three cases." It

became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard chart, a position it held for 10 weeks.While Presley was not an

innovative instrumentalist like Moore or contemporary African American rockers Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, cultural historian

Gilbert B. Rodman argues that the album's cover image, "of Elvis having the time of his life on stage with a guitar in his hands

played a crucial role in positioning the guitar...as the instrument that best captured the style and spirit of this new music."

Musical style
Influences
Presley's earliest musical influence came from gospel. His mother recalled that from the age of two, at the Assembly of God church

in Tupelo attended by the family, "he would slide down off my lap, run into the aisle and scramble up to the platform. There he

would stand looking at the choir and trying to sing with them." In Memphis, Presley frequently attended all-night gospel singings

at the Ellis Auditorium, where groups such as the Statesmen Quartet led the music in a style that, Guralnick suggests, sowed the

seeds of Presley's future stage act:

The Statesmen were an electric combination ... featuring some of the most thrillingly emotive singing and daringly unconventional

showmanship in the entertainment world ... dressed in suits that might have come out of the window of Lansky's. ... Bass singer

Jim Wetherington, known universally as the Big Chief, maintained a steady bottom, ceaselessly jiggling first his left leg, then

his right, with the material of the pants leg ballooning out and shimmering. "He went about as far as you could go in gospel

music," said Jake Hess. "The women would jump up, just like they do for the pop shows." Preachers frequently objected to the lewd

movements ... but audiences reacted with screams and swoons.
As a teenager, Presley's musical interests were wide-ranging, and he was deeply informed about African American musical idioms as

well as white ones (see "Teenage life in Memphis"). Though he never had any formal training, he was blessed with a remarkable

memory, and his musical knowledge was already considerable by the time he made his first professional recordings in 1954 at the

age of 19. When Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller met him two years later, they were astonished at his encyclopedic understanding of

the blues.At a press conference the following year, he proudly declared, "I know practically every religious song that's ever been

written."

Genres
Music scholar Paul Friedlander describes the elements of the rockabilly style, which he characterizes as "essentially ... an Elvis

Presley construction", that the singer and his band mates developed at Sun Records: "the raw, emotive, and slurred vocal style and

emphasis on rhythmic feeling [of] the blues with the string band and strummed rhythm guitar [of] country". Moore's guitar solo in

"That's All Right", the group's first record, "a combination of Merle Travis–style country finger-picking, double-stop slides

from acoustic boogie, and blues-based bent-note, single-string work, is a microcosm of this fusion."

At RCA, Presley's rock and roll sound grew distinct from rockabilly with group chorus vocals, more heavily amplified electric

guitars and a tougher, more intense manner. While he was known for taking songs from various sources and giving them a

rockabilly/rock and roll treatment, he also recorded songs in other genres from early in his career, from the pop standard "Blue

Moon" at Sun to the country ballad "How's the World Treating You?" on his second LP to the blues of "Santa Claus Is Back In Town".

In 1957, his first gospel record was released, the four-song EP Peace in the Valley. Certified as a million seller, it became the

top-selling gospel EP in recording history. Presley would record gospel periodically for the rest of his life.

After his return from military service in 1960, Presley continued to perform rock and roll, but the characteristic style was

substantially toned down. His first post-Army single, the number one hit "Stuck on You", is typical of this shift. RCA publicity

materials referred to its "mild rock beat"; discographer Ernst Jorgensen calls it "upbeat pop". The modern blues/R&B sound

captured so successfully on Elvis Is Back! was essentially abandoned for six years until such 1966–67 recordings as "Down in the

Alley" and "Hi-Heel Sneakers". The singer's output during most of the 1960s emphasized pop music, often in the form of ballads

such as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?", a number one in 1960. While that was a dramatic number, most of what Presley recorded for his

movie soundtracks was in a much lighter vein.