Sam Phillips, Who Launched Elvis and a Revolution, Dies

Sun Records’ Sam Phillips, who teased a rocking version of “That’s All Right” out of an unknown ballad singer, thus launching the rock ‘n’ roll revolution and its most celebrated career, died Wednesday.

The singer was, of course, Elvis Presley, but Presley was by no means all there was to Phillips, who died at 80 of respiratory failure at St. Francis Hospital, in Memphis, Tenn. His health had been declining for a year, son Knox Phillips told the Associated Press.

As proprietor of a tiny hand-built recording studio at 706 Union Ave. in Memphis, Phillips brought to the world a stunning array of musical stars -- Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Charlie Rich and Ike Turner -- and a host of blues and R&B; artists, including Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas and Little Milton.

“Phillips was arguably the single most important figure in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll because he always saw it as a revolutionary force, not just a hit sound,” The Times’ pop music critic Robert Hilburn said Wednesday. “From the beginning he saw that it was a vehicle for social and cultural expression that would be used by generations to come.”

“It was like Camelot,” Cash once said of Phillips’ legendary Sun Records. “For one shining moment in history there was a unique situation, never before and never after. And he was the man who brought it all about.”

Phillips began with a simple idea: to record the black musicians whose music he loved as a child. But it was never a simple thing to do.

As a white man, he faced almost overwhelming racial prejudice in his native South to record the vibrant, thrilling “race” music that he came to believe was universal -- if only it could “cross over” to a bigger audience. After many years of trying to find a way to make that happen, he concluded that it would take a white man singing black music to open a wider door.

In 1953, a nervous, incredibly talented teenager who also loved black music stumbled into Sun studios to record a couple of ballads for his mother.

Within a year, Phillips would draw out of Presley the stirring sound that would not only launch the singer’s career but shove rock ‘n’ roll smack into the middle of American popular culture, where it has remained for more half a century.

Sun released only five Presley singles -- an impressive roster of 10 songs that included “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” “Baby, Let’s Play House” and, finally, “Mystery Train” -- all recorded between July 5, 1954, and July 11, 1955.

Then Phillips, faced with a pop music phenomenon he was unprepared to handle and needing money to promote his other artists, sold the singer’s contract to RCA for $35,000.

Though questioned till the end of his days about that decision, Phillips insisted that he never lost sleep over it. He used the money to release one of Sun’s biggest hits, Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” (later a hit for Presley as well) and foster the careers of Perkins, Lewis, Cash, Orbison, Rich and others.

All eventually far outgrew Sun and went on to other labels, and Phillips finally grew tired of the recording business. In 1969, he sold Sun to Mercury Records’ producer Shelby Singleton.

Phillips afterward stuck mainly to radio stations and investments, including Memphis-based Holiday Inns.

But, although he had been out of the business for decades, Phillips’ place in rock history is second to none.

He was inducted into the first class of honorees when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was formed in 1986, taking his place next to Presley, who had died in 1977, and Lewis.

Phillips also was the first person to be inducted into all three Halls of Fame -- Rock and Roll, Blues and Country Music.

Phillips was born Jan. 5, 1923, in Florence, Ala., where his parents were tenant farmers. As a child, Phillips, who was sickly, went with his parents to tend the fields. It was there, he said, that he felt an “awakening of my spirit” when he heard the blacks who worked side by side with his parents singing songs about the hardships they bore.

“I saw -- I don’t remember when, but I saw as a child -- I thought to myself: Suppose that I would have been born black,” he told Presley biographer Peter Guralnick. “Suppose that I would have been born a little bit more down on the economic ladder.”

As he grew older, Phillips began to see that poor people’s music -- black and white -- “was absolutely the greatest thing we had in the South.” By that he meant the kind of music that few cared to record, such as string band music.

Forced by bad times and his father’s death to give up his hope of becoming a criminal defense lawyer, Phillips went to work at a radio station in Muscle Shoals, Ala. In 1945, he moved on to WREC in the vibrant city of Memphis, home of the legendary Beale Street. It was, he said, a street where there was “a guitar on every corner or someone playing a lard can with a broomstick.”

“I had this feeling on Beale Street, this sounds like [to] me that this is something that the nation and the world possibly should hear,” he said in A&E;’s 1996 documentary about him, “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Although by then he had a wife and child to support, he decided, “I just have to open me a studio. I know I can open it with my own damn hands. I gotta have it!”

Phillips worked at the radio station all day and then went to his studio to record “anything -- anywhere -- anytime” just to make a go of his new venture. For a long time, that meant mostly weddings and $2-dollar-a-side personal recordings.

Slowly, Phillips began recording some of the musicians he had so long wanted to popularize. The rawer the music, the better. He wanted to record black gospel, white gospel, hillbilly music, blues.

But he was no archivist.

“I wanted to see if there was anything I heard that I thought might break the mold a little bit,” he said.

Phillips started getting what he wanted with local blues artists like B.B. King, who recorded some early tunes with Phillips, and Howlin’ Wolf. The following year, Phillips recorded “Rocket 88” with singer Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner’s band. Many critics said Brenston’s fast, upbeat recording, which Phillips took to Chess Records for release, is really the first rock ‘n’ roll record.

Phillips had found a soul mate for what he loved in music in Dewey Phillips, a white DJ who played “race” music, as blues and R&B; were called then, for black and white fans alike on WHBQ’s “Red, Hot and Blue.”

But, according to Guralnick, author of the Presley biography “Last Train to Memphis,” Sam Phillips was coming to realize “both the limitations of the ‘race’ market and the unlimited possibilities, and untapped potential, in the popular appetite for African American culture.”

Sure, you could sell a lot of copies of a rhythm and blues record, Phillips said, but young whites, especially Southern whites, “felt a resistance that they probably didn’t quite understand -- they liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not.”

He got to thinking, “If we got a white person, and people knew that he was a white person, that there was a good possibility we could broaden the base for both black and white people that had talent,” Phillips told National Public Radio’s Terry Gross in 1997. He dreamed of how many records he could sell if he could find white performers who could play and sing in the “same exciting, alive way” as black performers.

The shy 18-year-old who worked up his nerve to come to Sun one Saturday in July 1953, saying that he just wanted to make a record for his mother’s birthday, seemed far from what Phillips was looking for.

“When I first heard Elvis, I knew, No. 1, that his voice was very unusual. I also knew that it needed a lot of work,” Phillips said.

After Presley recorded his two songs -- the Ink Spots’ “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” and “My Happiness” -- Marion Keisker made this by-now well-known note: “Elvis Presley--good ballad--Save.”

Presley hung around Sun, and Phillips worked with him on and off over the next year without much success.

He finally turned to guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, hoping that the two veterans could get something from Presley he hadn’t been able to get.

In July 1954, Phillips brought the three of them into the studio to work up some songs. For hours, the trio played tune after tune. Finally, Phillips called a break “because nothing was coming off.”

‘On the Right Track’

Moore recalled that Elvis picked up his guitar and started “just bangin’ on it” and singing “That’s All Right” apparently just to release the tension. Black picked up his bass and started slapping the strings. Moore joined in.

“Sam came out of the control room and said, ‘What are you’all doin’?’ ” Moore related later. “I said, we don’t know, just cuttin’ up. He said, ‘Well, that sounded pretty good to me coming through the doors. See if you can put it together a little better and let’s put it on tape.’ ” Moore said, “Everybody looked at each other and said, ‘What were we doin’?’ ”

Phillips related years later that he didn’t know that Presley even knew the song that had been a hit for Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, a black artist who began in the South, let alone that Presley could sing it like that.

“Man, that was what I was looking for all along,” Phillips said. “Then I knew we were absolutely on the right track and that this cat could do it.”

Phillips immediately took the record to Dewey Phillips, who played it on WHBQ on July 8, 1954. Listeners got so fired up by the song that the DJ ended up playing it many times in a row (the exact number is a matter of dispute).

“I think it is still one of the most exciting records you can put on a turntable,” Sam Phillips told Hilburn many years later. “Listen to the vitality, the spontaneity.”

Presley, who remained on good terms with Phillips, would go on to be managed by Col. Tom Parker and have dozens of singles and albums on the charts.

Cash confessed to mixed feelings about the man that he -- and most of the Sun artists, beginning with Presley -- called “Mr. Phillips.”

“He kind of took us for granted after he sold Elvis’ contract to RCA,” Cash told Hilburn in 2000. “He looked up every time the door opened to see if the next Elvis had walked in.”

Others, especially some of the black artists from the early Sun days who felt pushed aside when Sun’s white performers started hitting it big, became resentful. “Sam discarded all of [the black artists],” Rufus Thomas said.

In the long run, Sun couldn’t compete with the big labels, who scooped up its talent, and Phillips sold the studio to do other things.

“There was no use in me being a farm club, so to speak, for the major league club,” Phillips said.

The studio, which was closed for many years after Phillips had earlier moved to expanded quarters in Memphis, now is a tourist site.

Throughout his life, Phillips maintained that he “wasn’t conscious of creating a new kind of music.”

“I think I was conscious of letting out the insides, emotional insides, of people, and that was a challenge to a great extent,” he told NPR’s Bob Edwards in 1993. “Oh, man, I loved the music. I loved it. I dearly loved it. So this was a beautiful experience. It still is, to see the influence it’s had around the world.”