Is there a relationship to add the original release date to a recording? Would be nice to be able to tag songs with the actual year of release not whenever the cd was released. A little annoying when Heartbreak Hotel plays and 2002 is displayed instead of 1956 or when searching for songs from an era.
Just click the recording and you see its first release date (the first release in list).
Or, like your topic title says, what you want is the recording date (not the recording release date), then this can be set in the relationship between the recording and the work.
Your example is absolutely perfect actually as you can see that, according to what we currently know, HEARTBREAK HOTEL was recorded on 1956-01-10 then released on 1956-01-27.
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The issue I am trying to figure out is how to have Picard pull that information when a release is loaded so the individual songs have that applied to the tag instead of the release date of the album. Also, I am referring to when a compilation release is being used. I used the script @outsidecontext suggested here Original Release Date and that did the trick for regular albums, but I’m trying to figure out a way for compilations like this one https://musicbrainz.org/release/c856080d-8e2e-4a1a-a524-cca1e79c2b79
@therealdero for a compilation you have changed the complexity level of the question massively.
For a Release it is easy to spot when that Release was originally released. So much so the data is always available to Picard.
For a compilation the question now shifts to - when were these recordings originally recorded. Something that is not attached to Release data. So you’re going to have to look at deeply mining the database to get those results out of it.
It also gets more confusing if you look at track 3 - Hound Dog as that is a cover… so which date would you want? The “original” date of the song? Or the “original” date of the cover of the song?
I think you’re gonna need to poke the add-on writers for this one.
Good Luck 
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Going to dive into learning to be a script wright.
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A good place to start is looking at anyone trying to extract extra details from the recordings. Like those scripts manipulating instruments per recordings… recording data can’t be far away from that data.
“Hound Dog” will be an interesting case. You’ll need to work out if you want “original recording date” or “first recording by this cover artist”.
Someone wrote a plugin just for this a few years ago:
This was for Picard 1.4 though so it will probably not work with 2.x, but it would probably not take too much effort to port/update it. 
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I just use this simple script:
$set(date, $left(%originaldate%,4))
All it does is it replaces the “date” (in your case 2002) with original date of the recording (1956).
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THANK YOU, Ive been looking for this!!!
Note that this doesn’t set the original date of the recording but the earliest (known) release in the release group. This has several caveats: 1) the recording might not actually appear on the earliest release, so “recording date” gets set to too early; 2) the recording appeared on releases prior to releases in this release group (esp. true for compilations, but can also be for like singles etc.), so the earliest release date is still a later date than when the recording was first available.
The only way to do this properly is something like the plugin I linked earlier, though this one will also cause a ton of additional requests to the MusicBrainz web service, so it will slow down lookups significantly.
Btw, there is a (related) ticket for this here:
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