Richmond will always be author Preston Lauterbach’s birthplace. But San Diego is where he was raised, and Memphis is one of several historic music hubs that shaped him artistically.

From that pedigree, there’s a sense that he was born to write his latest nonfiction book, “Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King” (Da Capo).

Released earlier this year, the book’s subjects and themes have been percolating for over two decades while Lauterbach researched and wrote other books like 2011’s “The Chitlin’ Circuit.” The previously overlooked, often misunderstood histories he explores have set him apart as an ear and voice for some of America’s earliest recording artists [outlets such as NPR, Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone have given his books year-end honors].

Most of Lauterbach’s efforts are embedded in the specificity of historic times and places, such as “Beale Street Dynasty” (2015) and “Bluff City” (2019)—the latter an astonishing look at the secret life of famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who turned F.B.I. informant. Further biographies he’s worked on have included collaborations with Annye C. Anderson, stepsister of the mythically elusive bluesman Robert Johnson, in “Brother Robert,” celebrated Stax drummer Howard Grimes in “Timekeeper,” and the Blind Boys of Alabama in “Spirit of the Century.”

But his latest work is a crowning achievement, less for ink spilled on the King—though you can expect “a hunk, a hunk of burning love” as far as that goes—and more for the portraits of lesser known, but no less important, figures in American music that emerged before Elvis Presley.

Even dressed down in a Western shirt, Lauterbach cuts a dashing figure when we meet up for coffee in Carytown on the first day of Mardi Gras. At first, I wasn’t sure if I’d be dealing with an Elvis fanatic, so skilled is the authorial voice of his books. On the surface, the author’s portrait of Presley comes across as democratic and cool, revealing more through showing than telling, and never too celebratory of Presley’s achievements, which are well documented and continue to be lavishly immortalized.

I’m struck when Lauterbach shows his cards just about as soon as we sit down and says: “Elvis was my gateway drug to a lifetime addiction to rhythm and blues, blues, soul music.”

After that silly, if stylized, “Elvis” biopic came out in 2022, Lauterbach was spurred by a common theme of its critical reception: That despite hamfisted efforts, the movie missed an opportunity to portray the unsung heroes of Black music who paved the way for Presley.

By that time, Lauterbach was well on his way to being able to expertly render that era of Memphis from the social, cultural and musical standpoints his past work explored. But just as rock ‘n’ roll’s early progenitors led to Elvis, it’s been a two-way street ever since.

“Elvis is a controversial person, the way that some people look at it in hindsight, for appropriating African American music,” Lauterbach explains. “And that’s definitely part of this book, and part of the discussion that I think should take place. But the fact for me personally is: I learned about Black music through Elvis.”

Only after Elvis’ popularity could a wider, specifically white audience, approach Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” and Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train”—all commercial hits for Presley—in a socially accepted and mainstream marketplace. Lauterbach’s book begins earlier and delves into these key figures’ cultural circumstances during the Civil Rights Movement, which would prime the way for Presley’s sound and swift ascent.

“There could have been any number of other people who were profiled in this book who were equally deserved, but this particular group of artists all intertwined,” Lauterbach explains, adding that the bulk of the action takes place from the summer of 1953 to the summer of ‘54, the last full year before Presley’s first commercial recording. “All this stuff happened at the right time to contribute to Elvis being Elvis at the time he broke. One little teeny example, and it’s something I’ll never prove—because you just can’t—but if you listen to the recordings that Elvis made for his mother in 1953, and then you listen to his first commercial recording in 1954: He didn’t have it in ‘53. He had it in ‘54.”

However, there’s a big, overlooked piece to the puzzle that Lauterbach was better able to prove through thoughtful excavation of a particular Memphis family’s outsized musical legacy. Largely missing in the annals of music history, Phineas Newborn Sr. and sons Phineas Jr. and Calvin had a direct impact on Presley, not to mention jazz in the second half of the 20th century. Lauterbach conveys the teenage Presley’s earliest and formative exposure to Black music at Reverend Herbert Brewster’s East Tree Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis; but the eureka moment comes from interviews with Calvin, who the author was skeptical of, at first.

“He came at a lot of people with his stories about working with young Elvis. I didn’t believe it. You know, I thought he was full of shit,” Lauterbach recalls. “Part of that was that I was very young and naive, and I think, on guard about being taken advantage of, particularly as a young journalist. Printing some bullshit and then getting laughed at.”

After years of further sleuthing, gathering firsthand accounts and getting to know Calvin and his family’s story better, Lauterbach shares new revelations about Elvis “the Pelvis” and his history with the Newborns from Beale Street that journey from the Flamingo Room to RCA, where both Elvis and Phineas Jr. would go on to cut records. It’s all in the book.

Particularly illuminating are the stories about major figures such as Big Mama Thornton, often in her own words, and Little Junior Parker, “from Sun to Sun Ra” in Lauterbach’s words; especially when it comes to Parker, for whom less is known. (Both warrant biopics of their own, pronto.) Personally, I was most keen on learning about the hero journey of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who laid roots in Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where his spot the Do-Drop-Inn stands to this day in Nassawadox. It’s there that Lauterbach was greeted by a billboard for the Elvis impersonator, Jesse Garrin, as he crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel into Cape Charles, where he also managed to track down Crudup’s surviving family by asking around at the local gas station.

“I’m FaceTiming with Crudup’s grandson seconds later,” he says. 

Time and again, Crudup was exploited by music industry machinations and would eventually get his fair shake too late when, after his death, his surviving family members received their due. It’s tragic this couldn’t happen in Crudup’s lifetime, but Lauterbach thinks it’s more important to remember these overlooked artistic talents as just that: talented artists, rather than victims.

“Rock’n’roll is theft,” as the venerable scribe Nick Tosches put it, a sentiment which gets cited explicitly and echoed throughout Lauterbach’s book. But imitation is one thing, and systemic exploitation is another.

“Elvis stole from Crudup. If you start looking into it, Crudup borrowed from, you know, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Little Brother Montgomery and Big Joe Turner and all these other artists who recorded that same hook,” Lauterbach reasons. “Finding real authorship with blues lyrics? Good luck … because a lot of ’em were passed down by people who didn’t have recording in mind and weren’t really looking at it as a business. I mean, that’s one of things with white people, we kind of go in and try to make a dollar off of everything … and it really does kind of fuck everything up.”

It’s clear how Lauterbach’s work demystifies and recasts popular music history by singing the praises of those less sung, but I’m curious what led him here, as a white author. At first, the connections to his work he shares feel cosmic or coincidental. “While I was being born in St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Virginia, the very same day, very same hour, Arthur Crudup’s sons were being arrested for bank robbery on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.” So there’s that.

“In demystifying history, all you do is you take away the layers of falseness. I don’t think you take away the beauty of it.”

Lauterbach has moved back and forth, to and from Virginia numerous times over the years. In his most revealing moment during our interview, he touches on the impact his father’s racism had on him and his younger brother from an early age.

“My dad was an old-school, drive-around-Hanover County, drink-beer-and-tell-lies kind of storyteller, you know?” he explains. “My dad, as much as I loved him, was a n-word dropping racist, and that had the opposite effect on me. Instead of making me a racist, it made me aware of Black people and wonder why he had to talk this way … Look, we’re all dealing with our parents in one way or another, but a lot of my motives are the sins of the father.”

Further indulging my curiosity about his connection to Richmond, Lauterbach describes the butcher stall his grandfather, a German immigrant, had in Church Hill (“They were doing 100 years ago all of the hipster, urban stuff. Now, it’s just coming back; local and walkable, and I guess it was pre-chemicals, it was probably organic,” he says, cracking me up).

“Richmond has always just had this romance to it, and I love the feeling. It’s always something that I’ve tried to draw from, and it has always inspired me,” he says, swiveling his long empty, plastic iced-coffee cup. “I don’t really want that mystery to ever be solved, you know? I don’t want it to become commonplace.”

Initially, this seems at odds with everything Lauterbach has expressed about the point of his work: to reexamine and expand our understanding of history. By his own account, that work has a net positive. “In demystifying history, all you do is you take away the layers of falseness. I don’t think you take away the beauty of it.”

But don’t expect Richmond to be the subject of a Lauterbach book anytime soon. The next one he’s working on covers the intersection of independent soul labels with organized crime, and their eventual commodification (I believe). When I stop recording our interview, he has just told me, “I feel like I’ve given you too much,” with a devil-may-care grin.

Days later, I’m still puzzled over why he would shy away from Richmond’s heavy history, especially since he’s aware of how its presence hangs in the air here. I follow up over email, and he sums it up for me.

“It’s like a first love, the first place that ever moved me just by being.”

I get that, I think, and am reminded of another Nick Tosches quote that hits on all this old-time art stuff, whether it’s the blues or any other siren song throughout time. And it’s one he appropriately cribbed from another poet.

“Do not move, Let the wind speak.”