The story behind the song
A Cane and a High Starched Collar is an old-fashioned, square-dance style Elvis Presley song created by songwriting team Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett. The song’s melody takes a lot from the well-known 18th-century Irish tune called The Girl I Left Behind Me.
The track was recorded on August 8, 1960, at Radio Recorders in Hollywood for the 20th Century Fox Western movie Flaming Star. Flaming Star was a serious, dramatic film where Elvis played Pacer Burton, a guy of mixed white and Native American background caught in a frontier conflict.
Because the movie was a serious drama, the musical parts were kept to an absolute minimum. A Cane and a High Starched Collar is the only song Elvis actually performs on screen in the film, showing up less than five minutes into the movie during an old-fashioned kitchen party scene. With Jimmie Haskell playing the accordion, the lyrics feature a funny conversation where a cowboy keeps avoiding a marriage proposal, saying he’d rather stay single.
Rumor has it that Elvis didn’t like the song, thinking it and another movie track called Britches were ridiculous. He made it clear that they should never come out on a commercial record album. RCA respected his wishes while he was alive, and the song was left off the movie’s promotional EP, Elvis By Request, in 1961. The song stayed hidden in the RCA vaults for almost 16 years. It finally came out to the public on January 1, 1976, on the compilation album Elvis: A Legendary Performer, Volume 2, which put together pieces of his funny outtakes and the final master.
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