DEATH OF A BLUESMAN
COOK, BRUCE
On Music DEATH OF A BLUESMAN BY BRUCE COOK he father of rock and roll" is what they called him, and in this case, it wasn't a press agent's phrase but a statement of simple fact. For one...
...They had names like Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley...
...For one thing, Arthur Crudup never had a press agent...
...Crudup told me years later that in the entire time he worked for Melrose, he never saw the inside of the white man's office...
...You can judge for yourself by listening to the selection that Victor has culled from its archives and is offering on the LP, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup (RCA LPV-573...
...While his guitar-playing showed no genuine improvement, it was at least changed by virtue of electric amplification...
...In addition, Melrose's Wabash Music Company owned all the copyrights on Crudup's songs...
...I was born a poor man, I lived a poor man and I'll die a poor man...
...although his recordings were steady sellers among blacks all over the country, Crudup never received a royalty payment...
...In this collection of 16 tunes crowded onto a single record Crudup moves from primitive blues in the early sessions—"If I Get Lucky" and "Rock Me Mamma"—to fairly sophisticated material during the late '40s and '50s...
...Elvis, especially, was strongly influenced by Arthur Crudup...
...These were the people who first recorded for Sam Phillips' Memphis label, Sun, and who created rock and roll...
...Papers were signed and sent up to Hill and Range's president, Gene Averback, for his signature...
...For this, he was paid a sum of money on the spot, as little as $90 and once as much as $500...
...The novelty of a white boy "singing black" started a musical revolution...
...What Crudup did in tunes like "My Baby Left Me," "Shout, Sister, Shout," and "That's All Right" was to create material in a 32-bar popular song form that was infused with the spirit and devices of the looser 12-bar blues...
...Bookings were handled by Dick Waterman, the rediscoverer of Son House and benefactor of many old bluesmen in the past decade...
...his voice was somewhat stronger and more resonant...
...What did Arthur Crudup have that so attracted Elvis and others...
...Unlike other big blues singers of his generation, Crudup was not essentially a performer...
...Of course, somebody was making a considerable amount from the music—a fact that Crudup became aware of when he heard Presley's version of "That's All Right" on a juke box one day in the mid-'50s...
...And when he learned, it was on an instrument with a split neck held together with bailing wire...
...Not that he was the first to try it, nor even the first to pull it off...
...About one year ago, a large (but not a huge) sum was agreed on, and Arthur Crudup, along with his heirs, came to New York to meet with Dick Waterman and the AGAC representative in the offices of Hill and Range...
...He died poor, of a stroke, last March 00...
...Eventually, he settled in Virginia, at the southernmost tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, where blues and jazz collector Bob Koester found him more than a decade later...
...They settled on "That's All Right"—which, of course, became the hit...
...After the association was established, a simple procedure was followed...
...He ultimately decided the hell with it, moved to Florida, and hired himself out as a migrant laborer, shuttling back and forth with his family between his new home and Virginia, depending on the time of year...
...During his years with Bluebird, when he was creating the canon of rhythm and blues, he never attempted to support himself with his songs...
...He sounded good enough for Melrose to risk a session on him for the Bluebird label, and once Tampa Red finished coaching him in the fundamentals of recording technique, Crudup cut a single...
...Crudup recorded two long-playing albums for Koester's Delmark label —Look on Yonder's Wall (Del-mark DS-614) and Crudup's Mood (Delmark DS-621)—that featured much of his old material, including "Dust My Broom," "Coal Black Mare," "Rambling on My Mind," and "Any Old Way You Do...
...He was saying, in effect, "Sue me...
...Aver-back, though, sent them down again, unsigned, with a curt note stating that he felt his lawyers had given away more than he would lose in a court of law...
...But the composer never saw a cent of royalties...
...As a 19-year-old truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, he cut a country ballad for Sun that he didn't really have his heart in...
...He looked out the window and said, "I didn't believe it, anyway...
...After sounding a lot like Robert Johnson, the almost legendary Delta bluesman who was the king of them all toward the end of the '30s, Crudup, by 1945, had developed his own style, a kind of rough bargain struck between his Mississippi beginnings and the more polished manner of the first "urban bluesmen" who had emigrated northward to Chicago— men like Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim...
...He tried playing to audiences during the War in a South Side theater, but decided he didn't like it much...
...Nobody disputed that Arthur Crudup had written the songs or that he was entitled to a considerable amount of money...
...On Music DEATH OF A BLUESMAN BY BRUCE COOK he father of rock and roll" is what they called him, and in this case, it wasn't a press agent's phrase but a statement of simple fact...
...Dick Waterman, who told me this story, commented that afterward, in the taxi leaving the Hill and Range office, Arthur Crudup was not bitter, merely philosophical...
...To the day he died, Crudup was never quite sure how much of a blessing the encounter was...
...But when his records began blaring from juke boxes all over the South, a generation of white teenagers listened, liked what they heard and started emulating it...
...Once action was initiated through the American Guild of Authors and Composers (AGAC), the case seemed clear-cut...
...This was mostly weekend employment...
...Realizing that he must have something coming to him, Crudup put in several calls to Melrose's office, only to get the run-around each time...
...Not only was he self-taught (as were most old blues performers) but he did not even take up the guitar until six months before he cut his first recording at the age of 36...
...Crudup was right...
...For another, the Mississippi-born blues singer, who died last month at the age of 68, provided the direct link between the old, raw, black music of the Delta and the younger white echo of it that turned American popular music upside-down in the mid-'50s...
...Doctor" Clayton, a blues singer, and Lester Melrose, a white, small-time music entrepreneur, just happened to be walking by and heard him...
...the money they brought in barely managed to help his big family over the rough spots...
...The record, a solid blues, sold well, and for the next 15 years Crudup maintained an association with Bluebird...
...Temporarily stranded on the South Side of Chicago in 1940, Crudup was discovered whanging on his half-broken guitar and singing on a street corner...
...When Waterman heard about Lester Melrose and the Wabash Music Company, he also launched a crusade to recover the money that was rightfully Crudup's...
...Whenever Crudup was to record, he would receive a wire summoning him to Chicago, travel up from Mississippi, stay with a half-sister on the South Side, and record two, or perhaps four, sides...
...At issue was simply the size of the settlement, and negotiations on this went on for years...
...The singer had no contract, however, and never dealt directly with the company, only with Melrose, his "manager...
...Instead, he stuck to what he knew best, farming, and earned his living as a Mississippi sharecropper...
...The brilliant series of recordings he made for Victor's Bluebird label—over 80 sides cut between 1941-55—set the style and pace for that transitional category known as rhythm and blues...
...He sounded, if anything, better than before: His delivery was more confident (though he never lacked in this regard...
...Then asked by Phillips what ideas he had for the other side, Presley named four Crudup tunes he had learned from juke boxes...
...during the week Crudup would work his small farm in Virginia...
...Following Elvis, a number of other performers had recorded Crudup songs—among them B. B. King, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Rod Stewart— and had dutifully paid money into Wabash (or into Hill and Range, the mammoth music concern that bought up all the Wabash copyrights...
...There is a certain musical sophistication in the later Crudup recordings on Victor that is hard to account for, considering the extent of his musical background—or lack of it...
...c oming along when they did, these two albums provided Crudup with an entirely new audience—the students in the colleges and universities who were then fueling the blues revival of the '60s— and he spent the last years of his life on the college circuit, doing dates at coffee houses, playing blues festivals and concerts...
Vol. 57 • April 1974 • No. 9
