1. Early Elvis: Tupelo Kid

ELVIS PRESLEY PHOTO MOSAIC
A Lifetime of Pictures
ELVIS
THE TUPELO KID: THE EARLY YEARS I
https://www.hillmanweb.com/elvis/early/ep01.html

With both his parents now working, there was more money coming in than there'd ever been in Tupelo,
but it was still never enough. So, when Daddy bought an Old lawn mower,
Elvis went around the streets knocking on doors offering to fix people's lawns.
He didn't do badly, and he was proud when he could pay the grocery store bill.
Vernon, who soon got a bad back picking up a five-gallon tin of paint, was pleased.
'Elvis, you always did have a generous heart, he would say, as Elvis gave him whatever he'd earned.
Gladys's reaction was always the same. 'That's nice. Just so long as you're doing your schoolwork, too!’
He was ... as best he could. But he spent more time studying the records
he heard on the radio than writing essays.
And he really did study them, noting how a singer such as Billy Ward of the Dominoes might bend a note,
what harmonies were used, and how a lyric could most effectively be sung.
Later he would sometimes feel as though he blinked and those early teen years passed by without him noticing.
It was just school, hanging out, the radio, the movies, some church and his guitar.
In a few years he would become closely associated with the guitar,
but he would always happily admit that he was never anything more than a rhythm player
- the instrument being mainly something to do with his hands while he was singing.
Other guys, real guitarists, would always do the fancy picking on his records.
It was the same with the piano. The family never had a piano at home when he was young,
but he'd learned a few gospel chords in church in Tupelo,
and was allowed to fool around at the keys sometimes while he was at Humes High.
There was obviously never any money for piano lessons so, as with the guitar, he was self-taught.
He never learned to play any Rachmaninov or Chopin like some of the other kids at school,
but he learned to hammer out by trial and error what he was hearing on the radio or at church
.—©Being Elvis, A LONELY LIFE

A FEW YEARS LATER

That's All Right - Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup 1946 (orig. version)
https://youtu.be/h5vxQjOAt1A

Born on August 24, 1905 in Union Grove, Forest, Mississippi, American blues musician/singer/songwriter Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, best known for having written and recorded the song that would become Elvis Presley's debut single "That's All Right" and a further Presley cover "My Baby Left Me". Crudup began his career as a blues singer around Clarksdale, Mississippi. As a member of the Harmonizing Four, he visited Chicago in 1939. He stayed in Chicago to work as a solo musician but barely made a living as a street singer. The record producer Lester Melrose allegedly found him while Crudup was living in a packing crate, introduced him to Hudson Whittaker, better known as Tampa Red, and signed him to a recording contract with RCA Victor's Bluebird label. He recorded with RCA in the late 1940s and with Ace Records, Checker Records and Trumpet Records in the early 1950s.
Crudup's recordings were popular among African-Americans in the American south. Somehow a young Elvis Presley heard his records.
Crudup stopped recording in the 1950s because of disputes over royalties. He said, "I realized I was making everybody rich, and here I was poor". He returned to Mississippi and took up bootlegging.
Crudup was credited as the composer of Presley's "That's Alright, Mama", but despite legal battles into the 1970s, reportedly never received royalties. An out-of-court settlement was supposed to pay Crudup an estimated $60,000 in back royalties, but never materialized. Crudup died in 1974, four years after the failed royalty settlement.
Crudup has been honored with a marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail, placed at Forest. Elvis Presley acknowledged Crudup's importance to rock and roll when he said, "If I had any ambition, it was to be as good as Arthur Crudup".
An article by The Guardian in 2004 refutes the suggestion that Presley's version should be considered as one of the first records of the rock 'n' roll genre. It was simply one of "the first white artists' interpretations of a sound already well-established by black musicians almost a decade before. It was a raucous, driving, unnamed variant of rhythm and blues".
~ John Einarson
On Spetember 9, 1954, recently signed Sun Records artist Elvis Presley whose debut single "That's All Right Mama" has been released that summer performs in a parking lot at the opening of Memphis' Lamar-Airways shopping mall. Afterward he meets audience member Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash would go on to sign with Sun Records. Presley, Scotty Moore and Bill Black (photo below from the gig) aoppear on a makeshift stage built on a flatbed truck in the center's expansive, unprecedentedly large parking lot. Still relatively unknown outside of Memphis the Memphis Press-Scimitar again misspelled Elvis' name, this time with two S's in Presley. Elvis' appearance at Katz drugstore drew a a huge crowd of teenagers and is MCed by Elvis' former Humes classmate George Klein.
Johnny Cash, just recently out of the Air Force, married and relocated to Memphis, was also in the audience that night. In an autobiography he wrote, 'the first time I saw Elvis, singing from a flatbed truck at a Katz drugstore opening on Lamar Avenue, two or three hundred people, mostly teenage girls, had come out to see him. With just one single to his credit, he sang those two songs over and over."
Photos taken that day by Opal Walker.
Wynonie Harris - Good Rocking Tonight (1947)
https://youtu.be/imsgCI26bsA
https://youtu.be/FVLBZjyeaVQ

Memphis' Lamar-Airways shopping mall

To Part II: The Elvis Early Years Mosaic

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