rca’s regal in-house gold record award for “all shook up”

Es­ti­mated reading time is 2 min­utes.

BE­FORE THERE WERE RIAA GOLD RECORDS, sim­ilar awards were presented to artists by their record com­pa­nies. Col­lec­tors dif­fer­en­tiate be­tween these two types of awards by re­fer­ring to com­pany awards as “in-house” whereas RIAA awards are “of­fi­cial.” While searching the in­ternet, I found an RCA Victor award for an Elvis record on the Rock­hurst Auc­tion website.

It’s a gold record award for All Shook Up pre­sented from RCA Victor to Colonel Parker. Amer­ican record com­pa­nies did not stop pro­ducing their own awards when the RIAA began of­fering theirs. Most com­pa­nies didn’t even think the RIAA awards were nec­es­sary and didn’t bother to re­quest certification.

While RIAA awards for Presley records show up reg­u­larly on the in­ternet, I don’t see too many in-house awards. This is a short ar­ticle (es­pe­cially for me): I just wanted readers to see how at­trac­tive some in-house awards were back be­fore the RIAA started their Gold Record Award pro­gram in 1958.

 

In house gold record award from RCA Victor for Elvis Presley's "All Shook Up" of 1957.
This is a photo of the gold record award pre­sented to Colonel Parker from RCA Victor com­mem­o­rating a mil­lion sales of “All Shook Up.” It mea­sures just over 16 x 14 inches,

RCA’s regal in-house awards

The de­scrip­tion of the award on the Broad­hurst Auc­tion web­site ac­knowl­edged that “record la­bels reg­u­larly is­sued ‘in-house’ awards to their artists. And no label awards looked more regal than those is­sued by RCA, as ev­i­denced by the of­fered Gold Record Award for Elvis Pres­ley’s 1957 single All Shook Up, with its deep green velvet back­ground, gold frame, and en­graved silver plaque.”

The award mea­sures 16 1/8 by 14 1/8 inches and the plaque reads ‘To Col. Tom Parker in Ap­pre­ci­a­tion of His Con­tri­bu­tion To­ward Making All Shook Up A Mil­lion Seller 1957.’ Parker al­ways re­ceived his own copies of awards for Elvis’ hits. 

The Broad­hurst people noted, “This ex­ample was likely re­stored at the be­hest of Colonel Parker during the 1970s, as its de­sign de­tails and framing differ slightly from those hailing from the 1950s.”

 

Elvis AllShookUp sheet music 50¢ 800
This is the orig­inal sheet music for Elvis Pres­ley’s recording of Otis Black­well’s “All Shook Up.” Is­sued in 1957, first print­ings have a 50¢ price printed on the cover.

This was Pres­ley’s sev­enth (or eighth, de­pending on who is counting) record to sell more than a mil­lion copies in little more than a year. There were six singles:

•  Heart­break Hotel
•  I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
•  Hound Dog
•  Love Me Tender
•  Too Much

There was also one EP album that sold over a mil­lion, ELVIS VOLUME 1 (EPA-992), plus Don’t Be Cruel easily sold a mil­lion copies in­de­pen­dent of Hound Dog. But I don’t know if RCA pre­sented Elvis with awards for these two achievements. 

If not, then All Shook Up was his sixth in-house award.

And we are done so that’s all, folks!

 


 

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