Felton Jarvis was in the midst of preparing for a new series of Elvis sessions in Nashville when he officially resigned from his position with the RCA label. In the four years they'd been working together Elvis had grown comfortable with Felton's producing style and judgement, and when Elvis offered to hire him on as his personal producer, Jarvis jumped at the chance. His first order of business was to make arrangements to cut the eighteen sides (one album and two singles) the singer was required to deliver in 1970. In addition to putting him in exclusive charge of Elvis's recording career, the new position would also give Felton a central role in the artist's escalating concert schedule. The offer to Felton may have been a "spur-of-the-moment" decision on Elvis's part, but he'd make the same offer to Thorne Nogar and Jim Mallory in years past; unlike Felton, though, the two engineers were unwilling to give up their regular jobs for what must have looked in the 1960's like a very uncertain future.
Felton's new employment started with a session scheduled for the night of June 4, 1970. Two and a half years had passed since Elvis had last recorded at RCA's Studio B in Nashville; fed up with a system that was going nowhere, Elvis had given up Music City for Chips Moman's Memphis, but their uncomforbale parting meant that returning to American was out of the question this time around. And perhaps there were other reasons Elvis might have been happy to look elsewhere: Working with Moman, whose preference for strong, contemporary songs, rehearsed, played, and arranged to meet his own vision and standards, collided sharply with the freewheeling, try-anything approach to recording that Elvis had followed since the Sun days. Nor was Felton without his own feelings in the matter: He didn't want to be overlooked in the credit process either, and he felt he was just as responsible as Chips for some of the best of the Memphis recordings, not to mention five hit singles and the Grammy winning How Great Thou Art album before Chips was even in the picture. He was more than ready to be back in the driver's seat.....on his own.....and he couldn't wait to get started.
June 8, what became the final night of the sessions began with Elvis agreeing that Dallas Frazier's "There Goes My Everything" "doesn't have to be straight country" and turning it into another fervent modern ballad. In just five nights, Elvis had recorded a staggering total of thirty-four songs. By and large they were published by Elvis, which would keep Freddy and the Colonel happy. Most important, Elvis......now Felton's personal big boss man......had clearly enjoyed himself.
*The Complete Recording Sessions by Ernst Jorgensen*
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