Forgive me for laying low for a few. Since last posting here I finished a collaboration with the Blind Boys of Alabama. Our book Spirit of the Century is scheduled for a March 2024 release.
I also started a book that’s got the working title Before Elvis. This project has been all kinds of revealing. It’s built on profiles of African American artists who inspired Elvis—Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, “Little Junior” Parker, Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, and Calvin Newborn, with sidebar features on other musicians.
To me the biggest mystery going in—despite my total and unfounded confidence in pitching the project that it’d all work out—was Junior Parker, composer of “Mystery Train.” He’s been one of my favorite artists for years, but he died in 1971 and somehow no one knows where he’s buried. Getting to meet his living relatives, including his sister, was magical. I’ve gotten a little closer to his burial site—it’s somewhere in West Memphis—but hit a dead end there. More importantly though, I learned why his life story has been so murky and will be able to share some details on who he really was and what his life was like.
Digging in to Arthur Crudup’s story—he wrote and originally recorded Elvis’s first hit “That’s All Right”—I visited the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where Crudup spent the last twenty years of his life leading a crew of produce pickers and running a juke joint.
I had no game plan or connections and as I drove up the highway from Cape Charles to Exmore, I thought, “I need to find a Black-owned business.” Just then a billboard for Krystal’s Kountry Kitchen appeared on the horizon, and I thought, “That’s probably not it.”
I pulled into a gas station to fill up and asked the person at the pump just ahead of me if she knew about Arthur Crudup. “My Aunt Betty’s a Crudup,” she said, and within a few minutes I was face-timing with Crudup’s grandson. There’s still a lot of energy and some terrific stories about this cast of characters that I think you’ll enjoy reading about.
Working on Elvis racial stories has me feeling rant-y at times. The Elvis biopic that came out last summer inspired the book. The movie highlighted Elvis’s love of Black music (kind of ridiculously, Sister Tharpe at Sunbeam Mitchell’s???) and the issue of racial disparity in audience and media share during that time fairly enough, but every critic from every media outlet that I hope will review my book got mad at one aspect or another of how Elvis benefitted unfairly from Black originators and how relatively unknown these people are compared to him, so I put together the easiest pitch of my career and here we are.
The only real takeaway about Elvis and race is that it’s a bit tricky but not impossible to reach a few strong conclusions. I think that some people want a sweeping statement that Elvis was or was not a racist. Like most humans, Elvis changed over the course of his life. While he showed real commitment to integration in Memphis during the first couple years of his career, he lived an increasingly insular and weird life after returning from the army in 1960.
There are still cool stories about him being generous with people. Scott Barretta unearthed a nugget about Roy Brown, composer and singer of “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” that Elvis covered at Sun in 1954, knocking on the door at Graceland and telling Elvis about his IRS issues. Brown said that the King forked over a few grand and got him out of trouble.
And there are many other spontaneous incidents of goodness. But there was no real public commitment to civil rights issues despite the fact that Elvis lived at the epicenter of the movement during its pivotal era. (Similarly, the take that Sam Phillips was a civil rights hero leave me feeling confused the definitions of “civil rights” and “hero.”) While Elvis helped artists on the down low, what would an Elvis Roots tour with Presley, Big Mama, and Big Boy Crudup have meant for those careers in the early 1970s?
Eh, if the biopic taught us anything, it was probably all the Colonel’s fault.
As important as the Before Elvis chapters of these artists’ lives are, the After Elvis effects are no less compelling. Where Elvis left them hanging, Crudup and Thornton especially used their non-relationships with Elvis to their advantage, seizing the disparity as a key part of the story they told audiences. These savvy, intelligent people took the sense of exploitation surrounding Black music and exploited it. Not a bad twist.
Other than Before Elvis, I’m working on another project that I’ll be sharing here next week, so stay tuned.
I just spit out my coffee when I read the "Scott Barretta at a crossroads" caption!