Wrote this a while back. Posting because today is Eddie Cochran’s birthday.

In the earliest sessions at Sun Records (known then as “Memphis Recording Service,” at least that was – and still is – the neon sign in the front doors), Elvis and Sam Phillips and Scotty Moore (guitarist) and Bill Black (stand-up bass), after the “That’s All Right’ breakthrough on July 5, 1954, kept experimenting, seeing what they could come up with other songs. They wanted to bring a rhythm & blues feel to country tunes, or sing a rhythm & blues tune with a country vibe: the blend was what they were after. They had no idea what they were doing.

After one rollicking take of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” they all burst into laughter (they’re almost scared: they’re crossing the color line. After they finished recording “That’s All Right,” Scotty Moore commented, “They’re gonna run us out of town for that one.”) In the midst of the laughter, Sam Phillips exclaims, (and you can hear his excitement), “Boy, that’s fine, that’s fine. That’s a POP song now!”

That was what was amazing to them about what they had stumbled across, something they all had sensed out there in the culture already – they didn’t discover it or invent it, but they started doing it consciously: taking old obscure songs, confined to one genre (country – or “hillbilly” and rhythm & blues), and somehow twisting them, transforming them into “pop songs.” It wasn’t new, Ike Turner had done it, Fats Domino had done it … what was new was the skin color of the boys playing the song. It would be expected that a white boy would be going the Hank Williams route, not the Fats Domino route. (And, on the flip side, just to make it clear that this went both ways: it would be expected that Ray Charles would be going the B.B. King route … but he always said one of his main influences was Hank Williams.) What was revolutionary was taking a specifically black idiom and bringing it into the white mainstream to such a degree that the black idiom BECAME what was known as “pop music.” Sam Phillips had hoped that would happen. Everyone who knew anything hoped that would happen. And Phillips had tried, but there was a “ceiling” to what he could sell with his African-American artists. He had some huge hits on the label (all things considered – not Elvis-size hits, but very very big hits) with his black artists – but at some indefinable point the selling stopped. It was like the song hit a wall every time.

This was evidence that there was zero crossover.

Phillips knew there would eventually be crossover. (Hoped? Knew? With Sam Phillips, was there a difference?) Elvis had no idea, he was just paying tribute to the music he loved. Phillips had been struggling with the problem openly for about 5 years when Elvis came along. I think that even PHILLIPS had no idea how big this thing would get, his Biblical-prophet persona in the last decades of his life notwithstanding. All he wanted was to bring black music to a larger audience. That was his whole purpose. The fact that it ended up being a white boy who did it is unfair, especially seen through the eyes of the black artists who had been recording their songs for years beforehand on Sun. Unfairness or no, it’s the way it went down, and the way it went down has a lot to tell us about the era, the development of music, and also that region of the country, and why it was more possible THERE than anywhere else. Even Sam Phillips wasn’t prepared for what “crossover” would actually look like. The explosion surprised even him. It was when white teenagers started buying black music – even more importantly, though, when black teenagers started buying white music – that the crossover happened and the entire world changed.

And that, in a probably unexpressed way, was what everyone was going for in those early Elvis sessions in 1954. But the “moment” was all. Nobody was trying to create a crossover hit. They were just trying to capitalize on the energy and momentum of what had just happened with “That’s All Right”.

One of the songs Elvis, Scotty, and Bill worked on in those early sessions was the old blues song “Milk Cow Blues Boogie”.

Let’s have a primer on the history of the song.

It was originally recorded by Sleepy John Estes (who also wrote the song) in 1930.

If you listen closely to that, you can hear (obviously) that it’s a blues song, and his voice is a blues voice, but there is something about the arrangement and the guitar that also brings a hillbilly vibe to it. This is the mixing of genres/races/sounds that could only take place in the Delta. This is why 20th century American pop music originated in the Delta states. That mix existed nowhere else in the country.

So that’s the start of the song. In 1937, Robert Johnson recorded a version of it, right before he died:

Johnson’s is different from Sleepy John’s. Johnson’s is wild, wild, raw blues. And it provides an opening, another kind of opening, BEGGING to be explored further. And it WAS explored, by a very unlikely source.

Johnny Lee Wills, a hillbilly country & western fiddler, a white man, recorded it only a couple of years after Robert Johnson did and I’ll have something to say about it afterwards:

Now listen to that. And compare it to the original and to Robert Johnson’s.

This is why Sam Phillips felt that something was going to happen in American culture. That the black idiom was going to rise, and influence the white idiom – that that had already HAPPENED, at least in his sharecropping childhood in Alabama, where nobody cared about genre, they just sang because they wanted to sing.

So here’s this song written by a black blues singer. And then it is covered by the whitest man imaginable in the whitest WAY possible. And in Johnny Lee Wills’ version, you can hear the culture start to crack apart a little bit. Wills is admitting to being influenced by a black style, and this was happening in 1941. It’s radical, in its own way, almost as radical as Elvis’ attempt. Everyone was the beneficiary of black culture, people enjoyed seeing black singers show up in white movies and perform some beautiful song, but to admit that black culture was the SOURCE of so much of white culture … and that white culture could be inspired by black culture, and then express it in their own individualistic way … That consciousness just did not exist in any mainstream way. It was dangerous, it was unheard-of, it was practically (and in some cases actually) illegal.

But what we see here in Johnny Lee Wills’ version is what Sam Phillips felt: the white world was ready to admit the enormous contribution of black culture in their lives. That America was formed almost solely by black culture (at least in the music). And it was time to bust that boundary down and just ADMIT it.

Sam Phillips didn’t INVENT this, though. It’s just that he’s the one who brought it to the white masses. Johnny Lee Wills played the blues song in his own style, and it’s a terrific version of it, clear evidence of the flexibility of genre, the mixing of styles/cultures – that would become “old hat” by the late 1950s, when “hillbilly” music suddenly transformed itself into “rockabilly,” and gospel-sounds started informing pop songs, and Jesus Mary and Joseph, which end is UP in this environment??

My point, ultimately, is that the “crossover” Phillips was hoping for already existed. Johnny Lee Wills covered a blues song. There it was. It’s just that nobody had noticed yet on a wide scale, it hadn’t happened in a big enough way to make a real impact.

Back to Elvis and Scotty and Bill in the studio with the same song in 1954:

They did it a bunch of different ways, messing around with it, and the version they ended up with started with a meandering beginning, Elvis’ voice looping around, with Scotty riffing about in the background. You can almost feel them trying to REACH something, something they could not put into words. Is it country? Kind of. Is it blues? Yeah, sort of. But then, startlingly (and this was extremely new at the time, almost unprecedented outside of blues/jazz recordings), Elvis stops the recording and says, “That don’t MOVE me. Let’s get real real GONE, for a change.” It’s a command: Let’s go deeper, let’s get this thing MOVING. And suddenly, Elvis wails, “WELLLLLLL” and the rhythm picks up, and Elvis launches into another energy entirely, with the music going along with a train-chugging-along-the-tracks feel. It’s fresh, and strange, and schizophrenic, that recording – perhaps the best indication of how crazy and grasping those first sessions were. They didn’t know what they were looking FOR.

Nobody felt they really pulled “Milk Cow Blues Boggie” off successfully. Maybe the schizophrenic feel was the problem. The song eluded them. It didn’t “break through,” they felt, in the same way “That’s All Right” did or “Blue Moon of Kentucky” did. But you can feel the attempt. You can feel that they can almost SEE the sound they are looking for.

That was in 1954.

In 1960, a couple of months before Eddie Cochran, the rockabilly-king with the to-die-for-face and the Elvis-inspired voice, died in a car crash, he performed the same song, in an unforgettable live version.

To compare/contrast:

There’s something about Elvis’ version that I’m trying to express: the grasping, the experimenting, the out-into-thin-air feeling that makes it very very special. The three men, plus Sam Phillips, were moving into unchartered waters. They were going to be “run out of town for this” and they love it and that thought makes them giddy. The song trembles on the cusp of something huge. But it doesn’t tip over into what happened for Elvis during “Mystery Train” or “That’s All Right.”

In other words: even though Phillips et al did not feel that “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” got to where they wanted it, Elvis still suggested possibility. He opened up a space for genre (and race)-mixing. He already knew this. It was the air he grew up breathing. Now he needed to bring it to everybody else. While it is unfair that nobody in the mainstream made that connection with Fats Domino or Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but in the situation as it stood then, then Elvis took it to the masses, in his wailing command at the opening of “Good Rockin’ Tonight: “Have you heard the news? There’s good rocking’ tonight!”) Little Richard and B.B. King both said that neither of them got mainstream radio play until after Elvis. He kicked down the door.

In “Milk Cow Blues Boggie,” Elvis is saying, in that grasping innocent insistent way that he had, “There’s more here to be done with this. There’s something here. Let’s get to it, let’s find it.”

By 1960, the “crossover” had happened. Black music was climbing the pop charts, not relegated to “race” stations, “race” charts, or r&b charts. Nobody was going to run any white boy out of town anymore for playing the blues. Elvis had already taken the heat for that. So Eddie Cochran came along. His stuff lacks the giddy “on a high wire without a net” feeling of Elvis’ early recordings, he resides very comfortably in the space that Elvis had opened up. There is a freedom and confidence in Cochran’s style that is a pure representation of the EFFECTS of the work that had already been done by Elvis, Scotty and Bill in 1954. Cochran, along with many others, white and black, was the beneficiary of those original risks. So were The Beatles. What do lads from Liverpool know about the blues? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out, because the black idiom was universal – as black artists always KNEW that it was. That’s the thing that the clueless majority missed, and –
more insidious – that’s the thing that people did not want to admit. Still don’t.

Elvis didn’t grow up in a middle-class white environment. His parents were sharecroppers, working the fields next to African-Americans. Elvis was one of the invisible (crazy good looks notwithstanding), who grew up on a street back-to-back with the “black street,” and both streets were on the wrong side of the tracks. Memphis was like that. So the black church on the corner emanated the music out into the AIR in a way that just was not happening in the more segregated East Coast. That Delta mix again. Sam Phillips, also the son of sharecroppers, had a visceral sense as a child that segregation was not just unfair but a sin, he was aware that he had more advantages (poor as he was) because of the color of his skin. A black man lived with the Phillips family for his entire life – everyone called him “Uncle Silas” – and Sam, as a little boy, was struck by the thing he had no word for as a child: racism. Nobody else seemed to notice it. But he did and he wondered about it. Silas was the smartest man he had ever met. Silas explained the issues of the Second World War to him. Silas was informed. Why, then, did the world keep him down? These are explosive topics, maybe even more so today, but it’s worth understanding the CONTEXT of earlier conversations about it. Sam understood, young, that even though he was poor, he had a leg-up automatically. This pissed him off. He didn’t write op-ed columns about it. He created a recording studio to help poor black artists get themselves on tape. It was a mission. Clueless whites needed to know about black culture. AND black culture needed to be heard and celebrated, just for itself. It was 1950. There was a lot of work to be done. Elvis wasn’t as conscious about all of this, and he clearly benefited from his white skin, although he was a member of the permanent underclass in America. He might as well have been an immigrant, arriving in the new land with old-world parents, busting out on his own. It’s a very complex interconnected issue, and Sam and Elvis were immersed in it: Southern boys, religious Pentecostal boys, dirt-poor boys, who grew up alongside African-Americans in the cotton fields, connected to that culture through the sheer near-ness of it to their everyday lives. Carl Perkins, who had the first real crossover hit, came from the same atmosphere and culture, another sharecroppers son, another poor boy with no Plan B because America didn’t provide Plan Bs for guys like Carl Perkins, another boy raised on both the Grand Ole Opry, gospel, and rhythm & blues.

Let’s move it back to Eddie. Eddie Cochran was born in Minnesota, identified as Oklahoman (his parents were from there), but it’s a different background than the first wave of guys, who were ROUGH. Johnny Cash. Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis. Carl. These guys were lean, hungry (literally). Eddie does not imitate Robert Johnson or Arthur Crudup. That connection was lost in a matter of 3 years. Eddie imitates Elvis. Elvis was singing about the landlord banging down the door, and how “he’s got a woman way cross town” who’s “good to him.” Eddie’s songs are about white middle-class life: throwing parties when your parents are out of town, making out in the movie-theatre balcony, having milkshakes and going to record hops. Some raw power and RISK is lost in the transfer.

Eddie Cochran’s live 1960 performance of “Milk Cow Blues Boogie” is straight-up unashamed ferocious rhythm & blues. “Hillbilly” music, which Elvis was straining to break free from, or integrate into other sounds, is far in the rear view mirror. Elvis and Scotty and Bill sound tentative in comparison. Elvis, after 1954, would get bluesier and bluesier in his style, pouring gospel influences in as well, making pop songs sound like preacher’s diatribes declaimed in a muddy field in Alabama, and making country songs sound like lascivious blues songs, and on and on and on. Once the crossover started happening, it could not be stopped.

And so listen to Eddie Cochran’s version of the song above.

Listen to what is now possible. Eddie is the whitest of white boys, but what you hear in Eddie’s frankly carnal version of the song is proof that the crossover needed to happen, it had been building up for decades, since the 1920s, and once the door burst open, there would be no closing it.

Elvis’ initial “country”-ish attempt in the preamble of his version is tossed out entirely. Now it’s all blues. It’s gone back to its proper origins. As we now understand when we listen to Robert Johnson, to Sleepy John Estes, to Johnny Lee Wills, to Elvis, to Eddie, the song belongs to everyone.