Elvis ‘Memphis’ Box Set

Despite a long recording career that saw him cut at top studios in New York, Nashville and Hollywood, Elvis Presley’s most uniquely powerful work was captured in his hometown of Memphis. In August, RCA Records and Legacy Recordings will celebrate that body of work with a new Elvis box set titled “Memphis.”

The five-CD set — which will also be released digitally and in a pared down two-LP vinyl package — marks the first “fully comprehensive collection” of the recordings Presley made in in his hometown Memphis, Tennessee.

Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Presley’s first sessions at Sun Records in 1954, "Memphis" includes 111 tracks spanning his recordings in the city, with 88 of those tracks newly remixed by local Grammy-winning engineer/producer Matt Ross-Spang at his Crosstown studio, Southern Grooves. The deluxe package also features liner notes from fellow Grammy winner and Memphis author/essayist Robert Gordon.

Produced by noted Elvis archivist Ernst Jørgensen, the box set chronicles Presley’s 1954 and 1955 sessions at Sun, his comeback at American Sound studios in 1969, the music he made at Stax Records in 1973, live recordings from a 1974 show at the Mid-South Coliseum, and a final set of songs cut in the Jungle Room of his Graceland home in 1976, a year before his passing.

Aside from the iconic Sun recordings, all the tracks on "Memphis" were newly mixed by Ross-Spang, removing overdubbed strings, horns and additional backing vocals. As Jørgensen notes, this “provides a unique ‘fly-on-the-wall’ glimpse of what it sounded like to Elvis, while he was recording all these songs with the band.”