>While Presley performed several of his classic ballads for the '68 Comeback Special, the sound of the show was dominated by

aggressive rock and roll. He would record few new straight-ahead rock and roll songs thereafter; as he explained, they were "hard

to find". A significant exception was "Burning Love", his last major hit on the pop charts. Like his work of the 1950s, Presley's

subsequent recordings reworked pop and country songs, but in markedly different permutations. His stylistic range now began to

embrace a more contemporary rock sound as well as soul and funk. Much of Elvis In Memphis, as well as "Suspicious Minds", cut at

the same sessions, reflected his new rock and soul fusion. In the mid-1970s, many of his singles found a home on country radio,

the field where he first became a star.

Vocal style and range
Music critic Henry Pleasants observes that "Elvis Presley has been described variously as a baritone and a tenor. An extraordinary

compass ... and a very wide range of vocal color have something to do with this divergence of opinion." He identifies Presley as a

high baritone, calculating his range as two octaves and a third, "from the baritone low G to the tenor high B, with an upward

extension in falsetto to at least a D-flat. Presley's best octave is in the middle, D-flat to D-flat, granting an extra full step

up or down." In Pleasants' view, his voice was "variable and unpredictable" at the bottom, "often brilliant" at the top, with the

capacity for "full-voiced high Gs and As that an opera baritone might envy." Scholar Lindsay Waters, who figures Presley's range

as two and a quarter octaves, emphasizes that "his voice had an emotional range from tender whispers to sighs down to shouts,

grunts, grumbles and sheer gruffness that could move the listener from calmness and surrender, to fear. His voice can not be

measured in octaves, but in decibels; even that misses the problem of how to measure delicate whispers that are hardly audible at

all." Presley was always "able to duplicate the open, hoarse, ecstatic, screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless sound of the black

rhythm-and-blues and gospel singers," writes Pleasants, and also demonstrated a remarkable ability to assimilate many other vocal

styles.

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