Artist: Arthur Crudup
Author: Arthur Crudup
Label: RCA Victor
Year: 1946

Original title: I Don't Know It. Three years later the first blues/R&B on a 45 (red vinyl). Slightly influenced by Son House's My Black Mama (see there), lyrically connected (slightly) with Blind Lemon Jefferson's That Black Snake Moan ('26) ("Mama, that's all right mama, that's all right for you"), Little Brother Montgomery's Something Keeps A-Worryin' Me ('36 - RCA Bluebird) and Louis Jordan's It's A Low-Down Dirty Shame ('42). Arthur Crudup has always been exploited, as sharecropper in Mississippi, as bluesman under Lester Melrose in Chicago. Nothing changed when his contract was sold to Hill & Range, Elvis Presley's publishing company, who cut four of his songs. Only when Chappell Music bought Hill & Range in '75, the Crudup family finally saw some revenues coming in. Arthur unfortunately had died recently while one of his sons was doing time for robbery.

A-side of Presley's first Sun single, the song that convinced Sam Phillips and soon a whole babyboom generation with him. After all, this was the first non-ballad he sang in that tiny studio. Sam was utterly baffled when this white kid suddenly uttered this uptempo countryblues rendition of a song written by a black man from Belzoni, MS. Elvis who was raised in that same state, in a '56 interview: "The coloured folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doing now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and juke joints and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, MS I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever go to the place I could feel what old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw".