RCA VICTOR RECORD BULLETIN
BIGGEST C&W RECORD NEWS OF THE YEAR!
In Elvis Presley we’ve acquired the most dynamic and sought-after new artist in country music today, one who’s topped the “most promising” category in every trade and consumer poll held during 1955!
Promotion is being spearheaded with disc jockey records to the entire Pop and C&W “A” lists, an initial coverage of more than 4,000 destinations!
Page ads will appear this week in Billboard and Cash Box, reprints about 10 days later. The issues will carry full publicity on Presley’s joining the label.
It’s imperative that you follow up this all-market approach to every station receiving Pop or Country service. Use the trade articles to sell your dealers and one stops across the board!
The tunes: I FORGOT TO REMEMBER TO FORGET and MYSTERY TRAIN. The number: 20/47-6357. The name: ELVIS PRESLEY, one that will be your guarantee of sensational plus-sales in the months to come!
(Bottom left:) #55C-489 / 11/28/55
(Bottom right:) John Y. Burgess, Jr., Manager / Sales and Promotion / Single Record Department
For all that has been written about Elvis Presley’s arrival at RCA Victor, one piece of the story has been hiding in plain sight. The November 28, 1955 Record Bulletin reproduced above is well known to collectors as a charming relic of the signing — but read closely, it is something more: a set of instructions, and the two promotional LPs that carried them out have sat in our discographies all along, catalogued separately and never quite read together. Place the bulletin beside E-Z Pop Programming No. 5 and E-Z Country Programming No. 2, and the connection the document was describing comes into focus.
The bulletin is not merely an announcement; it is the blueprint for a single, coordinated campaign, and the two records that survive from that campaign are its physical execution. When John Y. Burgess wrote of “disc jockey records to the entire Pop and C&W ‘A’ lists,” he was describing exactly two promotional LPs that RCA Victor pressed to carry Presley to both formats at once. The country “A” list received E-Z Country Programming No. 2, a ten‑inch various‑artists sampler on the light‑green label that opens Side 1 with “Mystery Train” and turns to “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” on Side 2, set among sides by Eddy Arnold, Chet Atkins, Hank Snow, and the Sons of the Pioneers. The pop “A” list received E-Z Pop Programming No. 5, a twelve‑inch yellow‑label disc that places “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” on Side 1 and “Mystery Train” on Side 2, surrounded by Eddie Fisher, Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Jaye P. Morgan, and Kay Starr. Two records, two formats, one artist, the same two songs — precisely the “all‑market approach” the bulletin demands.
That these two LPs were released simultaneously is the only reading consistent with both the document and the discs themselves. The bulletin is dated 11/28/55 and built around a single catalog number, 20/47‑6357, the RCA reissue of the Sun coupling; its entire purpose is to push that one record into “every station receiving Pop or Country service” in the same week. A promotion conceived as one stroke does not stagger its samplers. The physical evidence agrees: E-Z Country Programming No. 2 carries a disc date of 11/1955 and a release date of 12/1955, and E-Z Pop Programming No. 5 carries the identical disc date of 11/1955 and release date of 12/1955. Their run‑off matrices reinforce the pairing rather than separate it: the pop disc is stamped F70P‑9681 / F70P‑9682 and the country disc G70L‑0108 / G70L‑0109, both belonging to the same “70” manufacturing series — a full series ahead of the confirmed February 1956 pressings. Taken together, the bulletin and the two records describe a single moment, not a sequence: in late 1955, on the strength of one single, RCA put Presley before every pop and country programmer in America at the same time, and the surviving Pop No. 5 and Country No. 2 are the twin halves of that one release.