Love Me Tender

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Love Me Tender

Written by Ken Darby (credited to Elvis Presley and Vera Matson), 1956, set to George R. Poulton’s 1861 melody “Aura Lea”

Few love songs feel as gentle as this one, and part of its charm is that the tune was already almost a hundred years old when Elvis sang it. The melody comes from “Aura Lea,” a sentimental parlor ballad published in 1861, with music by George R. Poulton and words by W. W. Fosdick. It became a favorite during the Civil War, sung around soldiers’ campfires on both sides, and later turned up at West Point under the name “Army Blue.” By the 1950s it was one of those old melodies that many people knew without knowing where it came from.

In 1956, Twentieth Century Fox was making a Civil War–era western called The Reno Brothers, which would be the first movie to feature a young singer named Elvis Presley. The studio’s musical director, Ken Darby, was asked to write songs for him. Darby took the old “Aura Lea” melody, reshaped it a little, and wrote new words for it, giving it the simple, heartfelt quality that suited Elvis’s softer side.

Then comes the curious part. When the record came out, the songwriting credit went to Elvis Presley and Vera Matson, not to Ken Darby. Vera Matson was Darby’s wife. Elvis’s name was on it because of a common arrangement of the day: songs he recorded were often published through his own company, and a share of the credit came with that. Elvis never claimed to have written it. When Darby was asked why he had put his wife’s name on the song, he reportedly answered that he did it because she didn’t write it either. It’s a wry little footnote to one of the most tender songs of the era.

Elvis introduced the song to the country on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956, before the film or the record was released. It is often reported that more than half of the nation’s television audience was watching that night. The response was so strong that roughly a million advance orders poured in, something almost unheard of at the time, and the studio decided to rename the movie after the song. Love Me Tender opened in theaters that November.

The single climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard charts and stayed there for several weeks. There’s one more story from the film that audiences of the day remember. Elvis’s character dies at the end, and early viewers were upset to see him go. So the studio added a closing image of Elvis, superimposed over the final scene, singing the song one more time as the movie fades out. Many people who saw it in 1956 still recall that moment.

Over the years the song has been recorded by many other artists, but it remains closely tied to Elvis. For many of us, it is the song that showed there was more to the young rock and roller than swiveling hips: a quiet, sincere voice that could hold a room still.