'It's All a Big Hoax, Honey': 'All Shook Up' by Elvis Presley

100 Greatest 50s Rock, Pop & Doo Wop Songs

Frank Mastropolo

RCA Victor

Billboard magazine called Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” the №1 single of 1967. Critics have disputed The King’s contribution to the song, though Presley and Otis Blackwell are listed as its songwriters.

Blackwell told Time Barrier Express magazine in 1979 that he wrote “All Shook Up” in 1956 in the offices of Shalimar Music. Al Stanton, one of Shalimar’s owners, suggested the song’s title.

“He walked in one day with a bottle of Pepsi, shaking it, as they did at that time, and said, ‘Otis, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you write a song called “All Shook Up.”

“Two days later I brought the song in and said, ‘Look, man. I did something with it.’”

David Hill was first to record Blackwell’s tune. The claim that Presley was its co-writer is based on a 1957 interview with Dolores Diamond.

“It’s all a big hoax, honey,” said Presley. “I never wrote a song in my life. I get one-third of the credit for recording it. It makes me look smarter than I am. I’ve never even had an idea for a song. Just once, maybe.

“I went to bed one night, had quite a dream, and woke up all shook up. I phoned a pal and told him about it. By morning, he had a new song, ‘All Shook Up.’”

“As far as ‘All Shook Up,’ the title came from a real set of circumstances,” Hill said in 2009.

“When I decided not to write it, Otis Blackwell did, and I had the first recording for Aladdin Records. It was my title, but Otis wrote the song and Presley took a writing credit in order to get him to record it. That’s the way things happened in those days.”

Presley received one-third of the writer’s royalty for “All Shook Up.” Blackwell and other writers understood they would earn more from a reduced share than they would from a full share if recorded by a less-popular artist.

Gordon Stoker, first tenor of the Jordanaires, recorded a dual vocal with Presley on “All Shook Up” at Hollywood Radio Recorders in January 1957. Stoker recalled working on the tune on the 1971 radio documentary, The Elvis Presley Story.

“While I was doing ‘All Shook Up’ with Presley, I was just facing him on another mic, you see, and all the time I’m doing it, I had this little ‘Yea, yea, I’m all shook up.’ I had these little harmony parts I had to do with him.

“Of course, now, the recordings these days, you overdub it. Like Presley would have put his voice on first, and I would have put my harmony part on second. But in those days, we did it all at the same time.

“During the entire recording, Presley tried to break me up. He either picked at me, winked at me, or stuck his finger in my mouth, just anything he could do, you see, to try to break me up, and only one place on the entire record, if you ever hear the record, at the very end of the record, when I say, ‘Yea, yea, I’m all shook up,’ he did break me up at that point, and if you play the record, you’ll hear it.”

Frank Mastropolo is the author of 100 Greatest 50s Rock, Pop & Doo Wop Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.