Can’t Help Falling in Love

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Can’t Help Falling in Love
Written by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss, 1961

This tender ballad has three names on it. Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore were cousins who worked together as the songwriting and producing team known as “Hugo & Luigi.” George David Weiss was a lyricist who later co-wrote “What a Wonderful World.” They wrote the song in 1961 for Elvis Presley’s movie Blue Hawaii.

The tune is much older than it sounds. Its melody is borrowed from “Plaisir d’amour,” a French love song composed in 1784 by Jean-Paul-Égide Martini. Martini set his music to a poem from a novel by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. So when Elvis sang it, he was singing a melody nearly two hundred years old.

There’s a curious detail hidden in the words. The song was first written from a woman’s point of view, as “Can’t Help Falling in Love with Him.” That explains why the opening lines end on “in” and “sin” rather than on words that rhyme with “you.”

Elvis recorded it at Radio Recorders in Hollywood on March 23, 1961, and it took him 29 takes to get the vocal just right. In the film, his character gives his girlfriend’s grandmother a music box for her birthday. She opens it, and Elvis begins to sing.

RCA released the song as a single on November 21, 1961, with “Rock-A-Hula Baby” on the other side. It climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, kept out of the top spot by Joey Dee and the Starliters’ dance craze hit “Peppermint Twist.” It held No. 1 on Billboard’s easy-listening chart for six weeks and spent four weeks at No. 1 in Britain in 1962. The Blue Hawaii soundtrack album stayed at No. 1 for twenty weeks.

The song stayed close to Elvis for the rest of his life. In his concerts of the late 1960s and 1970s, it became his farewell number, including the close of his 1973 Aloha from Hawaii broadcast. It was also the last song he ever sang on stage, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis on June 26, 1977.

Many others have recorded it since. Andy Williams took it to No. 3 in Britain in 1970. In 1993, the British reggae band UB40 recorded a breezy, island-flavored version for the movie Sliver. It spent seven weeks at No. 1 in America and also topped the British charts, introducing the old melody to yet another generation.