Was Elvis Presley's 'Suspicious Minds' the first song with a fade-out and fade back in?

Question

Wikipedia on Suspicious Minds explains:

Elvis' primary producer Felton Jarvis made the unusual decision to add a premature fade-out to the song starting at 3:36 and lasting for 15 seconds before fading back in. The first verse then continues repeatedly until it completely fades out. In a 2012 interview with Marc Myers of The Wall Street Journal, Moman disclosed that Jarvis was never happy with Elvis recording at American Sound Studio, saying "it was a control thing." Moman added, "So when Jarvis took the tape of 'Suspicious Minds,' he added this crazy 15-second fade toward the end, like the song was ending, and brought it back by overdubbing to extend it. I have no idea why he did that, but he messed it up. It was like a scar. None of which mattered. Soon after the song was released, Elvis was back on top of the charts."

I find it quite an interesting resource, but also disconcerting, that I have never listened in other songs.

There are quite a lot of resources explaining the why of the usage of the resource in this song, but I cannot find explanations on whether this was used anytime before Felton Jarvis did.

Was Elvis Presley's 'Suspcious Minds' the first song with a fade-out and fade back in?

Answer 1

The Wikipedia article on Fade states that it is not possible to reliably identify the first modern recording to use fade.

It also states, in relation to earlier recordings:

By the early 1930s longer songs were being put on both sides of records, with the piece fading out at the end of Side One and fading back in at the beginning of Side Two.

This is also referred to in article by Alan Cross:

There were other experiments with longer songs and tracks that couldn’t fit on one side of a 78 RPM record. The practice became to fade the song toward the end of the playing time on side one — usually less than four minutes — and then pick things up with a fade in on side two.

Your question is aimed at the use of the effect in a similar way to "Suspicious Minds", so I fear there may be no way to answer that.

Taking your question literally, I guess there will have been a "first" user of the fade-out/fade-in technique to split a long piece over 2 sides of a 78rpm, but again, it is going to be hard to nail that one down.

Stretching the "literal" take on the question further, the answer could be the 1896 78rpm mentioned in the wiki article:

An 1894 78 rpm record called "The Spirit of '76", a narrated musical vignette with martial fife-and-drum that gets louder as it 'nears' the listener and quieter as it 'moves away'.

And the effect of fade-out, at least, pre-dates recording - see again the wiki article for discussion of Haydn's "Farewell" symphony and Holst's "Neptune the mystic" from "The Planets", but I'm sure there could be many other examples, and examples of fade-in also.