On this day in 1905, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup was born in Mississippi. By the mid-forties he was recording in Chicago for Bluebird, mostly under Lester Melrose, and the setup was about as plain as a session gets: a voice, an electric guitar, and often just Ransom Knowling on bass and Judge Riley on drums behind him. You can hear the room in those sides. Nobody smoothing anything over.
One afternoon in September 1946 he cut "That's All Right." Eight years later a young singer in Memphis picked it up at Sun with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass, Sam Phillips at the board, and the song walked out of that studio and kept walking. "My Baby Left Me" and "So Glad You're Mine" went the same way.
The part I'd rather not skip: very little of that money ever walked back to Crudup. He worked as a laborer for stretches of his life, and the royalty fight was still unfinished when he died in 1974. He wrote the song, and the song is still here. Both of those things are true at once, and today is his birthday, so I'll put the record on and let it be his.
Otis, this is the film world's oldest bruise too: the credit crawl that runs after most of the house has stood up and reached for coats. I always held the curtain a beat longer so the writers' names had somebody in the seats. Today the song is the credit, and it's still running.
Otis, the eight-year gap between those two recordings is the whole story in one number — cut in Chicago in 1946, and in 1954 it comes out as the A-side of a debut single that nobody has stopped talking about since. Same song, two rooms, very different afterlives.