Arthur Crudup wrote the song that became Elvis’ first hit. He barely got paid

FRANKTOWN, Va. (AP) — Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup helped invent rock ‘n’ roll.

His 1946 song “That’s All Right,” an off-the-cuff shrug to his beloved, became the first single Elvis Presley ever released. Rod Stewart sang it on a chart-topping album. Led Zeppelin played it live.

But nobody would know that in the event that they saw Crudup living out the remainder of his life on the eastern shore of Virginia, wearing overalls and leading a crew picking cucumbers, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes.

Despite being called the “father of rock ‘n’ roll,” Crudup received meager songwriting royalties during his lifetime due to a record deal that funneled money to his original manager. Crudup died 50 years ago, forsaking certainly one of the grimmest accounts of artist exploitation in the twentieth century.

“Of course, material things don’t mean everything,” says Prechelle Crudup Shannon, her granddaughter. “But they took a lot more than just money. They left him with all the burdens of a poor black man. And they left him with a broken heart.”

Crudup has received flashes of recognition in recent times, including being briefly portrayed by Gary Clark Jr. in the 2022 biopic “Elvis” and being mentioned last 12 months by a California reparations task force examining the long history of discrimination against African Americans.

Friday marks the seventieth anniversary of Presley’s recording of “That’s All Right” — many historians consider July 5 a cultural milestone — and coincides with plans by the state of Virginia to erect a plaque on the highway honoring Crudup.

“Among others who covered Crudup were the Beatles, B.B. King and Elton John,” the plaque will say. “Rarely receiving royalties, Crudup supported his family as a laborer and farm hand.”

“A completely new thing”

Crudup was born in Forest, Mississippi, in 1905 and started singing the blues when he was about 10, he told Blues Unlimited magazine. He was working in a foundry by 14. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that he began playing guitar. Self-taught, he played at parties and nightclubs in the Mississippi Delta.

In Chicago, in search of higher work, he played on the street and slept in a crate under the L subway station. One night on a street corner, Crudup met Lester Melrose, a white field agent for Bluebird Records.

“He put a dollar in my hand and asked me to play,” Crudup told High Fidelity magazine.

There are many arguments about who wrote the first rock ‘n’ roll song. But “That’s All Right,” which mixes elements of blues and country, makes a robust claim.

“It doesn’t sound like country, it doesn’t sound like blues, even though I hear them there,” says Joe Burns, a professor of communication and media studies at Southeastern Louisiana University. “It’s really something completely new.”

Crudup recorded about 80 songs for Bluebird between 1941 and 1956, including “That’s All Right”, “My Baby Left Me”, and “So Glad You’re Mine”. He didn’t own the rights to any of them.

His first manager had them.

“I wouldn’t record anyone unless they signed all the rights to them over to me,” Melrose once said, in response to Alan Lomax’s book Mister Jelly Roll.

Crudup spent years in Chicago, recording songs there and taking the bus south to jobs in Mississippi, certainly one of which was taking out trash for $28.44 every week.

“I had to take care of my family, pay my car payment, my gas bill, my light bill,” Crudup said. He gave up music in his early 50s to work on farms.

“A kind of hillbilly record”

In 1954, Presley was taking a break from a rehearsal session at Sun Studios when “a song I had heard years ago popped into my head,” writes Peter Guralnick in his book Last Train to Memphis.

Sam Phillips, the studio’s legendary founder, immediately recognized Crudup’s song. Phillips was amazed that the 19-year-old knew it and felt his version “came out fresh and lush.”

A radio station in Memphis, Tennessee, soon played Presley’s recording. The response was “immediate,” with phone calls and telegrams asking for it to be played again, Guralnick wrote.

“It was by far Elvis’ biggest hit on The Sun and it launched him on a path to fame that soon became almost unimaginable to him,” Guralnick told The Associated Press.

Although Crudup is usually omitted from accounts of Presley’s profession, the singer publicly credited himself as a songwriter.

“In Tupelo, Mississippi, I heard old Arthur Crudup banging on the box the way I do now,” Presley told The Charlotte Observer in 1956, “and I said to myself that if I ever got to a place where I could feel everything old Arthur felt, I would be a musician such as no one had ever seen.”

Crudup himself liked Presley’s interpretation.

“He made it kind of a hillbilly record,” Crudup later told the Los Angeles Times. “But I liked it. I thought it would be a hit. Some people like the blues, some people don’t. But the way he did it, everybody liked it.”

Featured Stories

In the early Nineteen Sixties, Crudup finally received a hefty royalty payment of $1,600. But Melrose refused handy over the copyright.

Many black musicians have signed copyright agreements or been forced to share them, says Southwestern Law School professor Kevin J. Greene.

“A huge part of what we’re talking about in terms of exploitation is still covered by copyright law,” says Greene, who testified before the California Copyright Commission.

In 1971, Downbeat magazine estimated that Crudup probably must have earned greater than $250,000 — almost $2 million today — for the songs “That’s All Right” and “My Baby Left Me,” recorded by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The American Guild of Authors and Composers even tried to gather royalties on Crudup’s behalf. However, then-executive director John Carter told High Fidelity in 1972 that Crudup received “a maximum of $2,500” from the guild’s efforts.

Fun in the packaging hall

In his mid-50s, Crudup settled in Franktown, Virginia. His granddaughter says he was devastated by the experience. But he didn’t despair.

“My father stressed that Crudup was a man of extremely strong principles,” Shannon says of Crudup, who embodied the “old country values” of exertions and raising a family.

Etna Nottingham Walker, whose family owned the Virginia farm where Crudup worked, says that “if you didn’t know he was Arthur Crudup and that he was a musician, you wouldn’t pay any attention to him.”

Butch Nottingham, Walker’s cousin, also worked on the farm. During breaks, he says, Crudup would sometimes pull out his guitar and sing in the packing shed, where cucumbers were being washed and waxed.

Crudup eventually returned to music during the blues revival of the Nineteen Sixties. Record producers from two labels, Fire and Delmark, found him. He released latest albums, played festivals and shared stages with BB King, Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt.

But Crudup still lived on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a narrow peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Shannon remembers her silver-haired grandfather holding her as a toddler on their Franktown porch, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“He had these really, really long limbs,” Shannon recalls. “He just looked like a giant to me.”

Tim Prettyman worked at a drugstore where Crudup often bought insulin, coffee, and Camel cigarettes. Once, Crudup arrived in a suit with a guitar case, heading to catch a bus to New York and a plane to England.

“He said, ‘I’m going to play music for the Queen,’ and he winked at me and smiled,” Prettyman recalls.

“It wasn’t supposed to be”

Towards the end of his life, Crudup was near receiving a $60,000 settlement, which can be price greater than $400,000 today.

Melrose was dead. A deal was made with Hill & Range, the company that had acquired Crudup’s publishing rights.

However, when Crudup and his 4 children arrived in New York, they learned the deal had been voided, in response to the book “Between Midnight and Day” by Crudup’s last manager, Dick Waterman.

They were told that settling would cost the company more cash than the potential lawsuit would herald. And a lawsuit meant “taking down an old white widow who lives in Florida,” Waterman wrote. “We wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“It just wasn’t meant to be,” Crudup told Waterman. “Naked I came into this world, and naked I shall leave it.”

Indeed, the settlement didn’t come until after Crudup’s death in 1974. Chappell Music refused to purchase Hill & Range until the Crudup case was resolved. The first check was for just over $248,000, Waterman wrote, and Crudup’s estate received about $3 million over the following many years.

Warner Chappell Music declined to comment because the events took place so way back.

Jeanette Crudup, the widow of Crudup’s son Jonas, says the amounts paid to the musician’s children are nothing in comparison with what he must have received during his lifetime.

“They were left with crumbs,” he says.

Crudup stays relatively unknown, even on the East Coast, says Billy Sturgis, an area resident who produced an album by Crudup’s sons. Sturgis hopes the plaque will help. But, he says, Crudup belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, together with Presley and plenty of others who sang Crudup’s songs.

Crudup’s granddaughter agrees.

“It would be something if this story was unique,” ​​Shannon says. “But it’s not. We know this has happened to black artists throughout history, but specifically at this time.”