That’s All Right – 70th Anniversary
“Before Elvis, there was nothing!”
John Lennon
On July 5, 1954, Elvis Presley recorded That’s All Right: the single was released on July 19, 1954.
From that date — music changed forever.
Elvis Aaron Presley was an unlikely name for a teen idol and star, and Elvis had an unlikely background for one as well. The son of a poor sharecropper from Mississippi who had moved to Memphis as a young man, he was working as a truck driver when he first went into Memphis Recording Service to record himself singing a song for his mother.
And when record producer Marion Keisker heard the young man who’d come in to the studio, she thought she’d found just the singer her boss Sam Phillips had been looking for – the white man who could sing like a black man. However, even there, it’s hard to see from Elvis’ original recording – versions of My Happiness and That’s When Your Heartaches Begin – what she saw in him that sounded so black. Yet Keisker and Phillips heard something in those recordings. More importantly, though, what Phillips saw in him was an attitude. And not the attitude you might expect.
In fact, Elvis was a quiet country boy. He had been bullied at school. He wore strange clothes and kept to himself, only ever really getting close to his mother. He was horribly introverted, and the few friends he did have mostly didn’t know about his interests, other than whichever one he shared with them. He mostly liked to listen to music, read comic books, and fantasise about being in a gospel quartet like the Jordanaires, singing harmony with a group like that.
He’d hang around with some of the other teenagers living in the same housing block – Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, and a guy called Johnny Black, whose big brother Bill was the bass player with the Starlite Wranglers. They sort of allowed him to hang around with them, and they’d all get together and sing, Elvis standing a little off from the rest of them, like he wasn’t really part of the group.
He didn’t have many friends – and no close friends at all – and many of those he did have didn’t even know he was interested in music. But he was absorbing music from every direction and every source – the country groups his mother liked to listen to on the radio like the Louvin Brothers, the gospel quartets who were massive stars among the religious, poor, people in the area, the music he heard at the Pentecostal church he attended (a white Pentecostal church, but still as much of a Holly Roller church as the black ones that Sister Rosetta Tharpe had learned her music from). He’d go down Beale Street, too, and listen to people like B.B. King – young Elvis bought his clothes from Lansky’s on Beale, where the black people bought their clothes, rather than from the places the other white kids got their clothes.
But he wasn’t someone like Johnny Otis who fitted in with the black community, either – rather, he was someone who didn’t fit in anywhere. Someone who had nobody, other than his mother, who he felt really close to. He was weird, and unpopular, and shy, and odd-looking.
But that feeling of not fitting in anywhere allowed him to pick up on music from everywhere. He didn’t own many records, but he absorbed songs from the radio. He’d hear something by the Ink Spots or Arthur Crudup once, and sing it perfectly.
But it was gospel music he wanted to sing – and specifically what is known euphemistically as Southern Gospel, but which really means white Gospel. When we talk about a gospel influence on Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin or Sam Cooke, that’s the gospel music we’re talking about.
That black form of gospel became the primary influence on fifties rhythm and blues vocals, and through that on rock and roll. But there’s another gospel music as well – Southern Gospel or quartet gospel. That music is – or at least was at the time we’re talking about – almost exclusively white, and male, and sung by groups. To ears that aren’t attuned to it, it can sound a lot like barbershop music. It shares a lot of its repertoire with black gospel, but it’s performed in a very, very different style
The Blackwood Brothers were young Elvis Presley’s favourite group, and he was such a fan that when two of the group died in a plane crash in 1954, Elvis was one of the thousands who attended their funeral. He auditioned for several gospel quartets, but never found a role in any of them – but all his life, that was the music he wanted to sing, the music he would return to.
In August 1953, Presley checked into Memphis Recording Service, (the company run by Sam Phillips before he started Sun Records). He aimed to pay for studio time to record a two-sided acetate disc: My Happiness and That’s When Your Heartaches Begin. He later claimed that he intended the record as a birthday gift for his mother. Biographer Peter Guralnick argued that Elvis chose Sun Studios in the hope of being discovered.
In January 1954, Presley cut a second acetate – I’ll Never Stand in Your Way and It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You – but again nothing came of it. Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows, and another for the band of Eddie Bond.
Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun Records focused. In June, he acquired a demo recording by Jimmy Sweeney of a ballad, Without You, that he thought might suit Elvis. The teenaged singer came by the studio but was unable to do it justice.
Despite this, Phillips asked Elvis to sing other numbers and was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield “Scotty” Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work with Elvis for a recording session. The session, held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night.
As they were about to abort and go home, Elvis launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right.
Moore recalled, “All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them.”
Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for. And it’s just as timeless today as it was then, and just as uncategorizable. Is it folk music? Is it rock ’n’ roll? Is it country-flavoured blues? It is, simply, itself.
Three days later, popular Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips played That’s All Right on his Red, Hot, and Blue show. Listener interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the remaining two hours of his show. Interviewing Elvis on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended to clarify his colour for the many callers who had assumed that he was black.
During the next few days, the trio recorded a bluegrass song, Bill Monroe’s Blue Moon of Kentucky, again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed “slapback”.
A single was pressed with That’s All Right on the A-side and Blue Moon of Kentucky on the reverse.
Elvis Presley had a hit on his hands – at least as much of a hit as you could get from a country record on a blues label. But it was at the band’s first live performance that something even more astonishing happened, and it happened because of Elvis’ stage fright, at least as Scotty Moore used to tell the story.
When Elvis got on stage, he was so scared he started shaking. And so did his pants. And because his pants were so baggy, they started shaking not in a way that looked like he was scared, but in a way that was, frankly, sexual. And the audiences reacted. A lot.
Over the next year or two, Elvis would rapidly grow utterly confident on stage, and when you look at footage of him from a few years later, it’s hard to imagine him ever having stage fright at all, with the utter assurance and cocky smile he has. But all his stage presence developed from him noticing the things that the audience reacted to and doing more of them, and the thing they reacted to first and most was his nervous leg-twitching.
And just like that, the unpopular poor boy became the biggest recording artists the world had ever seen.
Elvis: The Hollywood Years
Sam Phillips (1923 – 2003) was a disc jockey, songwriter and record producer. He was the founder of Sun Records and Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, where he produced recordings by Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash.
Marion Keisker (1917 – 1989) was a record producer. She was the first person ever to record the singing voice of Elvis Presley.
Scotty Moore (1931 – 2016) was a guitarist who formed The Blue Moon Boys in 1954, Elvis Presley’s backing band. He was studio and touring guitarist for Elvis between 1954 and 1968.
Bill Black (1926 – 1965) was a musician who is noted as one of the pioneers of rock and roll. He played the double bass in Elvis Presley’s early trio, The Blue Moon Boys.
The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is, unsurprisingly, also the King of Number 1s. In just under 48 years, from first chart-topper All Shook Up in July 1957 to the reissue of It’s Now or Never in February 2005, Elvis amassed 21 Number 1s, spending 80 weeks at the top.
1: All Shook Up – 28 Jun 1957
The King had 9 previous UK hits before finally making No.1
2: Jailhouse Rock – 24 Jan 1958
From the Elvis film of the same name
3: I Got Stung / One Night – 30 Jan 1959
Elvis was in the army by the time this was a hit
4: A Fool Such As I – 15 May 1959
His first ballad to make it to the top
5: It’s Now Or Never – 3 Nov 1960
Based on the Italian song, O Sole Mic, Elvis’ first post-army No.1
6: Are You Lonesome Tonight – 26 Jan 1961
Song written in 1926 – includes spoken passage based on Shakespeare
7: Wooden Heart – 23 Mar 1961
Based on a German folk song, it was featured in Elvis’ film GI Blues
8: Surrender – 1 Jun 1961
Another revived Italian song, Return To Sorrento, written in 1911
9: His Latest Flame – 9 Nov 1961
A light-hearted story song with a Latin-influenced Bo Diddley beat
10: Can’t Help Falling In Love / Rock-A-Hula Baby – 22 Feb 1962
Both tracks taken from his hit movie Blue Hawaii
11: Good Luck Charm – 24 May 1962
The record foreshadowed a down turn in Elvis’ recording career
12: She’s Not You – 13 Sep 1962
Country-flavoured song from the Lieber & Stoller team
13: Return To Sender – 13 Dec 1962
The UK Christmas No.1 in 1962
14: Devil In Disguise – 1 Aug 1963
10th No.1 in less than 3 years, but it got tougher for the King from here on
15: Crying In The Chapel – 17 Jun 1965
Now struggling in the charts, his first No.1 for two years was recorded 5 years earlier
16: The Wonder Of You – 1 Aug 1970
Reviving his career in Las Vegas, and this is a live recording from his show
17: Way Down – 3 Sep 1977
Released just before the King died on 16/8/77
18: A Little Less Conversation – 22 Jun 2002
The song is from one of his long-forgotten 1960s films, remixed by JXL
19: Jailhouse Rock – 15 Jan 2005
To celebrate the 70th anniversary of his birth, a series of re-released Elvis singles was issued
20: One Night / I Got Stung – 22 Jan 2005
Continuing the re-issue of Elvis’ former No.1s
21: It’s Now Or Never – 5 Feb 2005
Yet another of his reissues hit the top. This was last at No.1 in November 1960.
Songwriter: Arthur Crudup
That’s All Right lyrics © Unichappell Music Inc., Crudup Music
Source: Sun Records and the 70 Recordings That Changed the World, 500songs.com and en.wikipedia.org
