Elvis
It’s been six years since Illinois native Mason Ramsey, then 11 years old, caught the world’s attention after a video of Ramsey yodeling the Hank Williams Sr.’s classic “Lovesick Blues” went viral. In the years following, he’s proven adept at adding more musical milestones — from his song “Famous,” which reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in 2018, to joining Lil Nas X on a remix of “Old Town Road” the following year.
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Now 17, Ramsey is keen to show the world that his appreciation of classic music extends far beyond country’s pioneering greats such as Williams. Sure, he still includes “Lovesick Blues” in his concert sets, but on his debut full-length album I’ll See You In My Dreams (out on Atlantic Records) he delves headlong into the sonically varied, vintage sounds of the 1950s through the 1970s.
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Ramsey, who splits his time between Nashville and his home in Illinois, describes his sound as “American Country Soul,” adding, “I do Americana and classic gentlemen’s country with soul, and I blend those sounds together to create the sound I love.”
The 14-song platter of music easily conveys the inspirations of artists including Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and Ricky Nelson. Ramsey’s voice has matured into an immensely versatile instrument, with a warm patina that makes classic crooner material a natural musical vessel. As his sound has changed, so has his aesthetic, swapping the jeans and starched shirts for ’70s-inspired, sometimes-embroidered suits, wide-collared shirts, flared pants and the occasional scarf.
Ramsey was raised in Illinois by his grandparents, who didn’t have access to the internet for many years. Shortly after experiencing that sudden rush of fame, he began searching out the music of Elvis, Johnny Cash and Orbison online.
“We didn’t stream music, but we did buy CDs,” he recalls. “I started getting into ’50s and ’60s music. Then, once we had internet access, I found songs from artists like Elvis and [Presley’s song] ‘That’s Alright,’ and everything went from that point.”
Earlier this year, Ramsey began working with writer-producer Dan Fernandez, known for his work with artists including Maren Morris and Lee Brice, with his songs having been recorded by Nate Smith, Boy Named Banjo and others. Ramsey and Fernandez co-wrote all 14 songs together, and recorded much of the project in Fernandez’s home studio. When they first began collaborating, Ramsey had previously released a few EPs, but says, “I felt like I was still missing my sound, as if I was still searching for what moved me, sound-wise.”
In January, they talked via phone, discussing Ramsey’s influences. The following day they went into the studio and began writing songs that evoked that timeless style of the songs of Nelson and Presley.
“It made me so happy for someone to understand my sound and just overall helped me feel more connected with my music,” Ramsey says. “I had actually ended up writing with him a few years before, so it was awesome to see him again. He helped me find the music part of what I wanted and I just put the lyrics to the music.”
The project is filled with the mellow, piano-based countrypolitan of “Come Pick Me Up,” and the smooth ’50s vibe of “Blue Over You,” while “All the Way to Memphis” sizzles with a soulful swagger that feels pulled from the heart on Sun Studio.
“I had been spending some time with this girl,” he says of the inspiration for “All the Way to Memphis.” “She lived pretty close to Memphis and I got to know her pretty well. Like I said, we were hanging out quite a bit, and I just really wanted to tell her what I would do to see her in the song. And it talks about that I would swim to Mississippi and I would run all the way to Memphis just for her. And so that song is pretty much just about doing whatever I can to go see her.”
Meanwhile, “The Woman From Havana” is flush with a sultry, old-school dinner club vibe and accented with a Latin flair.
“My producer has family from Cuba. He was playing a few licks on a Spanish traditional guitar, and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a song with like a little spaghetti guitar sound mixed with a bit of a Spanish flavor?’ We just started playing around with the music and the lyrics just kind of painted themselves. We made up this song about this guy that is in love with this girl and she’s from Havana. He just wants to dance with her and wants her to fall in love with him.”
It’s not only Ramsey’s fans who have taken notice of his new, retro-tilted sound. Lana Del Rey brought Ramsey onstage at her Fenway Park concert to perform Ramsey’s “Blue Over You” in June.
“I had put out ‘Blue Over You’ and posted a video of the song on my socials, and she commented and said, ‘We need to collab,’” Ramsey recalls. “A couple of months later, she invited me to Fenway, and we sang ‘Blue Over You’ together. It was such a magical moment for me and a fun time. She is very — if you were to talk to her, it is almost as if you’ve known her forever. She’s just a down to earth, very sweet person.”
However, though Del Rey has previously said she is set to release the country album Lasso, Ramsey says a collab between the two is not in the works at the moment.
“That has not been part of the conversation yet, but hopefully in the future,” he says. “I would love that very much — if she put out a country album and I could have a feature on it, I’d be so honored.”
As he was creating his new album, Ramsey and his producer did receive a request from Atlantic Records about writing and recording a song for the Twisters soundtrack, resulting in his foot-stomping rocker “Shake, Shake (All Night Long).”
“That was a huge deal,” Ramsey says. “We took a break from our album — which is great because we kind of needed it — but we wrote the song and it only took us about, 45 minutes to an hour to write, and then we immediately pitched it to the label. It just really had groove and it just had a good pocket, a high-energy type of song.”
Notably, Ramsey’s love of all things vintage extends beyond music and clothing. “I love trucks, specially older vehicles,” says Ramsey, who has a blue and white 1968 Chevrolet K10 that he’s fixed up. “I love that truck and I drive it all over town.”
With tour dates on the books for his Falls Into Place Tour Pt 2 trek, and a batch of music he closely connects with, he says, “I’m just super-excited to finally accomplish my first album. All of these songs came together simply and easy, because we don’t overthink on the writing — we just write what is on our hearts and minds, and put it on paper.”
They’ve both been gone for decades, and yet it’s still possible to hear two Country Music Hall of Fame members who started at Sun Records, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, in new ways.
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Presley is the subject of Memphis (due Aug. 9 from RCA/Legacy), a 111-track, five-disc box set that mines recordings from five different locations in his adopted hometown: the Sun Recording Studio, the American Studios, the Stax Studio, the Mid-South Coliseum and Graceland Mansion’s Jungle Room. On three of the studio discs, previously released tracks are remixed strictly using the instrumentation from the core tracking session, leaving out material that was overdubbed at a later date.
“By not having the additional strings and backing vocals, there [is] an intimacy to it that would reveal things that we hadn’t heard before,” says Memphis producer Ernst Jorgensen, a well-established Presley authority. “So songs come out with a different feel to them.”
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The Presley package arrives with the 70th anniversary of his seminal recording of “That’s All Right,” the single that launched his career.
Coincidentally, Cash’s 11-track Songwriter (released June 28 by Mercury Nashville/Universal Music Enterprises) includes the similarly titled “Well Alright” — a previously unreleased, 30-year-old song that echoes the spacious, simplistic sound that characterized his own Sun recordings. John Carter Cash produced the album with David Ferguson, isolating the Man in Black’s vocals from a series of 1993 recordings and reframing them with new arrangements.
“I always wanted to know what would happen if it went down to the bare essence of the correct, simple picture behind my father,” John Carter said during a media listening event earlier this year. It’s “the right instrumentation, the sound of Johnny Cash supported by people who had played with him, mostly.”
It’s no secret that record labels are able to bolster their bottom lines by repackaging and/or reimagining catalog material from their best-selling artists, though after creating multiple retro releases of classic artists, it becomes increasingly difficult to find fresh ways to celebrate them. The new Presley and Cash releases succeed in representing multiple facets of each performer’s career. Memphis captures Presley in his early rockabilly stage, explores his “Suspicious Minds” comeback era and wraps with the massive productions that marked his live shows and studio efforts in his final, mid-’70s years.
Songwriter, while drawing on Cash cuts from 1993, points to different eras in his own evolution. “Well Alright,” by adapting “boom-chick” production to a story about meeting a woman in a laundromat, has elements of his 1957 hit “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” “I Love You Tonite” reflects on his relationship with June Carter Cash while employing an appropriate country-ballad posture. “Hello Out There” — written after the 1977 launch of the Voyager spacecraft — takes a spiritual view of the universe’s expanse, much like his “I fly a starship” verse in “Highwayman.” And the tremolo-enhanced “Spotlight,” with a bluesy guitar solo by Dan Auerbach,fits neatly into the Americana genre that coalesced during Cash’s latter years.
“Dad saw no limits, and he said, ‘Always follow your heart,’ ” John Carter recalled. “So that’s what we did.”
Working with catalogs of such cultural heft as Presley and Cash is not for the faint of heart. “It’s very nerve-wracking,” says Memphis-based engineer Matt Ross-Spang, who remixed Memphis.
With the Cash material, the job was to enhance unfamiliar songs with musical settings that felt appropriate to his artistic sensibilities. With Presley, the assignment involved treating familiar performances — including a number of classics — with reverence, even while revising them. “You want to make it better, but you also don’t want to take it out of the realm of how we’ve all heard it and loved it all these decades,” Ross-Spang says. “I tried to really be true to the original. I tried to be true to the musicians’ and the producers’ direction.”
In the new remix of “Kentucky Rain,” sans the background chorus and horn section, Hammond B-3 stabs become suddenly evident. And on Presley’s underappreciated “My Boy,” Ronnie Tutt’s drum fills take on extra importance. In some ways, it sets up the sound of the live disc, where Tutt is a driving force.
“In a wonderful way, he’s overplaying,” Ross-Spang observes. “Every hip shake from Elvis, every scarf throw, every look or hand throw Elvis does, Ronnie’s doing an amazing drum fill. All the songs are going 90 miles an hour, and Ronnie’s leading the charge. It’s incredible. A big reason why those live shows were so exciting was Ronnie Tutt’s drums.”
Considered in tandem, Presley’s Memphis and Cash’s Songwriter hint at interesting parallels between both artists. They each played a role in the development of rockabilly while they were Sun labelmates in the 1950s. And both employed large concert ensembles during the 1970s — Presley stacked two backing vocal groups atop a large-size live band; Cash similarly performed on his ABC-TV show in the early 1970s with his band expanded by two supporting vocal groups (The Carter Family and The Statler Brothers), plus a sizable orchestra.
Cash eventually returned to a simpler sound with his Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings, beginning just months after he recorded the vocals that appear on Songwriter. Since Presley died at age 42, how he would have approached his senior recording years remains a mystery. But the two packages provide a reminder of how two significant 20th-century voices drew on small-town roots music to help shape the arc of modern country.
“They had great determination to go along with the melting pot of music that they came from,” Jorgensen notes. “Any kind of music — if you came from Arkansas, or Mississippi or Louisiana — was available to you. You couldn’t say the same about a lot of city environments.”
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For many, thoughts of the late, Tupelo, Mississippi-born music icon Elvis Presley center around his emotional, husky vocals, genre-defying catalog of enduring recordings, signature hip gyrations, electrifying performance style, jet black hair and bedazzled jumpsuits.
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But for another Southern-born singer-songwriter, the Tennessee and Georgia-raised Kane Brown — who to date has earned 10 Billboard Country Airplay No. 1 hits, including “Heaven,” “What Ifs” and most recently, “Bury Me in Georgia” — Presley’s name and music conjure thoughts of personal connection with a beloved family member.
“My nana is a huge Elvis fan and always has been,” Brown tells Billboard via email. “Growing up, I remember her carrying around a bag with Elvis’ face on it, and my earliest memories of Elvis and his music were of listening to him with her, and how excited she is and still gets hearing his music. My nana is a superhero, and so having that connection with and memory with her and his music is something that means a lot to me.”
On Wednesday (Nov. 29), Brown will be one of several performers helping to celebrate the legacy of the late Presley — as part of the new holiday special, Christmas at Graceland, which airs on NBC beginning at 10 p.m. ET and will be simulcast on Peacock.
Christmas at Graceland marks the first live musical televised holiday special of its kind at the late Presley’s 13.8-acre Memphis, Tennessee estate, and will feature never-before-broadcast footage of Presley. In 1982, Graceland was opened to the public as a museum, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to honor the life of Presley, who died in 1977 at age 42.
In addition to Brown, other artists taking part in the Christmas at Graceland special are Alanis Morissette, John Legend, Kacey Musgraves, newly named CMA entertainer of the year Lainey Wilson, Lana Del Rey, Post Malone and 2024 Grammys best new artist nominee The War and Treaty.
Brown’s performance on Christmas at Graceland connects with his recently released holiday song, a version of Presley’s “Blue Christmas,” which features vocals from both Brown and Presley. Brown previously released a solo version of “Blue Christmas” last year, reaching No. 14 on the Hot Country Songs chart.
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Written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson, the tale of unrequited love was recorded by Presley as part of his 1957 Elvis’ Christmas Album project. Brown’s ties to the song as a country singer are notable, given that prior to Presley’s version, “Blue Christmas” had been a No. 1 Hot Country Songs hit for country singer Ernest Tubb in 1950.
Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough will make special appearances on Christmas at Graceland, and she will also serve as an executive producer under her Felix Culpa banner with partner Gina Gammell. Christmas at Graceland is produced by Done + Dusted, Authentic Studios and Felix Culpa.
Brown recently talked with Billboard over email, discussing his recording “Blue Christmas” alongside Presley’s own vocals, his experience performing as part of Christmas at Graceland, and his own favorite family holiday experiences.
Are you an Elvis fan, and if so, what are your favorite Elvis songs?
Elvis is an internationally recognized icon and paved the way in so many different areas for artists, but I think to me what’s been really cool is — as I got older, learning a lot more about his background growing up, and just how much he had to push the meter in so may different ways, and how many times he was told “no” before he powered through to become the legend he is today. Now being an artist, having a better understanding just how amazing what he was able to accomplish was, and how he did it with his talent and by being so unique — that’s still so inspiring. It would be hard to pick just one song, but it is still something I am trying to wrap my head around that I have a duet with ELVIS. And to hear my daughters sing it at home now too — what an amazing feeling.
What was the recording session for “Blue Christmas” like, and what did you think when you heard the finished version?
Really different, in the sense that you obviously don’t have the other artist in the room while you are recording it — but the first time I heard the final track, it gave me chill bumps.
What are your impressions of Graceland?
Visiting Graceland and being able to see where he lived and what was important to him and what life he was able to build for his family, having come from nothing, is something I really connect with. I feel his spirit so much there.
What are your favorite holiday traditions you have started with wife Katelyn and your children?
The girls love to sing, and having them be old enough to sing holiday songs together has meant so much.
Are there certain things you all love to do around Nashville for the holidays?
We love being at home and getting a chance to recharge and really live in gratitude for a minute. Sometimes you blink, and it’s already a year later when you’re out on the road. Touring is amazing, and I am so grateful for what I get to do for a living and all the fans that have been with me since day one and along the way. But getting that time at home when you’re often on the road is an amazing feeling to take the time to have those little moments like having breakfast together and really do the small stuff as a family helps recharge you, and then you feel like you’re ready to get back out there and give it your all on tour. We have such an exciting year coming up next year, and getting that space to be together as family beforehand is something we don’t take for granted.
Austin Butler caught some heat from fans earlier this month when he referred to his ex-girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens as an unnamed “friend” when discussing how he landed the role of Elvis Presley in the 2022 Baz Luhrmann biopic for The Hollywood Reporter‘s Actor’s Roundtable.
However, in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times, Butler cleared up that the friend was in fact Hudgens, whom he dated for nearly a decade before the duo split in 2020. “I was with my partner at the time,” he told the reporter, who recalled Butler’s story, in which he was in the car when his “friend” heard him singing along to an Elvis song and encouraged him to seek out the role of the King of Rock and Roll.
“The month before I heard that Baz was making the movie, I was going to look at Christmas lights with a friend, and there was an Elvis Christmas song on the radio and I was singing along, and my friend looked over at me and goes, ‘You’ve got to play Elvis.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s such a long shot,’” Butler said during the THR interview, without mentioning Hudgens by name. Fans pieced together that the High School Musical star was the subject of the story, as she told a nearly identical anecdote back on a 2019 episode of Live with Kelly and Ryan.
When the LA Times reporter followed up, asking if the person in the car was Hudgens, Butler agreed. “We’d been together for so long and she had this sort of clairvoyant moment and so I really, I owe her a lot for believing in me,” he shared.
Cherishing the memory. Riley Keough shared the very last photo taken with Lisa Marie Presley on Tuesday (Jan. 24) before the latter’s sudden death earlier this month.
“I feel blessed to have a photo of the last time I saw my beautiful mama. Grateful @georgieflores took this,” she captioned the snap of herself and her mother cozied up while out to dinner together, punctuating it with a red-heart emoji.
Actress Georgie Flores commented on the photo, writing, “I love you both with my entire heart,” while Zola’s Taylour Paige added, “I’m so thankful I witnessed you taking this beautiful photo. You both looked stunning that night with our yummy oysters.”
The daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley died earlier this month after suffering a heart attack at just 54 years old. Days prior, she had attended the Golden Globes in support of the Baz Luhrmann-directed biopic about Elvis’ life and career, during which Austin Butler picked up the trophy for best actor in a drama for his portrayal of The King.
In the weeks since, the “I Love You Because” singer has been laid to rest at Graceland, though her official cause of death has been deferred by the L.A. County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner pending further investigation into her death.
In the meantime, a public memorial was held at Elvis’ iconic home in Memphis, Tenn., with performances by Axl Rose, Billy Corgan and Alanis Morissette, and tributes have poured in from the likes of Dolly Parton, Nicolas Cage, Questlove, LeAnn Rimes, Octavia Spencer, Nancy Sinatra and more.
See Keough’s final photo with Presley below.
Following the devastating news that Lisa Marie Presley had died at age 54, Baz Luhrmann — who directed the 2022 critically acclaimed biopic about her father Elvis Presley — took to Instagram to honor her.
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“Over the last year, the entire Elvis movie family and I have felt the privilege of Lisa Marie’s kind embrace,” he captioned a photo of Lisa Marie laughing with actor Austin Butler, who portrayed her legendary father in Luhrmann’s Elvis. “Her sudden, shocking loss has devastated people all around the world. I know her fans everywhere join me in sharing prayers of love and support with her mother, Priscilla, and her wonderful daughters Riley, Finley and Harper.”
Luhrmann concluded by writing, “Lisa Marie, we will miss your warmth, your smile, your love.”
“It is with a heavy heart that I must share the devastating news that my beautiful daughter Lisa Marie has left us,” Priscilla Presley said in a statement on Thursday (Jan. 12). “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known.”
The announcement came just hours after Priscilla had confirmed that Lisa Marie was rushed to the hospital earlier Thursday.
Los Angeles County paramedics were dispatched to a Calabasas home at 10:37 a.m. following a report of a woman in full cardiac arrest, according to Craig Little, a spokesperson for the county’s fire department. Property records indicate Presley was a resident at that address. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said paramedics performed CPR and “determined the patient had signs of life” before taking her to the hospital immediately.
Lisa Marie attended the Golden Globes on Tuesday, on hand to celebrate Butler’s award for playing her father in Elvis.
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