The Elvis Story Continues

This morning I came to my Apple computer screen, only to discover that I had recently entered something of an Elvis Dragon's Den. A reader and fellow writer, who shall remain nameless, disagreed somewhat with what I had written in a previous article about Elvis and Arthur Crudup. 

Well, I did say in the article that it, the subject of royalties for Arthur Crudup's three songs recorded by Elvis, like It's All Right Moma, was complicated. So please indulge me a little to see if I can clarify exactly what happened.

The first publisher of Arthur Crudup's songs was Wabash Publishing, which was owned by Lester Melrose, Arthur's self-appointed manager.

Lester Melrose never registered Arthur as a songwriter with any royalty collecting agency. All of Arthur's royalties money was therefore paid directly to Wabash Publishing.

Even though Arthur's songs were earning a fortune, Lester Melrose, or Wabash Publishing, never paid Arthur any royalties apart from the occasional ten or fifteen dollars when Arthur complained. In effect, Melrose was stealing Arthur's royalties.

In the mid-fifties, Lester Melrose wanted to sell up and retire to Florida. So he sold the company, Wabash Publishing, to Hill and Range Publishing, which was owned by the Aberbach brothers.

The sale of the company included three thousand copyrights, of which just three belonged to Arthur Crudup. Arthur's three songs were extremely valuable due to generating very large sums of money. So it is highly likely that the sale price of Wabash Publishing was significantly enhanced, possibly amounting to millions of dollars.

As the new owners of Wabash, which as I have said, owned Arthur's copyrights, Hill and Range became the new beneficiaries of Arthur's publishing royalties. Did they do the decent thing and pay Arthur his due? NO.

Hill and Range treated Arthur as if he did not exist and therefore had no rights to what was in reality his money. So Arthur got stitched up first by Lester Melrose/Wabash Publishing, and then by Hill and Range Publishing.

Hill and Range made an agreement with Elvis and his manager, Col Tom Parker, to divide any royalties accruing from Elvis's recording and release of songs, be they Elvis's own songs or those of A.N.Other.

The agreement was for a fifty-fifty division of royalties, fifty percent going to Hill and Range Publishing, and the other fifty percent to Elvis and his manager, Col Tom Parker. This agreement ran for twenty years!

At this point, I would like to reiterate that Elvis did not steal a dime from Arthur. However….

What I do sincerely believe is that Elvis and his manager were guilty of, unwittingly or otherwise, receiving money they were not entitled to, fifty percent of Arthur's royalties.

It has been pointed out to me by somebody that Elvis and Hill and Range Publishing had nothing to do with Arthur not getting royalties for the publishing of his songs. It was all the fault of Arthur's publishing Company. This is totally off the mark. 

Hill and Range WERE the publishers of Arthur Crudup's songs. What's more, they did give fifty percent of Arthur's royalties to Elvis and his manager. I cannot make it any clearer than that.

To confirm what I have said, in 1972, Hill and Range Publishing made an offer to settle with Arthur Crudup for unpaid royalties to the tune of sixty thousand dollars.

In the end, in 1974, Hill and Range were compelled to pay the estate of Arthur Crudup 248,000 dollars! Sadly, by this time Arthur had passed away, so the money was paid to his estate with his sons as the beneficiaries. Better late than never, I suppose.

I consider that what Elvis and his manager were guilty of was receiving fifty percent of stolen royalty benefits rightfully belonging to Arthur Crudup.

In the UK, the receiving of stolen property, including intellectual property, is a crime, and it is a very serious crime at that. The law takes the view that if there were no buyers or receivers, there would not be any thieves.

To be fair, in all likelihood Elvis was probably too busy being the heart-throb Rock and Roll singing sensation to know what was going on behind the scenes. And his manager, Col Tom Parker, was no doubt too busy spending his millions at a Las Vegas gambling casino to be aware of where all the money was coming from in any great detail. However, that does let them off the hook.

In the eyes of the law, ignorance of how exactly the stolen benefits were acquired is no excuse. Ignorance of the facts of the matter might be seen to some degree as mitigating, but it does not alter the fact that you received financial benefits from the stolen rights to intellectual property, provably belonging to somebody else.

I hope this goes some way toward clarifying what exactly happened to Arthur Crudup's royalties money and avoids any further confusion.