Chart position: Did not chart Category: Blues Writer: Arthur Crudup
Label and number: RCA Victor 20-2205 (1946) and RCA Victor 50-0000 (1949),
New York
Flipside: "Crudup's After Hours"
When and where recorded: September 6, 1946, in Chicago
When released:Late 1946 / March 1949
Why important: It was the first blues/R&B record released on 45 rpm,
and a prototype of early rockabilly.
Influenced by: "My Black Mama" by Son House (1930), "Keep on Trying"
by
Tampa Kid (1936), "If I Get Lucky" by Big Boy Crudup (1941), "Keep Your Arms
Around Me" by Big Boy Crudup (1944)
Influenced: Elvis Presley, J. B. Lenoir
Important remakes: Elvis Presley's first record in 1954, Marty Robbins
(/J7 C&W, 1955)
The story behind the record: When Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, bassist Ransom
Knowling and drummer Lawrence "Judge" Riley recorded their crude, simple blues
above a Chicago pawn shop forty-six years ago, they could never have imagined
what route it would take. The record sold a respectable number of copies upon
its release and then played out. There wasn't much to distinguish "That's All
Right" from hundreds of other blues records that received their obligatory six
weeks of promotion and distribution before lapsing into obscurity, presumably
never to be heard from again.
But something else was happening that year. Columbia Records engineers were secretly working on a new record format called microgroove-the 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record-that they would hatch on June 21, 1948; this in turn spurred the creation of another breakthrough record format that would make Big Boy Crudup a part of musical history.
Crudup (pronounced crew-dup) was born August 24,1905, in Forest, Mississippi. He didn't learn the guitar till he was thirty-two, and didn't record for another four years after that. His career began almost accidentally. He was touring with a gospel group in 1941 when the promoter stranded them in Chicago. Crudup slept in a packing crate under the 39th Street elevated train station, and sang on Southside street corners, trying to raise enough money to take the train back to Mississippi. It didn't take long for him to come into the sphere of Lester Melrose, a local white music publisher and A&R man for Bluebird Records, who auditioned him at a house on South State Street and signed him to a record contract.
Melrose, a former railroad man and record store owner born in the 1890s, had, along with J. Mayo Williams [see #13, "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee"], monopolized the production of Chicago's black music for the major companies, Columbia (Okeh) and Victor (Bluebird), since the early days of the Depression. Like Williams, Melrose signed the acts directly to himself, then farmed them out to the record companies. He made the rules and set the prices, and the blues musicians could either like it or lump it. Crudup would later regret his deal with Lester Melrose.
Unlike many other transplanted Mississippians, Crudup didn't take kindly to Chicago's hectic pace and bitter weather. With the cash from his first session he went back home, where he sharecropped a farm and brewed moonshine on the side. He ventured north only once or twice a year for a recording session with Melrose's in-house musicians in a makeshift studio above Eli's Pawn Shop on South State Street. Crudup's platters sold well enough that Victor released over forty of them, but he made no money beyond the $75 to $200 per song that Melrose paid him over the years, because his contract precluded his owning copyrights to his music or receiving future royalties. "I wasn't making money off those records to amount to nothing," he told an interviewer in the early 1970s. "And all those kids of mine were little then, so I just kept on recording every time I was asked and working on the farm between times."By the time Radio Corporation of America merged with Victor Records in the mid-1940s, Crudup was moved from the Bluebird subsidiary to the new RCA Victor label. He had a couple of hits in 1945-46, including "So Glad You're Mine" (number three R&B), but "That's All Right" wasn't one of them, even though (or because) it was typical of his recordings. In fact, it was little more than a pastiche of several of his earlier recordings, especially "Keep Your Arms Around Me" from 1944. At 220 pounds, Big Boy Crudup lived up to his moniker, but his high, shrill voice belied his size. His voice was also the most distinctive part of his performance, for he mixed a strong field holler with gospel shouting. His guitar work, on the other hand, remained rudimentary. He generally sang and played in one key-E-and he used the guitar more for syncopation than anything else, hitting the strings with staccato stabs and constantly jumping time (altering the song's rhythm and bar structure).
Backing up Crudup were two of Melrose's regular session men who appeared behind dozens of his Bluebird acts. Melrose especially relied on Ransom Knowling, a veteran New Orleans bassist who had no trouble following the "country changes" of rural bluesmen like Crudup. Knowling also functioned as Melrose's right-hand man, making sure that Crudup got from the train station to the studio without stopping at a bar or liquor store.
"That's All Right" was an ordinary but catchy blues song about a man trying to decide whether to put up with a woman who's been giving him trouble, and never quite able to come to a decision: "Well now that's all right now, mama, that's all right for you, that's all right now, mama, any way you do, but that's all right, that's all right, that's all right now, mama, any way you do . . . Well, my mama she done told me, papa told me too, this life you're living, son, now women be the death of you-but that's all right . . . Babe, now if you don't want me, why not tell me so, you won't be bothered with me 'round your house no more-but that's all right!" Reflecting the song's ambivalence is the word mama, which Crudup seems to be using for both his mother and the woman tormenting him.
Although "That's All Right" did only modest business in 1946, RCA Victor decided to make it a part of recording history three years later. The story goes back to around 1900, when the Improved Gram-O-Phone Record Company in Philadelphia inaugurated a new shellac, ten-inch record that played at a standard speed of 78 revolutions per minute. Before then, records spun at speeds from 72 to 85 rpm, with mostly laughable results. And, until 1948, not much else of importance happened to recording technology, except that Victor almost went broke trying to introduce a 33 1/3 format in the mid-1930s.
Then everything changed. When Columbia introduced the twelve-inch microgroove long-play (LP) format, it threatened to dominate the recording industry. Other companies had to press their albums at Columbia's pressing plants or pay Columbia a fee for every LP they sold. RCA Victor's consumer products engineers feverishly worked day and night on their own Project Madame X, which they triumphantly unveiled in early 1949.
Madame X turned out to be the unassuming seven-inch, 45-rpm single, immediately dubbed "the donut disk" because of a big hole in its center. Most of the industry sneered at the 45 because it couldn't hold much more music-about four minutes comfortably on each side-than the creaky old 78. RCA Victor pointed up the 45's greater durability and lightness-shellac 78s were heavy, bulky and easily broken-but the company was uncertain how the little plastic experiment would compete with Columbia's larger LP format. To insure that the donut disk wouldn't get dunked, RCA Victor hired marketing geniuses to sell it to the public.
Somebody came up with the idea of color-coding the vinyl according to the type of music in its grooves. On the day in early March when RCA Victor launched its new format, a handful of records hit the market: Country music was on green vinyl, classical selections on red (a nod to the company's prestigious "Red Seal" line), pop music on blue vinyl and children's records on yellow. A bright orange vinyl was reserved for the label's rhythm and blues line.
The first orange disk that day was Big Boy Crudup's "That's All Right." He was the first black artist ever released on a 45 record. "That's All Right" garnered some airtime on a few Southern radio stations, sold a few copies and, for the second time, faded into silence without making much noise.
The 45 caught on fast. If pop music was part of postwar America's disposable culture, the cheap little disk was the perfect throwaway. Other labels contracted with RCA Victor to press their artists onto this new plastic product. And, since teenagers associated the 45 with the growth of R &B music and later rock 'n' roll, it became the record they called their own. With the thumb-size hole in the center, the disk fit easily into even a child's hand. By 1958 the major companies stopped pressing 78s-but that's another story.
In 1954 RCA Victor let Arthur Crudup's contract lapse. His records weren't selling. Ironically, at about that time, Sun Records in Memphis was recording a session that would insure Crudup's place in the history books. In the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black recorded "That's All Right" at Presley's first session [see #41], using almost the identical arrangement from Crudup's 1946 session-the main difference being the lack of drums on Presley's record and the omission of Crudup's last two verses. Later on, Presley recorded Crudup's "My Baby Left Me" for Sun and, when he moved onto Crudup's old label, RCA Victor, "So Glad You're Mine." These three songs left no doubt what effect the old bluesman had had on young Elvis.
And yet Crudup received little or no benefit from Elvis Presley recording his songs because of those contracts he had signed with Lester Melrose back in the '40s. "I was making everybody rich and I was poor," he complained. Till the end of his life he fought with Hill and Range, the publishing firm that had bought his songs from Lester Melrose's estate, but their lawyers kept him at bay.
Some sources report that Presley paid for a 1959 recording session for Crudup in Nashville that was later released on Fire Records out of Harlem, New York, but Fire owner Bobby Robinson countered at least half that story, claiming that he had found Crudup in Virginia in 1962 and recorded him in New York City, with no help from Elvis Presley. Whatever, out of Crudup's Fire sessions came a powerful version of "That's All Right" that sounded much like the original. It was released on an early '60s album called Mean Ol' Frisco.
Toward the end of his life, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup witnessed his revival. He played festivals and recorded several albums both in the States and Europe. Buddah Records released a live version of "That's All Right," recorded at the Newport Blues Festival in 1973, on an album called The Blues-A Real Summit Meeting. After touring with Bonnie Raitt, he suffered a fatal stroke at his home in Franktown, Virginia, on March 28, 1974.