Song of the Day Nov 5

November 5, 2023

Today our song is: Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley

Wikipedia tells us this about the song:

The song was written in 1955, by Mae Boren Axton, a high school teacher with a background in musical promotion, and Jacksonville, Florida-based singer–songwriter Tommy Durden. The lyrics were based on a report supposedly in The Miami Herald about a man who had destroyed all his identity papers and jumped to his death from a hotel window, leaving a suicide note with the single line, "I walk a lonely street". Songfacts.com says they were unable to locate the Miami Herald story. They labeled it an urban legend. In 2016, an article in Rolling Stone magazine suggested that the story in reality originated from a report about a painter and criminal, Alvin Krolik, whose marriage had failed and who wrote a unpublished autobiography including the line "This is the story of a person who walked a lonely street." Krolik's story was published in news media, and received further publicity after he was shot and killed in an attempted robbery in El Paso, Texas. On August 25, 1955, the El Paso Times reported Krolik's death under the headline "Story Of Person Who Walked Lonely Street".

  

Enjoy!