Mark James, songwriter who gave Elvis his hits Suspicious Minds and Always on My Mind – obituary

Mark James, who has died in Nashville aged 83, was the songwriter behind two of Elvis Presley’s most enduring late-period hits, Suspicious Minds and Always on My Mind; his most successful songs enjoyed extended lifespans in imaginative new recordings.

In 1968 James was a 27-year-old staff writer for the great Memphis producer Chips Moman at his studio, American, when he came into Elvis’s orbit. James had already had a Top 10 hit with B J Thomas’s version of his Hooked on a Feeling, and Chips thought a soulful new composition called Suspicious Minds, about the corrosive pain of jealousy and mistrust, could be a hit too.

James released his own version, but it failed to chart, and his voice lacked the raw passion it needed. Elvis immediately took to it, however, and set about recording it during the January 1969 sessions at American which would turn out to be an artistic highpoint in his career.

Suspicious Minds gave Elvis his biggest hit for seven years, a No 1 single in the US and 26 other countries and a No 2 in Britain, and he made it an extended centrepiece of his live shows – only dropping it from his sets in the mid-1970s, by which time he could no longer do justice to the speeded-up tempo of the live version and its frenzied finale, which occasionally split the seams of his bejewelled jumpsuits.

Elvis’s biographer, Peter Guralnick, aptly described Suspicious Minds as “Elvis’s signature song about relationship problems”, and it has become one of his best-loved recordings.

The song returned to the UK Top 10 in 1986 as a hit for the Fine Young Cannibals, and in 1992 the country star Dwight Yoakam recorded it; Gwen Stefani performed a much-admired version for an NBC television special in 2002, while the director Baz Luhrmann used it, sparkily remixed, in his 2022 biopic Elvis.

Mark James was born Francis Rodney Zambon on November 29 1940 in Houston (styling himself Mark James, according to The Houston Chronicle, because Houston club owners did not like the sound of Francis Zambon).

After some success in New Orleans with She’s Gone Away , a “swamp pop” single which he both wrote and sang, James moved to Memphis to work for Chips Moman’s publishing company. In 1968 B J Thomas, a country singer and friend from Houston days, reached No 5 in the Hot 100 with James’s Hooked on a Feeling; Thomas also released James’s The Eyes of a New York Woman, reaching No 28.

In 1974 the Swedish band Blue Swede’s recording of Hooked on a Feeling, with the addition of an “ooga chacka” chant, topped the US chart. Quentin Tarantino put it in the soundtrack of Reservoir Dogs (1992) and in 2014 it featured in the Marvel blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy. Currently the Blue Swede version of Hooked on a Feeling has more than 678 million plays on Spotify.

In the late 1990s, a slightly creepy animation of a baby dancing to the “ooga-chacka” version of the song became one of the internet’s first viral videos and this year the Swedish group the Hives released another version, speeded-up, punk-infused and with boisterous guitars.

James’s other big hit for Presley was Always on My Mind, which he wrote with Wayne Carson and Johnny Christopher. This heart-tugging lament for lost love chimed with the pain Elvis felt over the collapse of his marriage to Priscilla and and it entered the UK Top 10 at Christmas 1972.

With its robust melody Always on My Mind proved endlessly adaptable, being re-recorded in a range of styles. There were country versions from Brenda Lee (1972), John Wesley Ryles (1979) and, in 1982, Willie Nelson: that one earned James and his co-writers two Grammy awards (for best country song and best song of the year). Then in 1987 the Pet Shop Boys’ synth-pop disco treatment gave the duo a UK Christmas No 1 and worldwide smash hit.

James supplied three other songs for Elvis in the singer’s later years, the title song of his final studio album, Moody Blue, released in 1977, It’s Only Love (recorded in 1971) and Raised on Rock, the title song of a 1973 LP.

James was inducted into the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters’ Hall of Fame.

He is survived by his wife, Karen Zambon, and two daughters.

Mark James, born November 29 1940, died June 8 2024