Elvis' Golden Records

Elvis' Golden Records collects nine number one A-sides along with four B-sides, "Loving You", "That's When Your Heartaches Begin", "Treat Me Nice" and "Anyway You Want Me", and one album track, "Love Me", originally issued on the 1956 LP Elvis. Every flip-side also hit the chart separately from its parent hit side, with four making the Top 40; chart positions noted for those tracks individually. "Love Me" was also included on the Elvis Vol. 1 EP single which made the top ten on the singles chart.

In the 1950s, a gold record awarded for a single referred to sales of one million units, different from the definition in use by the late 1970s for albums, where a gold record came to mean album sales of 500,000 units. Exact figures from the RIAA are difficult to confirm, but in the press conference from September 22, 1958, originally released on the RCA Victor EP Elvis Sails in 1958 and included on disc four of the RCA CD boxed set The King of Rock 'n' Roll: The Complete 50s Masters, the interviewer asked Presley for a tally of his gold records. Presley responded, "I have 25 million sellers, and two albums that have sold a million each."[2]

Most of the songs in the compilation were recorded at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, with other sessions at the RCA Victor studios in New York City, at 20th Century-Fox's Stage One in Hollywood, and the RCA Victor studios in Nashville, Tennessee. Although RCA Victor executive Steve Sholes was the in-house A&R man for Presley, and nominally in charge of his recording sessions at RCA Victor, accounts by Presley historian Peter Guralnick and Presley discographer Ernst Mikael Jorgensen indicate that Presley himself acted as the producer for his RCA Victor sessions in the 1950s.

The unified Billboard Hot 100 singles chart was not created until August, 1958, after the release of this compilation, and of course after the release of all of these singles. Chart positions referenced were taken from the "Best Sellers in Stores" chart, although early statistics for rock and roll records also came from the "Most Played in Jukeboxes" chart.

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[3]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music	[4]

In a review for AllMusic, Bruce Eder commented:

This was rock & roll's first greatest-hits album, and it set the standard for all others to follow ... Each of the 14 songs had earned a Gold record award for a million sales, a record unequaled at that time by anyone else in rock & roll ... Elvis' Golden Records does give a bite-sized glimpse of where Elvis had come from and where he was going (for better or worse) musically on the eve of heading into the Army.[3]

Elvis' Golden Records is one of Presley's most popular albums and has remained consistently available since its original 1958 issue. RCA first reissued the original 14 track album on compact disc in 1984. This release, in reprocessed (simulated) stereo sound, was quickly withdrawn and the album was reissued in original monophonic. RCA reissued the album on CD again in 1997 and added six bonus tracks, with "Blue Suede Shoes" an unusual track in that it was issued simultaneously in conjunction with every track from Elvis' debut LP Elvis Presley in singles form, more than five months after the release of the album on March 23. Two more charting B-sides, "I Was the One" and "My Baby Left Me", and three Sun Records tracks rounded out the compact disc. RCA Victor had purchased the rights to reissue Sun material when buying Elvis' contract from Sam Phillips in 1955, using Sun recordings to fill out album tracks throughout the decade.

Details are taken from the 1958 and 1997 RCA Records albums liner notes and may differ from other sources.[5] See singles discography and song list for additional information.

Original LP

1997 CD reissue

Original UK LP

• Elvis' Golden Records at Discogs (list of releases)
• LPM-1707 Elvis Presley Guide part of The Elvis Presley Record Research Database