{"id":56213,"date":"2017-07-05T06:45:40","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T10:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=56213"},"modified":"2024-08-21T07:57:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T11:57:04","slug":"on-this-day-july-5-1954","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=56213","title":{"rendered":"On This Day: July 5, 1954 – Elvis Presley Recorded “That’s All Right”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thatsallright\"<\/a>
\nAll photos of Sun Studio in this post were taken by me.<\/i><\/p>\n

\n“That’s All Right”, what would be the first single, which went off like a bomb (at least in Memphis, although other regions of the South would follow) was recorded on July 5, 1954, by Elvis Presley, Bill Black (on bass) and Scotty Moore (guitar), with Sam Phillips in the control room. Elvis was 19 years old. <\/p>\n

Excerpt from Dave Marsh’s amazing Elvis<\/i><\/a>\"\" about that day. <\/p>\n

They hit the new sound while fooling around between takes. Elvis began to sing an Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup country blues, “That’s All Right”, and Scotty and Bill joined in. From the control booth came Sam’s voice, excited. “What are you doing?” They shrugged. “We don’t know.” “Well, find out …” Phillips commanded. “Run through it again.”<\/p>\n

Every rock writer returns to “That’s All Right”, as though to the Rosetta stone. It’s not the greatest record Presley ever made, and it certainly is not the bluesiest. But it has something else: a beautiful, flowing sense of freedom and release. Elvis’ keening voice, so sweet and young, playing off the guitars, Scotty’s hungry guitar choogling along neatly until it comes to the break, where it simply struts, definitive, mathematical, a precise statement of everything these young men are all about. Is it art? Is it history? Is it revolution? No one can know, not anymore, unless they were there to hear it before they’d heard any of the other music Elvis made or any of the rock & rollers who followed him. Is it pure magic, a distillation of innocence or just maybe a miracle, a band of cracker boys entering a state of cosmic grace?<\/p>\n

What’s most remarkable, given how assiduously pursued this sound had been, is its spontaneity and unselfconsciousness. “That’s All Right,” like the best of the later Sun material (its B side, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” “You’re a Heartbreaker”, and, most of all, “Mystery Train”), sounds casual, the kind of music you could hear any day or every day, the kind of sound that has always been familiar but is still surprising. These men are reaching that elusive noise and once they have it in their grasp, they simply toy with it, flipping the thing back and forth among them as if they have been playing with it all their lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They listened to the song afterwards. Bill Black said, “Damn. Get that on the radio and they’ll run us out of town.”<\/p>\n

Let’s listen to Arthur Crudup’s version, the version Elvis had listened to and absorbed. <\/p>\n

\n