“I love Elvis,” Preston Lauterbach assures me during a phone call about his new book, Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King (Grand Central), in advance of two Southern celebratory events in April — the first at the Oxford Conference for the Book on Thursday, April 3rd, and the second here in the Bluff City at Memphis Listening Lab in a Q&A with fellow Memphis audiophile Robert Gordon on Friday, April 4th.
Lauterbach’s declaration of admiration for the King of Rock-and-Roll serves as a disclaimer. As with his past works, Lauterbach’s newest offering means to demystify Elvis Presley by exploring the artist’s influences.
It’s a well-trodden path for Lauterbach, whose Beale Street Dynasty (2015) explores the political and business landscapes that made Beale Street as famous as the musical figures who played there. His Bluff City: The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest C. Withers (2019) paints a nuanced portrait of a historic figure often villainized for his alleged role as an FBI informant, or lionized for his work as the premier documenter of the Civil Rights movement.
Lauterbach is drawn to complicated figures, using careful research to portray each person in all their complexity and with all necessary context. Or, as the writer himself puts it:
“The book, on the surface of it, might look to some like it’s a takedown. In fact, it’s really quite the opposite because, for me, Elvis opened the doors to all of the musicians who are profiled in the book. One of the first CDs I bought was the Sun Sessions,” noting that Arthur Crudup and Junior Parker weren’t exactly eating up the airtime on radio waves in his youth. “Elvis was the access point for me to all of that great music.”
Cultural Lightning Rod
photograph courtesy of the author
Author Preston Lauterbach is holding a "Hadden Horn," a device invented by a Memphis mayor in the late 1800s to curb cheating during dice games.
Before Elvis is, primarily, a chapter-by-chapter tour through the musicians and songwriters who influenced Presley or whose compositions he covered, but some consideration is owed to Presley himself as well.
“This book is coming out in a time period in which discussions about the Black origination of mainstream culture is heated,” Lauterbach says. “While Elvis is a very convenient lightning rod for that criticism, the real blame lies in how the music business has been conducted historically.”
Take, for example, “That’s All Right.” Arthur Crudup, a Black blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter, was the original composer of Presley’s first hit.
“When Elvis’ version came out, naturally he and [producer] Sam Phillips properly credited Crudup on the record label as the songwriter, as one should, and in fact, there are canceled checks that show Sam properly paid royalties on the sales of that song,” Lauterbach explains. “So they did everything that they could have and should have done by Crudup. The problem was that Crudup had lost ownership of the song eight years before Elvis recorded it.”
Lauterbach’s excellent new book examines all of the forces at work in these instances. Often, the fact that business can be exploitative, and that the burgeoning music business was changing rapidly, result in unequal outcomes. Publishing rights would be surrendered to the producer as standard practice, and at a time when most of the financial incentive for playing music came from live performances, often artists had no idea of the potential fortunes they had surrendered.
“People want one declaration about Elvis,” Lauterbach says, “and the facts don’t really support any of that.” It’s important, too, Lauterbach reminds his readers, to consider the differences between exploitation, an intentional misuse with financial incentive, and appropriation, for which Lauterbach admits, a stronger case can be made against the King, who did, after all, perform no small number of songs by Black composers.
“He loved the music, very sincerely, and he experienced the music firsthand. He hung out in the Flamingo Room [in Memphis] before he was famous,” Lauterbach continues. “At some point, his sincere love of this music blossomed into this opportunity.” Lauterbach also notes that Presley was, at least in his early career, an outspoken opponent to segregation. “He was photographed at the WDIA Goodwill Review with his arms around B.B. King, and that was not typical. I don’t think Pat Boone was doing that at the time. I don’t think Frank Sinatra was doing that.”
The disparate pieces of evidence, when drawn together, fail to support one easy declaration about Presley, but they do clearly point to someone who loved African American music.
Jazz House Rock
The delight of Before Elvis lies in the unexpected connections Lauterbach makes as he traces the roots of musical family trees back through the decades. Gospel and blues make appearances, of course, but so too do jazz and psychedelic rock, hinting at the interconnectedness of popular American culture.
“Thornton continued to bridge musical worlds,” Lauterbach writes in Chapter 15, “Ball and Chain,” after a riveting discussion of Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and her songs “Hound Dog” and “Ball and Chain,” both of which were also hits for other performers. The author details not only the publishing trials and triumphs with those two hit songs, but Thornton’s career in two acts, bridging the gap between the R&B and blues market and, later, psychedelic rock. Taken as a piece of music history, it’s a riveting read; as an example of a recurring motif of the book — namely, that American music, at its best, happens when two cultures come together and share sounds — the chapter speaks for itself.
“You have these two parallel comets streaking through the sky at the exact same time — and nobody knew they had jammed together in the Flamingo Room. So the connections between Elvis and jazz are that foundation of blues.” — Preston Lauterbach
In a similarly genre-bending chapter of Before Elvis, Lauterbach contends that Presley might not have been quite the frontman extraordinaire he became without lessons learned from the Memphis jazz scene of the time. Presley and Phineas Newborn Jr. came from “the same musical family tree,” Lauterbach explains, noting that their musical roots both go back to the Newborn Family Band.
The late Newborn Jr., himself an acclaimed jazz guitarist, according to Lauterbach, credited his father, Phineas Newborn Sr., a drummer, with teaching Elvis his sense of timing. “You don’t think of vocalists as being hooked on the rhythm,” Lauterbach says, “but [Elvis’ sense of rhythm has] been attributed to the drummer father of Phineas Newborn Jr., so the two of them are very closely related, even though they sound so, so different.”
The two performers shared other similarities in the timing of their careers. When Elvis signed with RCA, Newborn Jr. signed with the same company as well. “You have these two parallel comets streaking through the sky at the exact same time — and nobody knew they had jammed together in the Flamingo Room. So the connections between Elvis and jazz are that foundation of blues,” Lauterbach says.
Presley, without the blues, would have been a country artist. “The blues gave him that backbeat, that attitude, and that fountain of material that distinguished him because the business was so segregated at that point,” Lauterbach says. Though he had cut his teeth in Memphis and played primarily Black-originated music, Presley was a white act, so he was destined to play programs like Louisiana Hayride and stages like the Grand Ole Opry. His musical background and influences set him apart, and perhaps all because the beats of Phineas Sr. put the mash behind Presley at the Flamingo Room.
One Story Leads to Another
The book is meticulously researched, though its tone is almost conversational, as though a good friend in possession of a photographic memory is dishing the dirt about concerts, tours, and recording sessions galore. It’s a compelling read, inviting the reader to turn the page in search of just one more piece of musical history, and Lauterbach’s easy delivery owes much to his encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter, a knowledge borne of thorough research.
“You can’t get into these types of stories without talking to people, because most of this history is either totally undocumented or scantly documented,” Lauterbach says. “And of course one story leads to another.” You never know the detail that will lead to a whole new chapter.
“That’s when Elvis came to the Flamingo Room, to watch that battle of the blues.” The conversation took Lauterbach to archival newspaper clippings documenting Pee Wee Crayton performing in Memphis at the Flamingo Room with the Newborn Family Orchestra — and not only that, but just before Elvis cut his first record.
To further set the stage, so to speak, as Lauterbach explains, “The Supreme Court had ruled against the legality of segregation in the Brown v. The Board of Education ruling back in May, so about a month before this, integration is legal.”
In other words, in the weeks after the Supreme Court issued its decision, the Flamingo Room opened its doors to white listeners, and Presley, fresh from hearing Crayton’s guitar licks and sampling some of Newborn Sr.’s rhythmic mash, was off to Sun Records for his historic first sessions.
Preston Lauterbach will sign copies of Before Elvis at the Oxford Conference for the Book on Thursday, April 3, 2025, at 6 p.m. at the Powerhouse The next day, he will take part in a Q&A with music historian Robert Gordon at Memphis Listening Lab, with books from Novel bookstore, Friday, April 4, 2025, at 6 p.m.
