How great thou art
The stories of Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Big Mama Thornton and more move Danny Eccleston.
King-maker: That’s All Right writer Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Chicago, Illinois, 1945.
Donaldson Collection/Getty Images
Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made The King
★★★★
Preston Lauterbach
HACHETTE. £25
THAT ELVIS Presley’s rock revolution was built on raw materials mostly learned from black blues, gospel and R&B artists will be news to no-one. But luckily that’s only the starting point of Preston Lauterbach’s illuminating study. In pooling the lives and careers of Presley’s key influencers – among them, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, whose version of That’s All Right began Presley’s ascent, and Big Mama Thornton, whose Hound Dog rocket-powered it – he frees them from the files of the ripped-off and victimised (although they were those things, too) and affords them their own agency. Crudup, for one, emerges as a prodigious shifter of units in his own right. In 1949, notes Lauterbach, his That’s All Right was already such a staple that when 45rpm discs debuted, RCA reissued it on orange vinyl to hype the format.