Ask most people to name Elvis Presley’s biggest song, and they’ll say “Hound Dog,” or “Jailhouse Rock,” or “Suspicious Minds.” All wrong. The biggest-selling single of his entire career — around 20 million copies worldwide — is a slow, sweeping love song where he sings almost like an opera tenor.
It’s called “It’s Now or Never.” And the tune underneath it was written in Italy in 1898, when Elvis’s grandparents weren’t yet born.
Elvis Presley – It’s Now Or Never (1960)
It started with a homesick soldier. In the late 1950s, Elvis was serving in the US Army in Germany, far from home and still grieving his mother, and he heard a recording that stopped him in his tracks. It was based on “’O Sole Mio” — a Neapolitan ballad written in 1898 by Eduardo di Capua, one of the most famous Italian songs ever written. Elvis fell in love with the melody and decided he wanted to sing it himself, in English.
His music publisher, Freddy Bienstock, was visiting him in Germany, and Elvis put the idea to him. Bienstock went back to his New York office and handed the job to two songwriters, Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold. They wrote brand-new English words to fit that 62-year-old Italian melody — reportedly in about half an hour.
Elvis recorded it at RCA Studio B in Nashville on April 3, 1960, in a late-night session running from half past seven until midnight. He had just come home from the Army, and he wanted to prove something. This wasn’t a rock and roll record. It was a full-throated, romantic performance that ends on a soaring, operatic note — the singing nobody had ever let him do. He struggled with that ending so badly that the engineer, Bill Porter, offered to splice a better take onto the end for him. Elvis refused and kept going until he nailed it himself.
Elvis Presley – It’s Now or Never – First Time Performed Live
Then came a very expensive mistake. In America, “’O Sole Mio” was out of copyright, so Elvis’s publisher assumed it was free to use worldwide and credited only the two new lyricists. It turned out international law disagreed. In Britain, the song was still protected, and the release had to be delayed for months while lawyers sorted out a deal with the European publisher and added Di Capua’s name to the credits.
The delay backfired beautifully. British fans had been hearing about the record for months and couldn’t buy it, so advance orders piled up to an enormous level. When it finally came out, it entered the UK chart straight in at number one — something almost unheard of in 1960 — and stayed there for eight weeks, the longest run of any Elvis single. In America it spent five weeks at number one.
And there’s a lovely footnote from Priscilla: she has said it was Elvis’s own favorite song, that he loved it more than anything else he ever recorded. In the mid-1970s, he’d introduce it on stage by explaining its origins and having his singer, Sherrill Nielsen, perform the original Italian version first. The King of Rock and Roll’s proudest record was a 19th-century Neapolitan love song, and he never stopped telling people so.