That's All Right

Around 7pm on July 5, 1954 nineteen year old Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.  It was the prior August when a shy Elvis first wandered into Sun and asked if he could record an acetate of himself singing and playing.  He paid the $3.98 (+ tax), recorded My Happiness, a 1948 pop hit, and left with the acetate.  For the next several months Elvis would occasionally show up at Sun to hang around, asking whether they knew a band that needed a singer or guitar player and recording an additional acetate according to the exhaustive account of Elvis' early years by Peter Guralnick in Last Train To Memphis (1994) from which much of this post is drawn. 

These brief encounters made an impression on Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records and producer at Sun Studios, a tiny record company with a heavy emphasis on R&B.  Phillips decided to invite Elvis in for a more formal recording session to see how he sounded on tape.  He asked Scotty Moore (guitar) and Bill Black (bass) to come for the session.

The July 5 session initially went very poorly. For a couple of hours they tried recording various ballads but it just wasn't working. The music wasn't right and Elvis sounded tentative in his singing. Then, while on a break, Elvis started singing parts of That's All Right (Mama), a blues song by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.  Phillips was astonished that the kid even knew a blues song but he loved the way he made it sound.  They recorded a satisfactory version in just a couple of takes.

Scotty Moore remembered::

"It just sounded sort of raw and ragged.  We thought it was exciting, but what was it?  It was just so completely different.  But it just really flipped Sam - he felt it really had something.  We just sort of shook our heads and said 'Well, that's fine, but good God, they'll run us out of town!'"

This is the song.  You can hear how confidently Elvis plays with the melody and lyrics and the power in his voice which is quite a contrast to how tentative he sounded earlier in the evening.

Phillips knew he had something but what was it?  Was it too close to the "race" music that he specialized in recording and thus unacceptable for playing on white radio in the South?

On July 7, he invited his friend and the most popular radio DJ in Memphis, Dewey Phillips (no relation) over to hear the tape.  Dewey played a lot of gospel and R&B and had expanded his initial heavily black audience and started to attract white teenage listeners.  They listened repeatedly to That's All Right but Dewey did not commit himself.  The next morning, Dewey called Sam and told him he hadn't been able to sleep because he was thinking about the record and wanted two copies for that night's show.

That afternoon, Sam delivered two acetates (acetates are not records and there is no flip side) and Dewey played it for the first time around 10pm on July 8.  The reaction was instantaneous with phone calls and telegrams flooding into the show and Dewey began playing That's All Right over and over again.  Within a few minutes he called Elvis' home and got him to come to the station for an interview.

Dewey recounted their meeting in a 1967 interview:
  

"I had a couple of records cued up, and while they played we talked.  I asked him where he went to high school, and he said 'Humes' [a white school].  I wanted to get that out because a lot of people listening thought he was colored."

That's All Right became a regional (not national) hit after it was released as a single on July 19, Sam Phillips signed Elvis and his career was launched.  During late 1954 and into 1955 he built a fervent regional fan base while touring extensively in the South. In January 1956, Heartbreak Hotel (his first #1) was released, in June he provoked national controversy with his performance of Hound Dog on The Milton Berle Show and in July, Hound Dog was released as a single and rocketed to #1 where it stayed for a record eleven weeks (it was actually released as the B Side of Don't Be Cruel, which also became #1).  ELVIS! was born.  For more on Elvis read this earlier post.  His best recordings by far were with Sun and during his first year with RCA before he descended into dreck and self-parody.


Sam Phillips is one of the major figures in the creation of Rock n Roll.  In a brief period in the mid-50s he signed Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins (in December 1955 he sold Elvis' contract to RCA for $40,000 so he could focus on promoting Perkins).  Earlier in the 50s he was the first to record Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King and he also recorded and released what some consider the first Rock n Roll record, Rocket 88 by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats.

The always entertaining Phillips talks about the origin of Sun Records and what he saw in Elvis Presley as a white singer with a black sound and crossover potential.  It also includes Sam and Scotty Moore talking about the recording of That's All Right: