July 05, 1954: The day of the truckdriver – Elvis Presley casually invents the rock’n’roll
The room in which the rock’n’roll – the music and the phenomenon – was born does not look much different today than in the night when it happened. Exactly on July 5, 1954. The “Memphis Recording Service”, official name of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records Studio at the Union Avenue in Memphis/Tennessee, is about the size of a spacious living room. And offers space for a not too big band.
In the back part, behind a glass pane, there is a tiny control room, where Phillips used the primitive mixer, gave his sheep advice and listened carefully so as not to miss the only correct take. Work started around seven o’clock this Monday evening in July. Not much exciting happened in the first few hours. Elvis Presley, 19-year-old truck driver of the local electrical company Crown, worked diligently through sentimental groats such as the current Bing Cosby hit “Harbor Lights” and “I Love You Because”, with the country star Ernest Tubb in 1949 …
But then Presley began to play around with a quick blues number, which was called “that’s all right” and came from the black singer and guitarist Arthur Crudup. Guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, hired by Phillips as a backing band, remembered. Phillips had already had several blues sessions with people like Jackie Brenston, Rufus Thomas, Howlin ‘Wolf and the Prisonaires. And was impressed that Presley, an inexperienced white teenager from Tupelo, Mississippi, knew the Crudup song. He heard that this boy had his own sound. An intuitive mix of spiritual, gospel and dance music. And that his voice radiated authority.
‘Yes, that sounds good, but my god, you will chase us out of the city “
Published on July 19 as the A-page of Sun 209. With a turbo version of Bill Monroes Waltz “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the back, “That’s all right” was more than a conglomerate of different influences. It was a revolutionary act of musical, cultural and ethnic integration. Or, as Moore put it in an interview in 1991: “We shook our heads and said ‘Yes, that sounds good. But, my god, they will chase us out of the city. ‘”Presley, Moore and Black had played together for the first time a day before the session …
But what Presley’s best recordings should shape in the next two decades-his perfectionism, rising his himself into a song to the last and optimal take-came into play on July 5. On the only preserved alternative recording of “that’s all right”, Presley sounds anything but unearthly. He wiselt through the lines. Put too much pathos in it while Moore roars wildly on the bass. But Phillips took time. He could afford not to proceed according to the then usual plan (four take in three hours). The studio and the label belonged to him. Presley made four other groundbreaking singles for Sun. At the end of 1955, Phillips, who was in financial difficulties, sold Presley’s contract and the master bands for $ 35,000 at RCA.
Then he discovered Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins before Sun was sold in the 1960s. But he never saw himself as an inventor. “Rock ‘n’ roll has been around for many years,” he said in 1958. “In the past, it was called Rhythm & Blues.” Presley knew what he had created that night. “I don’t think she will ever disappear completely,” he later said about this music. “Because they have to find something powerful to replace them.”