There are no historic markers along Virginia’s Route 13 noting that the “Father of Rock ’n’ Roll” lived and died here. No signs point toward his gravesite in Franktown, Va., which, until the late 1990s—25 years after his death in 1974—wasn’t even marked by a headstone.
Ask many in this close-knit region if they’ve heard of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and they’ll shake their heads. If you had asked that same question 40 years ago, many people—at least in the white community—would have responded that Crudup was the tall, soft-spoken crew leader who oversaw migrant laborers picking vegetables on the Nottingham Brothers farm. But a blues legend who wrote Elvis Presley’s first-ever hit and whose work was covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Elton John? Not a chance.
The truth is, unless you’re a fan of the blues, you’ve probably never heard of Arthur Crudup either. (And likely don’t realize his name is pronounced “Crood-up” not “Crud-up.”) Like many African-American blues musicians of the 1930s and ’40s, he was cheated out of royalties for his compositions while music publishers, record companies, and the white artists who covered his music got rich.
But there’s something even sadder about Crudup’s story. No other blues artist can boast such a strong connection to Presley, who recorded two other Crudup songs—“My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine.” And, at the end of his life, Crudup, who was born into poverty in Forest, Miss., came tantalizingly close to finally receiving those back royalties, only to be denied at the last second by a calculating music publishing executive.
Arthur Crudup may have been dubbed a king, but he spent all his days living as a pauper.
FINDING TRACES OF ARTHUR CRUDUP on the back roads of Northampton County is like following a trail that isn’t marked. Crudup, his wife, Annie, and their five children lived in a variety of glorified shacks, none of which remain standing.
The Malibu Inn, Crudup’s legendary juke joint, where the bluesman and his musical sons, Jonas, James, and George, held court and made and sold moonshine is long gone.
So I’ve enlisted a local, Billy Sturgis, to take me around. Sturgis, 53, may be Crudup’s biggest fan on the Shore. A blues fanatic who co-hosts a radio show every Saturday night on WESR-FM, he produced an album featuring the three Crudup brothers in 2000. The record, “Franktown Blues,” features Big Boy’s sons performing their father’s hits as well as original tunes. Sturgis, also a devotee of the Blues Brothers movies, owns one of the “Blues mobiles” from the second film, but it has a flat tire, so we step into his slate-colored Mercedes instead.
We drive past old farms and small, tidy houses, a pond where Crudup, an avid fisherman, likely cast his line. We end up at the bluesman’s gravesite in the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, overlooking the Nottingham farm, where he toiled for so many years as an overseer. Next to the gray tombstone someone has left a vase of fake flowers, now cracked and faded by the weather. Sturgis tells me that the family was too poor to afford a headstone when Crudup died and his gravesite lay unmarked for years. “This is where we assume he’s buried,” says Sturgis. “Jonas [Crudup’s third son] said there was a tree nearby,” he says, motioning toward a stump.
Crudup’s wife, who died in 1963, lies in an unmarked grave, as does his mother, Minnie. Crudup’s youngest son, James, who gained unwanted notoriety for robbing a local bank and then using the Crudups’ van—emblazoned with the family name—as his getaway car, lies nearby. “When James sang, he sounded just like his father,” comments Sturgis, as we stand by his headstone.
Sturgis tells me at Big Boy’s funeral someone delivered a huge bouquet of flowers—much more grand than anyone in town could have afforded. “Some people say Elvis sent it,” says Sturgis, though he hasn’t been able to verify it.
A combine rumbles past on the road as we climb back into Sturgis’ car, Muddy Waters singing about love gone bad on the satellite radio. We drive a few miles to the site of the Malibu Inn in a thick woods a half-mile west of Route 13. Sturgis has been here before, but as we fight our way through the heavily overgrown underbrush, he can’t seem to find the building’s remains. “Wait, wait, here it is,” he suddenly shouts, pointing to one of four concrete blocks outlining the building’s frame. “You got the cornerstone of rock ’n’ roll right here,” he says. “Look at it!”
We poke around at what’s left of the structure—pieces of old wood, carpet fragments, a screen window frame, and a few rusted bus seats likely used as chairs.
According to Prechelle Ames, Crudup’s granddaughter, and the only blood relative still living on the Eastern Shore, the Malibu was demolished in 1982. “I remember being in there as a little girl,” says Ames, Jonas’ daughter, now 39, who works as the operations manager for Maryland Food Bank Eastern Shore in Salisbury. “There was always somebody there. They would gamble, roll dice, play cards. It was a typical juke joint—open for business 24/7.”
But now there’s nothing left but scraps. Still, to Billy Sturgis, this is hallowed ground. “This is the real deal here,” he says, as we stand surveying the ruins. “I get choked up being here. I really do.”
Sturgis bends over to unearth a couple of rusty, 1970s-era Ballantine beer cans. “He wrote his songs and Elvis took them,” he says of Crudup. “Elvis became famous and Arthur went into obscurity. Somebody was gettin’ that money and he knew it. It’s a tragic story. … But that’s why they call it the blues.”
BY THE TIME ARTHUR CRUDUP permanently moved his family to Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the 1950s, he was already fed up with the music business. Crudup, who didn’t learn to play guitar until he was 32, had moved to Chicago in the early 1940s to pursue a career in music. As the story goes, he was living beneath the city’s elevated train tracks in a cardboard box when music producer Lester Melrose, who recorded many of Chicago’s famous bluesmen, heard him playing on the street. Melrose invited him to perform at a party thrown by legendary blues guitarist Tampa Red, and after some initial stage fright, Crudup impressed Melrose enough that he signed him to a contract. Crudup, then 36, recorded his first song for Bluebird records, “If I Get Lucky,” in 1941.
Crudup stood 6-feet 5-inches tall (thus, the “Big Boy” label), but he sang in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. His unique sound, clever lyrics, and preference for electric guitar at a time when most blues artists were still playing acoustic attracted listeners and his records sold well. Some, most notably, “Rock Me Mama,” “Mean Ole Frisco,” “Keep Your Arms Around Me,” and “So Glad You’re Mine,” were legitimate hits and would later be recorded by other musicians who made them famous.
According to Dick Waterman, the longtime manager of blues legends from Buddy Guy to Bonnie Raitt, and who served as Crudup’s booking agent during the blues revival of the late 1960s, “There probably wasn’t a week during the decade of the 1970s when there wasn’t an Arthur Crudup song on the Billboard Top 200 albums,” he says, rambling off a list of seminal rock albums from Clapton’s “Slow Hand” (“Mean Old Frisco”) to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Cosmo’s Factory” (“My Baby Left Me.”)
But Crudup, who was paid an upfront fee for his recordings and signed away the copyrights to Melrose (as was typical of blues musicians at the time), only collected scant payments over the years.
“I never knew how much progress I was makin’ because Melrose didn’t tell me,” Crudup said in a 1973 documentary, “Born into the Blues,” filmed in Franktown. “I could hear my songs on the jukebox all through the South. I had a disc jockey tell me, ‘Now, Arthur, you’re supposed to be in good shape. Your records are selling second from the top.’”
In 1946, Crudup recorded “That’s All Right, Mama,” which Elvis covered and released in 1954 as “That’s All Right.” Crudup received credit for writing the smash, which established Presley as a star, but nothing from the singer other than an award plaque, which subsequently burned in a house fire. But Presley, who recorded many other black musicians’ songs, never denied Crudup’s influence. As he told the Charlotte Observer in 1956: “Down in Tupelo, Miss., I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel what old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
Still, Crudup clearly could have used some help. After his second wife was murdered in Chicago, he returned to farm work and odd jobs in Mississippi and later moved to Florida where he established a business shuttling migrant workers from Florida north to Franktown. He only went back to Chicago to fulfill his contractual obligations with Melrose. As he said in the documentary, “Every time I’d go make a record, I’d ask Lester, ‘How many records would a man have to make that he didn’t have to work on the farm?’”
DURING HIS FRANKTOWN YEARS, Crudup settled into a routine of farm work and selling moonshine to earn a living, putting his musical past behind him. “Pop Crudup was quite a distinguished maker and seller of moonshine,” says Ames. “People traveled from deep within the states to get his [hooch].”
He would perform occasionally at the Do-Drop Inn (now Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn), a licensed juke joint in the area that remains meticulously maintained by its owner, Jane Cabarrus, whose father built it by hand in 1967. These days, the club, likely the last juke joint on the Eastern Shore, is mainly used as a catering hall and community center, but its long bar, pool table, and worn wooden dance floor speak to a time when it hosted musical acts from around the region.
Cabarrus, a teenager in the late 1960s, remembers Crudup acting as the club’s doorman, collecting the $3 cover charge from patrons who would come every Saturday night to drink Schlitz beers and watch his sons play R&B hits. Known as The Malibus, the Crudup brothers band enjoyed decent success and toured throughout the East Coast, but were particularly big on the Eastern Shore. “What Elvis was to the world, is what the Crudup boys were to the community,” says Cabarrus, who notes that both father and sons attracted their share of female admirers. “Every Saturday night they’d pack the house.”
Cabarrus remembers Crudup sometimes opening for his sons or joining them on stage, but she says most of the people came to see The Malibus and weren’t really aware of the blues legend in their midst. “I don’t think people knew how big he was, how great he was,” says Cabarrus. “He didn’t really become great until after he died. … A lot of us weren’t knowledgeable about how great the blues were at that time,” as Motown and rhythm and blues were the dominant sounds in the black community.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Crudup did record and tour again as part of the blues revival that swept the country. Lloyd Kellum, a local pharmacist and a close associate of Crudup’s, recalls the bluesman showing up at his drugstore with a beat-up guitar case and an “awful-looking fur coat.” “I asked him where he was going and he said, ‘I’m on my way to England to play for the queen.’ I thought, ‘This man is crazy.’” (Crudup did tour England and then Australia, but he never performed for Queen Elizabeth.) Later, Kellum read an article in a Virginia newspaper that referred to Crudup as the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll. “I just couldn’t believe we had this guy living in our town,” he says.
“I had no idea about who he was—and maybe he liked it that way. But after that, we made him a little celebrity around the store.”
CRUDUP HAD WORKED with various lawyers over the years to help him recoup some of the monies he was owed. Finally, in 1973, the American Guild of Authors and Composers reached an agreement with the publishing house that held the rights to his work.
Waterman met Crudup, then 68 and frail, and his children in New York City to sign documents guaranteeing an initial payment of $60,000, plus future royalties. But as Waterman describes it, things didn’t go as planned. “Arthur signed the documents and then we waited 15, 20 minutes for the attorney to come back. He was very shaken and said, ‘[My boss] won’t sign it. He said he feels this gives away more in settlement than you could win in litigation.’
“Arthur looked at me and I said, ‘They’re not going to pay you, Arthur. You’re going to have to sue them. We’re going to have sue Lester Melrose’s widow.’ But the idea of a black man suing an elderly white woman—it just wasn’t gonna happen.”
Waterman says it was a blustery day in Manhattan as the group left the office building and huddled outside. “Them people got their ways of keeping folks like me from getting any money,” Waterman says Crudup told him. “Naked I come into this world and naked I shall leave it. It just ain’t meant to be.”
Resigned to his fate, Crudup returned to Franktown with his children. In March of 1974, he was opening for Bonnie Raitt in Washington, D.C., when he suffered a stroke and died several weeks later at a hospital in Nassawadox, Va.
Disgusted at how things turned out, Waterman met with another lawyer, Ina Meibach, in New York City on his way home from Crudup’s funeral. Eventually, Waterman and Meibach did succeed in securing royalties for the estate, which Waterman estimates has been paid more than $3 million since.
Unfortunately, only a daughter, also named Preshell but spelled differently, and Crudup’s son George, who has battled drugs most of his life, remain alive. It’s unclear as to who’s receiving the money, as the Crudup children each had several marriages between them. All Waterman knows is that a Florida attorney oversees payments to the estate.
The tragedy that “Big Boy” Crudup was never properly compensated for his accomplishments is not lost on his granddaughter, Prechelle. “When I’d listen to his music, I used to be really, really angry and upset cause of what he should have gotten—what it would have meant for our family, what we rightfully deserved,” says Ames, whose 18-year-old son, Pharez, hopes to work in the music industry someday. “But I long got past that. I started to enjoy it and just listen.”
For Sturgis and Cabarrus, they’d like to see the county or state or somebody establish an official Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup Blues Trail, with historic markers on Route 13 and signs pointing the way toward his grave and Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn, where Cabarrus hopes to once again host live music regularly.
“Franktown people need to know about what happened here,” says Sturgis. “Big Boy didn’t necessarily create the music here, but this is where he lived and died. They should know that this is where the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll called home.”
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