Sam Phillips \with Elvis Presley, bass player Bill Black and guitarist Scotty Moore at Sun Records, 1954
Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records, was born 100 years ago today.
Phillips was a record executive, record producer and DJ who played an important role in the emergence of rock and roll as the major form of popular music in the 1950s.
He was a producer, label owner and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s. He founded Sun Studio and Sun Records in Memphis.
Through Sun, Phillips discovered such recording talent as Howlin' Wolf, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. The height of his success culminated in his launching of Elvis Presley's career in 1954.
He is also associated with several other noteworthy rhythm and blues and rock and roll stars of the period. Phillips sold Sun in 1969.
Phillips was an early investor in the Holiday Inn chain of motels. He also advocated racial equality and helped break down racial music industry barriers.
The youngest of eight children, Phillips was born on a farm near Florence, Alabama to poor tenant farmers. As a child, he picked cotton in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers. The experience of the workers singing in the fields left a big impression on the young Phillips.
Traveling through Memphis with his family in 1939 on the way to see a preacher in Dallas, he slipped off to look at Beale Street, at the time the heart of the city's music scene. "I just fell totally in love," he later recalled.
Phillips attended the former Coffee High School in Florence. He conducted the school band and had ambitions to be a criminal defense attorney.
However his father was bankrupted by the Great Depression and died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave high school to look after his mother and aunt.
To support the family Phillips worked in a grocery store and then a funeral parlor. In the 1940s, Phillips worked as a DJ and radio engineer for Muscle Shoals radio station, WLAY (AM). According to Phillips, this radio station's "open format" (of broadcasting music from both white and black musicians) would later inspire his work in Memphis.
Beginning in 1945, he worked for four years as an announcer and sound engineer for WREC. On January 3, 1950, Phillips opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. The Memphis Recording Service let amateurs perform, which drew performers such as B.B. King, Junior Parker and Howlin' Wolf.
Phillips then would sell their performances to larger record labels. In addition to musical performances, Phillips recorded events such as weddings and funerals, selling the recordings. The Memphis Recording Service also served as the studio for Phillips's own label, Sun Records, which he launched in 1952.
Phillips combined different styles of music. As special interest was the blues. "The blues, it got people — black and white — to think about life, how difficult, yet also how good it can be. They would sing about it; they would pray about it; they would preach about it. This is how they relieved the burden of what existed day in and day out," Phillips said.
Phillips recorded what some — notably music historian Peter Guralnick — consider the first rock and roll record: "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, a band led by 19-year-old Ike Turner, who also wrote the song.
The recording was released on the Chess/Checker record label in Chicago in 1951.
From 1950 to 1954, Phillips recorded the music of James Cotton, Rufus Thomas, Rosco Gordon, Little Milton, Bobby Blue Bland and others. B.B. King and Howlin' Wolf made their first recordings at his studio.
In fact, Phillips deemed Howlin' Wolf his greatest discovery and he deemed Elvis Presley his second greatest discovery. Sun Records produced more rock and roll records than any other record label of its time during its 16 year run, producing 226 singles.
Phillips said of Elvis Preley: "Elvis cut a ballad, which was just excellent. I could tell you, both Elvis and Roy Orbison could tear a ballad to pieces."
Elvis Presley, who recorded his version of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right" at Phillips's studio and became highly successful, first in Memphis, then throughout the southern United States. He auditioned for Phillips in 1954, but it was not until he sang "That's Alright (Mama)" that Phillips was impressed.
For the first six months, the flip side, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," his upbeat version of a Bill Monroe bluegrass song, was slightly more popular than "That's All Right (Mama)." While still not known outside the South, Presley's singles and regional success became a drawing card for Sun Records, as singing hopefuls soon arrived from all over the region.
Singers such as Sonny Burgess ("My Bucket's Got A Hole In It"), Charlie Rich, Junior Parker and Billy Lee Riley recorded for Sun with some success, while others such as Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins would become superstars.
Despite this popular regional acclaim, by mid 1955 Sam Phillips's studio experienced financial difficulties, and he sold Presley's contract in November of that year. RCA Records' offer of $35,000 beat out Atlantic Records' offer of $25,000.
Through the sale of Presley's contract, he was able to boost the distribution of Perkins' song "Blue Suede Shoes" and it became Sun Records' first national hit. He lost many of his talents in the late 1950s after he sold Elvis' contract and was unable to regain his once prominent position in the Memphis music community.
Phillips is credited with teaching production to Presley who used this knowledge into his career with RCA Victor. Although Steve Sholes was credited as the official producer of Elvis after his move to RCA, it was Elvis who in reality, produced most of the music, using what he had learned from Sam Phillips.
Phillips had an open style and insightful guidance that seemed to allow musicians, especially Presley, to search and feel their way to a point to where they would perform beyond Phillips's and their own expectations. He also seemed to have a sense for when the artist was about to reach the point of their best performance.
Phillips recorded looking for a feel, not technical perfection. Phillips told Elvis that the worst thing he could go for was perfection. Phillips was always seeking what he called the perfect/imperfect cut. This meant it perfectly conveyed the feeling and emotion of the song to the listener and gave the song a living personality, partially due to it being technically imperfect.
Phillips innovated while recording Elvis. Most recordings at the time gave substantially more volume to the vocals. Phillips pulled back the Elvis vocals, blending it more with the instrumental performances.
Phillips's pivotal role in the early days of rock and roll was exemplified by a celebrated jam session on December 4, 1956 which came to be known as the Million Dollar Quartet.
Jerry Lee Lewis was playing piano for a Carl Perkins recording session at Phillips's studio. When Elvis Presley walked in unexpectedly, Johnny Cash was called into the studio by Phillips, leading to an impromptu session featuring the four musicians.
Phillips challenged the four to achieve gold record sales, offering a free Cadillac to the first, which Carl Perkins won. The contest is commemorated in a song by the Drive-by Truckers.
By the mid-1960s, Phillips rarely recorded. He built a satellite studio and opened radio stations, but the studio declined and he sold Sun Records to Shelby Singleton in 1968.
Through savvy investments, Phillips soon amassed a fortune. He was one of the first investors with Roy Scott in Holiday Inn, a new motel chain that was about to go national.
In 1986, Sam Phillips was part of the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and his pioneering contribution to the genre has been recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. He was the first ever non-performer inducted.
In 1998, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, and in October, 2001 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Phillips died of respiratory failure at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis on July 30, 2003, only one day before the original Sun Studio was designated a National Historic Landmark, and just weeks before the death of his former colleague, Johnny Cash, on September 12, 2003. He was 80.
Here is a segment on Phillips, the man who invented rock and roll.
Sun Studio, Memphis
Photo by Lance Vaughn