Inspired by “Dreaming Blues” Roy Brown & His Mighty-Mighty Men (1950).
Recorded (as a demo) by Glenn Reeves (1955).
Hit version by Elvis Presley (US #1/C&W #1/UK #2 1956).
From the wiki: “‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was written in 1955 by Mae Boren Axton, a high school teacher with a background in musical promotion, and Jacksonville-based singer–songwriter Tommy Durden. The lyrics were based on a report in The Miami Herald about a man who had destroyed all his identity papers and jumped to his death from a hotel window, leaving a suicide note with the single line, ‘I walk a lonely street.’
“It has been alleged that the songwriting of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was not wholly original; that the rolling piano, and song’s basic chord structure, was copied note-for-note from Roy Brown’s 1950 R&B hit ‘Dreaming Blues’. Brown would also become known as the writer and original performer of B.B. King’s sole Top-40 hit, ‘The Thrill is Gone‘.
“Axton and Durden give different accounts of how their song was written: Durden’s account is that he had already written the song and performed it with his band the Swing Billys before he presented it to Axton; Axton’s account is that Durden had only penned a few lines of the song, and asked her to help him finish it.