FEATURE:
Groovelines
Elvis Presley – That’s All Right (Mama)
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IT almost slipped me by…
IN THIS PHOTO: Elvis Presley in 1954/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
but, on 5th July, 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his debut single, That’s All Right (Mama). It is hard to say how the song should be written out, as I have seen it like that, That’s All Right, and That’s All Right, Mama. I am going to stick with the spelling and version in the header. In any case, this song is a cover version. That's All Right is a song written and originally performed by the American Blues singer Arthur Crudup. Elvis Presley’s version, That’s All Right (Mama), was recorded in 1954. The original was recorded in 1946 but not released until 1949. I think it is a seismic moment seeing the young Elvis Presley – he was just nineteen! – head into the studio. Perhaps a little nervous. Even though his debut single was recorded in 1954, his eponymous debut album did not arrive until 1956. That album changed Rock ‘n’ Roll. One of the most seismic album releases in history. I wanted to focus on his debut single and the story behind it. I am going to use a few features to help do that. I want to start with History and their study of That’s All Right (Mama). Recorded on 5th July, 1954, it is almost seventy years since a slice of history was laid down:
“History credits Sam Phillips, the owner and operator of Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, with the discovery of Elvis Presley, which is perfectly fair, though it fails to account for the roles of four others in making that discovery possible: The business partner who first spotted something special in Elvis, the two session men who vouched for his musical talent and the blues figure who wrote the song he was playing when Sam Phillips realized what he had on his hands. The song in question was “That’s All Right” by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and Elvis’ unrehearsed performance of it—recorded by Sam Phillips on July 5, 1954—is a moment some regard as the true beginning of the rock-and-roll revolution.
The sequence of events that led to this moment began when a young truck driver walked into the offices of Sun Records and the Memphis Recording Service on a Saturday night in the summer of 1953 and paid $3.98 plus tax to make an acetate record as a birthday present to his mother. Sam Phillips recorded Elvis singing “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” and he told his business partner Marion Keisker something that made her write down “Good ballad singer. Hold” in her notes. It was Kreisler who was impressed enough by the incredibly shy young singer that she repeatedly brought his name up to Phillips over the next year and mentioned that he seemed worth following up with. In early July 1954, Phillips finally sent two of his favorite session musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, to go meet with Elvis and report back to him with their assessment. After talking and jamming a bit with Presley, Moore and Black gave Phillips a report that was hardly enthusiastic. “He didn’t knock me out,” Moore told Phillips, “[but] the boy’s got a good voice.” Phillips decided to take a flyer and schedule a recording session with Presley for July 5.
Phillips knew that something was brewing in the music world of 1954, and he had a pretty good idea what it would take to make the pot boil: A white singer who could sing “black” rhythm and blues. However, the first several hours of the July 5 session did nothing to convince Sam Phillips that Elvis was the one he’d been looking for. Elvis’s renditions of “Harbor Lights” and “I Love You Because” were stiff and uninspired, and after numerous takes and re-takes, Phillips called for a break. Rather than shoot the breeze with his fellow musicians or step outside for a breath of fresh air, Elvis began to mess around on the guitar, playing and singing “That’s All Right,” but at least twice as fast as the original.
Through an open door in the control room, Sam Phillips heard this unfamiliar rendition of a familiar blues number and knew he’d found the sound he’d been looking for. “[Phillips] stuck his head out and said ‘What are you doing?'” Scotty Moore later recalled. “And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ Sam said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.'”
Phillips continued recording with Elvis over the next two evenings, but he never captured anything as thrilling as he did that first night. Released to Memphis radio station WHBQ just two days after it was recorded, and then as a single two weeks later, Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right (Mama)” became an instant regional hit and set him on his path toward stardom”.
I will move to this feature that offers even more details and revelations about an iconic single release. The start of something huge. It is wonderful that interest in the song was so intense that D.J. Dewey Phillips played the acetate fourteen times. The switchboards lit up. Elvis Presley went to the radio station, WHBQ, for an interview. Presley did not realise the microphones were live, so he revealed details about himself that made people aware of the fact he was a white artist. A song from a Black artist, maybe people felt Elvis Presley was Black. That’s All Right (Mama) sold about 20,000 copies. Even if it did not get a U.S. national chart position, it made the local Memphis chart:
“The first side might be seen as something of an accident. An inspired accident, to be sure, but one that was prompted more by desperation than by intent. It was the outgrowth of an audition session at Sun Records set up by Sun owner Sam Phillips nearly a year after Elvis had first come into Phillips’ studio to make a “personal” record at the singer’s own expense. Elvis was backed at the session by guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black, who at Phillips’ direction had listened to Elvis run through his repertoire of ballads, country, and pop material at Scotty’s house the day before. Both were in a hillbilly group called the Starlite Wranglers that had recently recorded for Sun, and Phillips judged them to be well suited, both musically and temperamentally, to bring out the best in the insecure nineteen-year-old who seemed unable to settle on a style. It didn’t work quite the way that anyone planned. The audition session was no more focused than the pre-audition, or, for that matter, the informal tryout Phillips had given Elvis just ten days earlier on a song he thought might be good for the boy. Elvis was all over the place on the evening of July 5-6, nervously stopping and starting songs, mostly sentimental ballads, and it was only when he sensed the moment slipping away that he picked up his guitar during a break and started flailing away on a blues that nobody could even have guessed was within his scope.
It was at that precise moment that Sam Phillips knew they had arrived at the destination they had unknowingly been seeking all along. “That’s All Right” was in its way a faithful homage to the 1946 Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup blues from which it derived, an homage intended neither to imitate nor to displace the original. And yet it was in its own way utterly, strikingly different. Probably what made it most different was its youthful purity, its unchecked sense of joyous release and exuberant lack of restraint. What set it apart in a more formal way was its combination of rhythm and melody (Crudup’s original, while unquestionably driving, retained the amelodic modal feel of much Mississippi blues), its deliberate blurring of genres, and the use to which its simple instrumentation was put. Scotty’s lead guitar featured some of the lyrical elements of Nashville stylist Chet Atkins in combination with the power-driven blues of some of Phillips’ earlier discoveries while Bill Black’s slap bass added a different, more eccentric form of propulsiveness and Elvis’ acoustic rhythm anchored the whole in an unshakably soaring groove. “To be honest, we just stumbled on it,” Elvis said in response to a question about the derivation of his style from announcer Frank Page in his Louisiana Hayride debut. That was unquestionably true of “That’s All Right,” which Sam Phillips circulated as a single-sided acetate. When it immediately became a radio hit in Memphis, due almost entirely to the enthusiasm of local DJ Dewey Phillips, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill (the trio’s initial name) were faced with the challenge of coming up with a B-side. “We spent three or four nights,” said Scotty, “trying to get something that would be in the same kind of vein. Then Bill jumped up and started clowning and singing ‘Blue Moon Of Kentucky’ in a high falsetto voice, and Elvis started banging on the guitar, and I joined in, and it just gelled.” With the Bill Monroe bluegrass classic, in other words, they set out to recapitulate the formula they had stumbled upon that first night, but in the opposite direction – in this case taking a hillbilly waltz toward a 4/4 blues. The result was an instant city-wide hit, with six thousand orders in something like two weeks, and regional success slowly radiating out from there. Sam Phillips had to fight a great deal of resistance from both country and r&b DJs, with some of the r&b jocks telling him the record was so country it shouldn’t be played after sun-up and the country jocks telling him they would be run out of town if they aired it. Nonetheless, Phillips persisted, Elvis persisted, and the record persisted, eventually posting sales of more than 100,000 copies, almost entirely in the mid-South, Texas, and Louisiana, in the year-and-a-half before Elvis’ contract was sold to RCA”.
Even if it is clear that Black artists like Little Richard were Rock ‘n’ Roll pioneers before Elvis Presley, it is obvious that Presley introduced something new. It is perhaps problematic that Presley, as a white man, was seen as more appropriate to promote. Rather than salute the pioneers he took inspiration from, there was still a real sense of racism through the media and beyond. Even so, That’s All Right (Mama) was a pivotal and enormous moment in music history. The introduction of an artist who would soon become a world-wide sensation. Far Out Magazine revisited Elvis Presley’s first single for their feature:
“Presley wasn’t the first rock and roll singer, nor was he even the first white rock and roll singer. Just a few months prior, Bill Haley released his version of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which still treated rock and roll as a dance fad much in the same way that Big Joe Turner’s ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’ did. Little Richard and Chuck Berry had already released records that blues into new, high-energy territory. But what Presley was doing was completely unique and at the forefront of a new cultural movement.
The story of where rock and roll actually starts begins before Elvis was even old enough to enter a bar. Pioneers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley were all making souped-up blues music that sounded completely different from the pure blues of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. Presley was simply an avatar for these influences – the man with the sound, the looks, and the acceptable race to be embraced by the general public and propelled into the mainstream.
Phillips wasn’t shy about his intentions: he wanted a white singer who could play black music. Presley was that man. A few days after the impromptu recording of ‘That’s All Right’, Presley, Moore, and Black returned to Sun Studios to cut a transformed version of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass classic ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. With more of an emphasis on rhythm, Presley showed that he could cull from both blues and country in own music. Both songs would quickly be compiled onto a single and released only a week later.
‘That’s All Right’ began to gain traction around Memphis and soon migrated down south to the Louisiana Hayride, a country music radio programme that was open to playing blues and R&B. The house drummer at the Hayride was D.J. Fontana, who provided Presley with his first backup of percussion. The pieces of Presley’s initial rock and roll takeover were starting to land in place. Soon, Presley would move beyond Sun Studios and its signature sound, but ‘That’s All Right’ never strayed far from Presley’s life as he continued to refine and redefine rock music over the next 23 years”.
For this Groovelines, I wanted to spend time with a song that, in a way, changed music history. The start of Elvis Presley. He, in turn, inspired so many other artists who followed. One of the most famous and adored artists ever. Released on 19th July, 1954, That’s All Right (Mama) was recorded a fortnight earlier. The debut single from a then-teenage Elvis Presley truly is…
A landmark recording.