One Song a Day #4: Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires — “Doncha’ Think It’s Time”

🎵 Today’s Song

Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires — “Doncha’ Think It’s Time”
1958

Random draw

Selected era bucket: 1955–1959
Verified remaining eligible population before today’s draw: 9,205 recordings
Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, followed by one uniform random draw from the previously unselected eligible recordings in that era.

Chart performance

Overall pop peak: #15
Billboard Most Played by Jockeys: #15
Billboard Top 100: #21
Billboard R&B: #10 on the R&B jockey chart
Billboard Country: No separate peak reliably established for “Doncha’ Think It’s Time”
Yearly rank: #131
Weeks charted: 6
Weeks Top 20: 2
Weeks Top 10: 0
Weeks at peak: 1

Elvis Presley at this point

Charting record: 30th of 153
Top-20 hit: 20th of 69
Top-10 hit: Not a Top-10 hit; Elvis would eventually have 38
#1 pop hit: Not a #1; Elvis would eventually have 18
Previous Top-20: “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”
Next Top-20: “Hard Headed Woman”

Retrospective standing

GOAT overall: N/A
Among Elvis Presley songs: N/A
Among Elvis Presley Top-20 hits: N/A
GOAT points: N/A
Hot 100 portion of chart run: N/A

Transition note: “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” completed its chart run before the Billboard Hot 100 began on August 4, 1958. Its N/A status here does not mean that it failed to rank highly enough; it falls outside the Hot 100-era data used for the project’s GOAT rankings.

Record details

Entered chart: April 21, 1958
Released: April 1, 1958
Recorded: February 1, 1958 — Radio Recorders, Hollywood
Single: “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” / “Doncha’ Think It’s Time”
Original context: Stand-alone single; not recorded for an Elvis movie
Songwriters: Clyde Otis and Luther Dixon
Lead vocal: Elvis Presley
Backing vocals: The Jordanaires
Running time: 1:57
Label: RCA Victor
Catalog number: 47-7240
Recording to use: Original 1958 single master, matrix J2WB 0179-sp, spliced from takes 40, 47 and 48.

Listen / watch / read

🎧 Original recording: Elvis Presley — “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” single master
📺 Contemporary performance/promotional clip: None verified
📝 Lyrics: Lyrics and recording information at the official Elvis Presley site

Versions & title history

Original or cover: Original recording
No other significant U.S. chart version identified.
Same-title unrelated Top-20 hits: None identified.

Streaming note

There is a genuine version issue with this one. The 1958 single master was assembled from portions of takes 40, 47 and 48. A complete take 40 was subsequently issued on 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong: Elvis’ Gold Records, Volume 2, apparently instead of the original single master. For this project, the recording we want is the 1958 single master.

Before There Was a Hot 100

Today’s selection gives me a good excuse to explain something that will occasionally look strange in this project: the project starts before the Billboard Hot 100 does.

I decided to start the clock with the Billboard chart dated July 9, 1955, when Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” reached #1. I’m using that as a practical dividing line for the beginning of the rock-and-roll era on the American pop charts. Every recording already in the Top 20 that week is grandfathered into the project, and from that point forward a new recording becomes eligible when it reaches the Top 20. That is the boundary built into the project rules.

The complication is that the Hot 100 did not exist until August 4, 1958.

Before then, Billboard published several different national pop charts measuring different forms of popularity. There was Best Sellers in Stores, based on retail sales; Most Played by Jockeys, based on radio airplay; and Most Played in Juke Boxes, based on jukebox activity.

In November 1955, Billboard introduced the Top 100, an early attempt to combine sales, radio and jukebox activity into a single overall ranking. But the older component charts didn’t immediately disappear. For several years, Billboard readers could look at the Top 100 while also seeing separate evidence of what was selling, what DJs were playing and what people were choosing on jukeboxes. The jukebox chart ended in 1957; the Top 100 and DJ chart lasted until the Hot 100 arrived in August 1958.

That matters today.

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time” peaked at only #21 on the Top 100. If I had simply decided to treat the Top 100 as an earlier version of the Hot 100 and required a Top-20 showing there, this song wouldn’t be in the project.

But it reached #15 on Billboard’s Most Played by Jockeys chart.

Under the rules of this project, that counts.

And I actually like that result. Before Billboard established one definitive composite chart, there really were several different answers to the question “How popular is this record?” A song might be selling particularly well, getting heavy radio play or being played constantly on jukeboxes.

Once the Hot 100 arrives, this gets much cleaner for us: #20 or better on the Hot 100 qualifies.

But for these first three years, I’m going to let the contemporary Billboard charts tell us what constituted a Top-20 pop record rather than impose a chart on the period that didn’t yet exist.

A-Sides, B-Sides and One Piece of Vinyl

There is a second bit of 1950s record-business archaeology that matters today.

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time” was the B-side of “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.”

For anyone who grew up after physical singles stopped being central to pop music, the terminology can be misleading. A B-side wasn’t a bonus track in the modern sense. A 45-rpm single was literally a physical record with a playable song on each side.

RCA Victor 47-7240 gave you:

A-side: “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”
B-side: “Doncha’ Think It’s Time”

You bought both songs because there was no way to buy one without the other.

That creates an interesting problem when measuring popularity. If someone bought RCA 47-7240, what were they buying it for? Probably “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” which was the designated A-side and the much larger hit. But perhaps some people liked both songs. The sales transaction itself can’t tell us.

Radio gives us a much cleaner answer.

If a DJ put the record on the turntable and played “Doncha’ Think It’s Time,” we know exactly which song was being heard.

That makes its #15 showing on Most Played by Jockeys particularly meaningful. This wasn’t merely a B-side receiving reflected glory because millions of people bought the A-side. DJs were actually flipping the record over and playing this particular song often enough to make it one of the 20 most-played records on American radio.

For this project, the two sides therefore remain separate recordings when Billboard treated them separately. We’ve drawn “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” today. “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” is still sitting somewhere in the random pool and can eventually be selected on its own. That treatment follows the project's rule for double-sided singles.

One More Data Note: What Is the GOAT List?

I’ll be referring regularly to a GOAT ranking in these posts. This is not my personal ranking of the greatest songs ever recorded. It’s the retrospective chart-performance ranking in the project’s “Songs in the Top 20” data for the Hot 100 era.

That’s why today’s GOAT fields say N/A.

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time” finished its chart run before the Hot 100 existed. It isn’t ranked poorly on the GOAT list; it predates the dataset.

A Very Strange Way to Meet Elvis Presley

This is our fourth random song, and somehow this is how Elvis Presley enters the project.

Not “Heartbreak Hotel.”

Not “Hound Dog.”

Not “Jailhouse Rock.”

Not “All Shook Up.”

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time.”

I had never heard of this song before today. It’s possible I’d heard it somewhere without remembering it, but it had made absolutely no impression on me.

And yet we're not meeting Elvis early in his career.

By the time “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” entered the charts, this was already Elvis’s 30th charting record and his 20th Top-20 hit by the chronology I’m using for this project. He was 23 years old and already one of the biggest entertainers in the world.

That makes this a fascinating entry point.

One of my theories about truly capital-H Huge musical acts is that their greatness extends beyond the famous records. Fans of the Beatles, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Led Zeppelin or other enormous acts can usually name album tracks and non-hits that they consider essential. There is a second canon underneath the public canon.

Elvis doesn’t always seem to be discussed that way.

Maybe that’s partly because his public canon is already so enormous. There are so many famous Elvis records that a casual listener has little reason to start digging through forgotten B-sides.

Today the randomizer made me do exactly that.

There is an important selection-bias warning here. This project only contains songs that reached the Top 20. I’m not randomly sampling Elvis’s complete recorded output and discovering that even the obscure stuff is great. “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” may be obscure now, but DJs liked it enough in 1958 to push it to #15.

Still, there’s something remarkable about an artist having a catalog deep enough that a legitimate national Top-20 hit can become a deep cut that I’ve never heard of.

The Song

I didn’t expect much from this one.

After listening to it repeatedly, I think it’s quite good.

I don’t hear an industry-defining record here. I don’t think we’ve uncovered a lost Elvis masterpiece. But what struck me almost immediately was how much Elvis himself elevates what seems like fairly ordinary material.

Listen to his phrasing.

The Jordanaires are behind him with those very recognizable “ah-hah-hoo” responses, while Elvis keeps putting little hesitations into his enunciation. Today those devices are almost impossible to separate from decades of Elvis impersonators. We’ve all heard people exaggerate exactly these vocal mannerisms while doing an “Elvis voice.”

On the actual record, though, they don’t sound like mannerisms.

They sound natural.

Elvis seems completely comfortable inside the rhythm. He stretches a phrase here, hesitates there, lets the Jordanaires answer him, then slides back into the song. There's a looseness and confidence to the whole performance.

And I think that confidence is one of the things that separates him from a lot of late-1950s pop.

This is not Elvis desperately trying to prove that he belongs. By February 1958, when the song was recorded, he has already conquered popular music. Yet what impresses me is that he doesn't sound like he's mailing in the B-side.

Maybe he was. I obviously have no way of knowing how emotionally invested Elvis Presley was in take 47 of “Doncha’ Think It’s Time.”

But if this is Elvis mailing it in, he was awfully good at mailing it in.

There are little performance choices all over the record that don't need to be there. He could have sung the melody straight through, RCA could have put it on the back of “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” and millions of Elvis fans would have received their perfectly adequate B-side.

Instead, he sounds engaged.

That may ultimately be what impressed me most about the recording. Great performers giving everything they have on their signature songs isn't surprising. Hearing this much personality on a largely forgotten two-minute B-side tells me something different about Elvis Presley.

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time?”

Lyrically, this is not complicated.

Elvis is talking to a girl he has apparently been seeing, and he wants the relationship to become more serious. Specifically, he wants them to go steady.

What I like is that he doesn't sound as though he's begging.

There is some genuine vulnerability in the premise. He's the one putting his feelings out there. He's effectively saying, I want this to be more than whatever it currently is. What do you think?

She could say no.

But Elvis never sounds weak or desperate. The performance suggests that he believes the feeling is mutual and is simply willing to be the one who says it first.

That's an appealing balance: vulnerable without being needy.

The song doesn't need a more elaborate story than that. The lyric establishes one romantic situation, Elvis gives it considerably more personality than it probably has on paper, and less than two minutes later we're done.

Final Verdict

This was a good find.

“Doncha’ Think It’s Time” isn't an all-time Elvis record, and I don't think it's an all-time song in general. But it's considerably better than I expected an Elvis B-side I'd never heard of to be.

It's easy to listen to. It's well made. It's well performed. Elvis sounds relaxed, confident and completely in command of what he's doing, while still allowing just enough vulnerability into the lyric to make the narrator likable.

Its #15 peak also feels less like a limitation after spending time with it. This song was competing not only with the rest of popular music but with an astonishing volume of other Elvis Presley records—including the much larger Elvis hit sitting on the other side of the same disc.

I'm glad the randomizer found it for me.

My rating: 62/100.

Not a classic.

Not a revelation.

Just a genuinely good, largely forgotten Elvis record that I probably never would have deliberately sought out.

And that is exactly what I hoped this project would find.

Search This Blog

One Song a Day Project

Song #4: “Doncha’ Think It’s Time” by Elvis Presley with The Jordanaires