Possible Inspiration
The song and the famous Elvis performance in the movie bear a remarkable resemblance to the theme and performance of a song called "Rock Around the Rockpile" from the movie The Girl Can't Help It, released one year earlier. In that performance, a villain played by Edmond O'Brien seeks to escape an assassination attempt by jumping on stage and singing the lyrics, "rock, rock, rock around the rockpile," while backed up by The Ray Anthony Band wearing striped inmate uniforms. O'Brien even includes some of the hip-swiveling and leg motions for which Elvis became famous. Reportedly, the producers had wanted Elvis for The Girl Can't Help It, but Elvis's manager Tom Parker had demanded too much money. Two uncredited composers on the film, Hugo Friedhofer and Lionel Newman, had also composed music for the Elvis classic movie, Love Me Tender, in the same year, 1956.
Read more about this topic: Jailhouse Rock (song)
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)