How Great Thou Art

It’s a strange trivia fact until you actually hear the record: the first competitive Grammy Elvis Presley ever won came not from a rock and roll single but from “How Great Thou Art,” the title track of his 1967 gospel album, at the 1968 ceremony – Best Sacred Performance. He’d win a second Grammy for the same song eight years later, for a 1974 live performance in Memphis. No rock hit of his ever managed that kind of recognition from the Recording Academy. The gospel material clearly mattered to him in a way the charts don’t fully capture.

Recorded at RCA Studio B in Nashville in May 1966 and produced by Felton Jarvis, the studio version builds the hymn slowly and deliberately – Presley’s voice starting close to Shea’s plainspoken register before opening into the full, theatrical power he built his reputation on, backed by the Jordanaires and the Imperials (led by Jake Hess) with session singer Millie Kirkham rounding out the vocal stack. The arrangement gives Presley room to do something Shea’s more restrained reading doesn’t attempt: turn the hymn’s final verse into a genuine vocal event, stretching notes and building dynamics the way a rock and roll performer builds toward a song’s climax, without losing the reverence the material asks for.

That’s the tension worth naming plainly: this is Elvis Presley singing a hymn, and it sounds like it – charismatic, vocally showy, built for a listener rather than a congregation. Whether that serves the material or works against it depends on what you want a hymn recording to do. Judged as a vocal performance, it’s extraordinary, and the Recording Academy agreed twice, eight years apart.

9.0/10 – the most vocally accomplished reading of this hymn most listeners will ever hear, and the Grammys said so before anyone else did.

Hero image: Elvis Presley, publicity still for Jailhouse Rock, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1957, public domain.