one of the best ways they could be afforded to grab people’s attention. As one of the most esteemed venues for country music, broadcasting its performances live on radio from Nashville, Tennessee, this was often a moment in artists’ careers where things took off.

Unfortunately for Presley, this occurrence in 1954 ended up being one of the worst performances of his entire career, but also one that acted as a learning curve rather than derailing his hopes and dreams completely. He could have taken this as a sign that this wasn’t the path he should be taking, and retired from performing before he’d even had any flirtations with mainstream success, but all in all, it made him more resilient.

At the time, he had only just released his first single, ‘That’s All Right’, three months prior to his appearance at the Grand Ole Opry in October, although it wasn’t exactly in the same country style that the institution was known for celebrating, and took on more of a blues and rock and roll approach. As a means of finding a compromise, Presley decided that he would perform a cover of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, but nerves appeared to be getting the better of the singer.

He pleaded to his bandmates: “They’re going to hate me. If they’d just let me leave, I’d go right now,” he reportedly said to bassist Buddy Killen prior to going onstage, and while Killen managed to convince him to go ahead with his performance, the reception was hostile to say the least. In a disparaging fashion, the venue manager said that he wasn’t too pleased with someone coming to the venue and performing a bluegrass song in a style that was associated with Black musicians, which allegedly left Elvis in floods of tears.

Of course, he would only have to wait until early 1956 for his first brush with success and for the world to catch up with his artistic vision, and had the performance at the Grand Ole Opry gone better, it may have been the case that he’d have made a name for himself as a country singer, rather than becoming the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ that we know him as today.