Elvis Presley won three competitive Grammy Awards across a career that redefined popular music. Not one of them was for rock and roll. All three went to gospel recordings, and the first of them, Best Sacred Performance in 1968, went to the album How Great Thou Art.
The root of that goes back to childhood. Presley's family attended an Assembly of God church in Tupelo, Mississippi, and later in Memphis, where, by his own biographers' accounts, he found his earliest musical inspiration. Long before Sun Records or the Ed Sullivan Show, gospel was the music he heard performed with total conviction, in a setting where singing was itself a form of worship. Peter Guralnick's widely read biography of Presley's early years treats that church going and the gospel quartets he sang along with as foundational to everything that came after.
How Great Thou Art, released by RCA Victor on February 27, 1967, is the clearest studio statement of that inheritance. Presley did not write the songs on it. He did not need to. What the record captures is a performer returning, deliberately, to the genre he had grown up inside, recorded with the same care he brought to any other session. Two more sacred and inspirational recordings later, and Presley's trophy case would hold precisely three competitive Grammys, every one of them a return to the music of an Assembly of God childhood rather than to the sound that made him famous.