On June 7th, 1970, at RCA Studio B in Nashville, Tennessee, Elvis Presley recorded a song that Willie Nelson had written nine years earlier in a single week in Texas, sitting in a car commuting between Pasadena and Houston. He was not the first to record it, not the second, not the third.
By the time it reached Elvis, Funny How Time Slips Away had been recorded dozens of times by dozens of artists. Billy Walker had the first chart version in 1961. Jimmy Elridge took it to number 22 on the pop chart that same year. Joe Hinton, Al Green, Bobby Bland, the song had been around long enough that most people who heard it assumed they already knew everything it contained.
Elvis recorded it anyway. In the first week of June 1970, in a five-day marathon session at RCA’s Studio B in Nashville, the same studio where he had recorded Are You Lonesome Tonight in complete darkness 10 years earlier, he worked from 6:00 in the evening until dawn each night, recording 35 songs across five days.
Funny How Time Slips Away was recorded on June 7th, the fourth day of that session. It lasted 3 minutes and 33 seconds. Peter Guralnick, whose two-volume biography of Elvis remains the most authoritative account of his life and music, wrote about what happened to that Willie Nelson song when Elvis got hold of it.
He wrote that it sat at the emotional core of the album, that it sounded like a conversation taking place at the edge of memory, that the voice carrying it was no longer the voice of the young man who had shaken audiences in the 1950s. It was something else, something shaped by the years and everything in them. One year before that session, Priscilla had told Elvis their marriage was over.
Willie Nelson wrote the song in one week. He said it was the saddest thing he had ever put on paper. Elvis recorded it the year after the woman he had spent 12 years pursuing had walked away. Nobody asked him what the song meant to him. He did not explain it publicly. He never did.
The recording said it for him. This is the story of that recording, the song behind it, and the man who sang it in Nashville at midnight in 1970 and made something that Goronic said was at the core of his music and perhaps the core of him. In 1961, Willie Nelson was 28 years old and commuting between Pasadena, Texas and the Esquire Ballroom in Houston, where he worked as a musician.
He was not yet the Willie Nelson that history knows. He was a working songwriter who had sold a few songs but had not broken through. A man sitting in a car on a Texas highway with more ideas in his head than he had outlets for. That week, one specific week in 1961, the details of which he has retold many times in many interviews with the consistency of someone who understands that the week mattered.
He wrote three songs. He wrote Crazy, which Patsy Cline would record and take to number two on the country charts, the song that would eventually become one of the most covered recordings in American music history. He wrote Night Life, which Ray Price would record and which would become a standard performed by hundreds of artists over the following six decades.
And he wrote Funny How Time Slips Away. He told interviewers about that week with the specific wonder of a man who has never entirely understood where the three songs came from. He said, “In one week, I wrote Crazy, Funny How Time Slips Away, and Night Life. That’s when I decided maybe to go to Nashville.
” Funny How Time Slips Away is a song about running into someone you used to love. The singer sees them somewhere, a casual encounter, the kind that life produces without warning or mercy. They talk. The ex asks, “How you been?” You say, “Fine.” You say you’re doing all right. You say you found somebody new.
The devastating thing about the lyric is everything underneath that surface, the recognition between two people who shared something large and now share only the specific awkwardness of having once been everything to each other. The politeness of it, the way people who loved each other deeply talk when they meet again as strangers.
Willie Nelson said it was the saddest thing he had ever put on paper. He was 28 years old in a car on a Texas highway when he wrote it. Elvis was 35 in a Nashville studio when he recorded it. One year after the marriage ended. In February of 1969, Priscilla Presley told Elvis that she was leaving him.
She had been at Graceland for six years, had been in his life for 10, had married him in 1967, and given birth to Lisa Marie in February 1968. The marriage had been the conclusion of a long, complicated, unconventional pursuit. The teenage girl in Germany in 1959, the years of long distance, the move to Memphis, the high school enrollment, the wedding.
Advertisements
And now, in February of 1969, it was over. She was leaving for a karate instructor named Mike Stone, a man she had met while taking the lessons that Elvis had encouraged her to take. He had pointed her toward the activity. She had found inside it the thing she hadn’t been getting at home. The divorce would not be finalized until October 1973, but the marriage was functionally over in February of 1969, and Elvis knew it.
And the year that followed was the year of the American Sound Sessions, the Vegas comeback, Suspicious Minds going to number one, the most triumphant professional period of his entire career. All of it happening while Priscilla and Lisa Marie were in the other room or the other house or the other city, and Elvis was performing for sold-out showrooms and flying between Las Vegas and Memphis and not talking about it, not publicly, not to the press, not in interviews.
He handled the end of his marriage by not discussing it and by singing. In June of 1970, 14 months after Priscilla told him, Elvis went to Nashville for 5 days. The sessions he recorded that week became two albums. Elvis Country, subtitled I’m 10,000 Years Old, was the primary one, a deliberate, considered dive into the country music that had been in Elvis since before Sun Records, the music that Tupelo had put into him before he was old enough to have any say in the matter. 35 songs in five nights, working from 6:00 in the evening until the light came up over Nashville, in the same Studio B where he had made his greatest recordings across 15 years. Funny how time slips away was recorded on the fourth night, June 7th. On 17th
Avenue South in Nashville is a room that has absorbed more American music than almost any other space in the country. It is where Elvis recorded Are You Lonesome Tonight in the Dark in 1960, where he recorded How Great Thou Art in 1966, and won the first of his three Grammy Awards, where he had recorded dozens of sessions across 15 years, working with the same musicians who had learned his instincts well enough to follow him wherever a song took him in the night.
The musicians in the room on June 7th, 1970, were the best available. James Burton on guitar, the same James Burton who had been at Elvis’s side since the 1969 Vegas comeback. Norbert Putnam on bass, the same Norbert Putnam who would be in the room 3 years later at Stax when Elvis threw the microphone.
David Briggs on piano, Charlie McCoy on organ and harmonica, Jerry Carrigan on drums, the Jordanaires and the Imperials, and Millie Kirkham on vocals. Felton Jarvis producing, working exclusively for Elvis now after leaving RCA. The man who had been behind the board for every important session in Elvis’s life since 1966.
These were people who had been watching Elvis make music across hundreds of sessions. They understood the difference between Elvis recording and Elvis feeling something. They knew which takes to keep and which ones to let pass. They knew when to stay out of the way. On the night of June 7th, 1970, Elvis recorded Funny How Time Slips Away.
What the arrangement gave him was space, understated production guided by Felton Jarvis with the restraint of someone who understood that the voice doing the singing did not require ornamentation. Steel guitar drifting underneath, piano quiet behind him, the room breathing around the words rather than filling the space between them.
The production that Felton Jarvis built around Elvis’s vocal performance on that track is the production of a man who has heard what is in the room and understood that his job is to get out of its way. Elvis sang a song about running into someone you used to love and being civil about it, about how you’re doing and I’m fine and finding somebody new and yeah, funny how time slips away.
Priscilla had been gone 14 months. The vocal on that track is not a performance of those words. It is something underneath performance. The specific quality that Guralnick heard and described as a conversation taking place at the edge of memory. Elvis never said so. He never gave an interview about Funny How Time Slips Away.
He never identified the song as personal. He recorded it on June 7th, 1970 in the fourth night of a five-day session in Nashville. The album came out and the world received it as a country album by Elvis Presley. Guralnick received it differently. He listened and wrote what he heard. At the emotional core of the album, perhaps the core of Elvis’s music itself, the voice shaped by experience, every word deliberate, every pause carrying meaning.
The recording said what Elvis would not say. Nelson wrote the song at 28 in a car commuting between Texas cities. He knew when he finished it that it was the saddest thing he had ever written. He did not know that nine years later it would reach a 35-year-old man in a Nashville studio whose marriage had just ended and whose private grief was not available to the public except through the specific channel of what he chose to sing.
That is the thing about a song finding its singer. It is not about technical proficiency or arrangement sophistication or production value. It is about the specific collision of a lyric and a life. The recording is on every streaming platform. It is 3 minutes and 33 seconds long. The arrangement is spare.
The production exactly as understated as Felton Jarvis understood it needed to be. Elvis’s voice is not the voice of 1950s, the raw, explosive instrument that had changed the sound of the decade. It is the voice of 1970, warmer, deeper, shaped by everything that had happened since Tupelo and Sun Records and Ed Sullivan and the movies and the comeback and the marriage and the year that followed the end of the marriage.
Funny how time slips away. Four words, a casual shrug of a phrase, the saddest sentence Willie Nelson ever wrote and in Elvis Presley’s voice in a Nashville studio at some point in the midnight hours of June 7th, 1970, also the most honest thing he said that year. Go find it.
Listen to what 14 months sounds like. If this kind of story is what brings you here, subscribe and more of them will find you. See you in the next one.
