The Young Dead

Tim Riley considers Preston Lauterbach’s “Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King.”

By Tim RileyFebruary 6, 2025

• Music

• Biography & Autobiography

THE FURTHER WE GET from Elvis Presley’s death, the more a crude music industry frame takes hold: the blinding flash of his Sun Records youth, the snowballing Hollywood banality, and the celebrity pill junkie slumped on his toilet, dead at 42. Praise Allah for recent documentaries like Elvis Presley: The Searcher (Thom Zimny, 2018), and the Reinventing Elvis: The ’68 Comeback (John Scheinfeld, 2023), where the performer’s radical charisma speaks for itself. In the same way that historic recreations always comment on their contemporary context, the Elvis Presley of Sun Studios and early RCA singles between 1954 and 1958 will always sound tantalizingly out of reach to 21st-century ears—another 80 years of laissez-faire racism will do that.

Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, the latest title from music scholar Preston Lauterbach, gives this story a major course correction. In a voice both confident and wry—without ever talking down to the reader—Lauterbach portrays a lively and complicated Memphis scene during the pre-Elvis era: regional radio personalities, Black churches where whites gathered to hear gospel quartets, and a series of progressive-minded figures that pressed against the hard lines drawn by figures like E. H. “Boss” Crump, the local segregationist enforcer.

In the 18 months between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in May 1954, and Rosa Parks’s arrest for sitting in the white section of the public bus in December 1955, this previously underground world surfaced in the form of rock ’n’ roll. Lauterbach turns this context into a larger subject, and his descriptions give it juice:

Intangible qualities made the late spring and early summer of 1954 in the Flamingo Room magical. It’s impossible to measure or chart the forgotten song. It’s difficult to re-create the effect of national desegregation on the minds of individuals in the moment. But it’s fairly easy to say that the conditions became as close to truly unique as you can find and that the timing was perfect for the special task of completing Elvis Presley’s influences just before he entered the recording studio that July. A racially diverse musical repertoire, a sexually charged entertainment, and an open spirit had come together.

In the first half of the book, Lauterbach draws a Beale Street music scene that thrived as Elvis attended Humes High School: the DJs who liberated the airwaves, including a preacher named Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, who wrote the first two Black gospel records to sell a million copies and invited white folks to visit his East Trigg Missionary Baptist Church. “Before the freedom fights started,” Brewster said, “before the Martin Luther King days, I had to lead a lot of protest meetings. In order to get my message over, there were things that were almost dangerous to say, but you could sing it.” White teens like Elvis and classmate George Klein “flocked to East Trigg at the urging of Dewey [Phillips, a DJ] and Reverend Brewster.”

And as the writer Louis Cantor noted, the WHBQ Memphis DJ “Dewey [Phillips] was by far the most famous white person at the East Trigg Sunday night service, but that was only because a young white teenager in the audience […] was still totally unknown. Elvis Presley […] attended East Trigg regularly.” Elvis’s presence at East Trigg, and his encouragement of other white fans to join him, mounted as stiff a challenge as WHBQ’s and WLAC’s playlists to the segregationist rule of Boss Crump and others like him.

In the book’s second half, Lauterbach follows these figures as they stretch out during Elvis’s Hollywood phase and after his death. Big Mama Thornton earned a second phase of renown more than 10 years after Elvis as a model for Janis Joplin, whose band Big Brother and the Holding Company covered Thornton’s “Ball and Chain” on their 1968 Cheap Thrills album (the one with the Robert Crumb cover). His portraits of Thornton, Junior Parker, and the relatively obscure Newborn family from Memphis’s Flamingo Room extends this context out into West Coast jazz and Sun Ra’s experimental Arkestra.

Brewster wasn’t just a key activist in an era before “civil rights”; he also turned into a role model for the teenage Elvis Presley, who heard his sermons and intuited the broader themes of freedom behind his pastoral work. In Lauterbach’s frame, as the Presley family moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1948, Brewster had become “a man of philosophy, achievement, and stature unlike any other, a man of indefatigable energy, spiritual pageantry, spectacle, and grandeur who believed utmost in humanity and equality, whose message had reached millions. He embodied all that young Elvis would try to become.”

During an early session, after sponging up all this gospel, Elvis broke into an Arthur Crudup R & B number (“That’s All Right, Mama”) to blow off steam. He made it seem naturalistic—the product of an impulse any kid might have. That whim, when shared widely, proved a new kind of gospel: of integration so sweet it seduced millions, upset a social order as far as any music ever has, and paralleled a civil rights movement so closely that it was hard to tell which inspired which.

Lauterbach’s argument traces a history many now want erased:

In our present appraisal of appropriation, we have to understand the importance of would-be minstrels to the breakthrough of Black music. This perspective may help explain how Rufus Thomas, himself an early Black deejay, Little Richard, and James Brown—none of whom pulled punches when asked about race in American culture and the music business—could all love Presley, specifically for what his presence meant to their own careers.

To Lauterbach, Elvis displayed a disarming candor about his Black influences, even mentioning Brewster by name to several local journalists. Just weeks after Elvis sang “Hound Dog” on national television, the local fairgrounds held its “Negro night,” which gave African Americans separate access to the local parks. Elvis Presley showed up to hang with his friends in the East Trigg Church crowd. Attending the fair and showing Black people some basic social courtesy strayed far from Memphis custom among whites, and “signaled a subtle rebellion” not lost on Black observers.

Lauterbach’s portrait captures a new, participatory Elvis: a high schooler who most likely heard singers like Crudup and Junior Parker and Roy Brown on Nashville’s WLAC station, which broadcast Black music as if it deserved space next to whites in ways that shocked the segregationists. Imagine if Hollywood had started making movies where the two races courted, romanced, and married one another, or where handsome young truck drivers like Elvis held a young Black woman’s hand in public, pinned a corsage on her dress, and took her to his white high school’s prom.

Lauterbach calls Elvis’s voice “fundamentally American in its devastating hostility and uplifting creative energy.” His keen ears translate the early style-mixing into meanings both subtle and overt. Like most music history, the street traditions at the time involved so much borrowing, reframing, restating, and outright stealing that dismissing Elvis as a “thief” distorts this richer context. As Lauterbach points out,

While it’s clear that there is much more to Crudup’s legacy than “That’s All Right,” it must also be said that Crudup could not definitively be the author of his own favorite hook. As [rock historian] Nick Tosches authoritatively declared, rock ’n’ roll is theft, and if Arthur Crudup is rock ’n’ roll, he, too, begged, borrowed, and reshaped his influences into something new.

The music industry, like the American government and capitalism itself, baked in racial animus to funnel money upwards. But that just confounded an already messy set of social tensions. Don Robey, a half-Black, half-Jewish man who founded Peacock Records and later absorbed the Duke label, had a snakish reputation that dwarfed later white figures like Phil Spector and Morris Levy. Thornton, for example, remembers receiving on $500 for her “Hound Dog” recording. Its white songwriters, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, “received a $1,200 check from Robey for their efforts—it bounced.” This made Don Robey “a true rarity: a Black businessman benefiting handsomely from the white appropriation of rock ’n’ roll.”

And as the history breaks out in new directions through characters you may have never heard of, Lauterbach drops sentences with oceanic subtexts: “Like the hint of deism in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, Elvis teases the Spirit without delivering an overly heavy dose of God.” Many of Lauterbach’s capsule summaries cry out for special attention, and he pens many sentences to reread and admire, pure meditations. About Big Mama Thornton: “Our rock mythology of the young dead is backward. The recipient of long life has made his deal with the devil, to live rich as a queen but with runny mascara and foot pain.”

Junior Parker’s career gets a sizzling summary, with honorifics like choice Beatles covers (“Tomorrow Never Knows”!), and his growth as a singer described as a “sort of reverse Elvis. To say that the world lost an artist has some literal meaning as well—Parker’s burial place is unknown.”

By emphasizing the more radical and messy nature of style and race, Lauterbach lands with a crack. While a lesser group of white artists generated heaps of undeserving praise and money, he argues, “time has more than squared this deal.” Readers arrive on some other side of industry groupthink, cued to how “race, culture, and business all explode off one another in real time” and crackle through contemporary sounds. Much of what he writes about Big Mama Thornton in the latter half of her career transcends sentimentality. “She blindsided many a well-meaning drummer by stopping a song to take over the kit herself and demonstrate how she wanted the beat,” he writes, and hippie culture’s embrace of her strikes him as sincere.

Finally, Lauterbach traces a previously unheralded musical family of Flamingo Room musicians who have long deserved wider praise: Calvin and Phineas Newborn. Their father, a Black guitarist, used to sneak Elvis into jam sessions at the club, and both of Newborn’s sons went on to storied jazz careers—Calvin with Sun Ra, and Phineas on a now-infamous 1961 solo turn called A World of Piano! for Contemporary, the adventurous Pacific Coast label.

Before Elvis draws these characters as a way of underlining the many streams crossing on Beale Street. “Calvin could have legitimately claimed that Elvis ripped him off,” he writes:

Instead, having experienced the context, Calvin appreciated the courage of a white man portraying Black culture, and that was Calvin’s word, “portraying.”

“Elvis portrayed rebellion which was against a lot of different things,” [Newborn] told [Lauterbach]. “He wore his hair differently. He wore clothes like a black person. He ate pork chops and gravy sandwiches. He was a soulful dude.”