“that’s all right” --7/3/26

03 Jul 2026

“that’s all right” --7/3/26

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Today's selection-- from Before Elvis by Preston Lauterbach. Arthur Crudup, the composer of Elvis Presley’s first hit, “That’s All Right”:

“Of all the early rock royalty, none felt the sting of lost royalties harder than Arthur Crudup, the man who wrote and originally recorded the song that became Elvis Presley's first hit, ‘That's All Right.’ As a historical figure, Crudup has been defined by his financial losses to a rapacious music industry. It is true that his compositions came to be worth tens of thousands of dollars during his lifetime, tens of thousands that he never touched. Crudup has become a symbol of racial disparity and exploitation–the sharecropper whose songs made Elvis king. But that scenario is a little more complicated than what meets the eye.

“Crudup's influence on Elvis and the American music world goes far beyond one song. His name spread from coast to coast on the strength of his seemingly inexhaustible flow of lyrics. In 1949, Crudup was so popular that when 45-rpm record technology debuted, RCA reissued his ‘That's All Right’ on orange vinyl to hype the new format. Crudup's story should be about a man of grit and fight who was down to play music and make money, and who had a huge family and never shirked his duty to support loved ones. But his relationship with Elvis has overshadowed all else.

“Arthur Crudup was born in Forest, Mississippi, on August 24, 1905. He has a peculiar historical parallel in the form of another notable Mississippian born within months of Crudup and raised in Forest during the early years of his upbringing–James Eastland, the hardest of hard-core segregationist members of the US Senate, who served from 1941 until 1978, a span covering Crudup's mercurial music career. Eastland maintained that African Americans were morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to white people. This likely says all that needs saying about the culture surrounding Crudup as he came of age. While Crudup received no schooling–1930 census records indicate that he did not read or write–Eastland attended the public schools of Forest prior to leaving for the University of Mississippi in 1922. ‘I didn't have much of an education,’ Crudup said. ‘Therefore I had to take what the other fella left.’

“Throughout his teenage years and young adulthood, Crudup lived with his mother and sister, shuttling back and forth between Indiana, where he worked in foundries, and Mississippi. ‘I farmed, railroaded, used to cut timber, the sawmills and highways, and all kinds of work, anything that I could get to do;' he said.Crudup had a musical family, and Forest had a few players around, but Crudup only picked up a guitar in his early thirties. ‘I reckon it was just a gift,’ he told Mike Leadbitter in a 1970 interview published in Blues Unlimited. ‘I never had any teaching, just learned myself’

Crudup at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival

"The way Crudup told it, in the spirit of taking what the other fella left, he got ahold of a broken guitar, playing at first on the only two strings it had. As he mastered those, he added a third, later a fourth and :fifth, and :finally he installed the sixth string once he knew how to work the others. ‘After I picked up and got to where I could make a few chords on it, why I left Forest and went up in the Mississippi Delta,’ he said.

“The Delta was the unholy land of American music, a place of unremitting poverty, unpunished violence, and unbonded whiskey, teeming with cotton and itinerant guitarists, blossoming with unlettered poets. Crudup arrived there during a peak period of musical talent in the region, when Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Son House, Muddy Waters, Tommy Johnson, Big Joe Williams, and numerous lesser-known but equally gifted artists hopped trains and hitched rides from roadhouse to roadhouse.

“Dribs and drabs of Crudup's story, dropped in interviews here and there, indicate his dark passages. Talking with an English journalist, Crudup recalled being shot while dancing in a juke joint. He had been to the penitentiary, he admitted in another interview, but for fighting, he carefully pointed out, not stealing.

“Crudup approached music the same way he farmed or cut timber–he had a growing family to support and hustled for them. He hit upon a routine of farming and filling the offseason with music. Needing to make money and meet immediate needs, Crudup was driven by the fear or the presence of hunger to Chicago in 1940. He was thirty-five.”