Pat Boone Sings Guess Who

Pat Boone: Well, I first met Elvis in Cleveland, Ohio. He was not very known really, nationally not at all. It was before Heartbreak Hotel, before Hound Dog, he had two or three country records, sort of 'rockabilly' we called them. And I'd seen his name on some jukeboxes in Texas, and made note of the name. I even did an album, a tribute album to Elvis. I wanted to call it 'Pat Sings Elvis', that's the logical title, but his manager, Col. Tom Parker, wanted to charge us a huge extra royalty for the use of his name in the title. And I said, 'Colonel, this is my friend, I'm doing a tribute, I'm honoring Elvis'. 'Yes, but this is business, you know. You got to pay for the use of his name and sell more records'. It was really sort of unscrupulous of him. So we didn't call it 'Pat Sings Elvis'. We called it 'Pat Boone Sings Guess Who?' And I wrote, I don't know how this will translate, but I wrote backliner notes all about my friend Guess Whosely. I never said his name. And Tom Parker eventually tipped his hat to me, and said, 'Well, you've conned the con man. You've out-hustled the hustler, and I salute you'. But the album was one of the best albums that I've ever made, musically, and very much like, in a way, my new album - that is, doing songs that were hits for somebody else, and never really recorded, most of them, by anybody else. And then I did my own versions, which were light, commercial jazz treatments. And I'm very proud of that album, Pat Sings Guess Who?