He, like the music, was an original

Rock ‘n’ roll’s roots are so deep and twisted that fans and critics often throw their hands up in frustration when trying to search through the various branches to explain its origins.

It’s a quest that frequently ends up in debates over such minutiae as which artist first used the word “rock” in a song, or who established the guitar as a rallying point for youthful rebellion.

But the real story of the birth of rock may be as simple as a single man’s dream.

Rock ‘n’ roll lost its father on Wednesday when Sam Phillips died at the age of 80 in a hospital in Memphis, the music-rich city where this son of an Alabama cotton farmer discovered and helped shape the talents of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison.

As a struggling recording studio owner in the ‘50s, Phillips certainly signed those artists with profits in mind, but this man with larger-than-life zeal was also driven by something deeper -- a spirit that he saw in the music of the working-class South, black and white, that he felt could be a soulful, liberating force if somehow merged.

Phillips was a master record producer (the spare, echo-driven quality of his recordings has been as influential as Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”), but he was also a visionary and an idealist. He chose the name Sun for his label because it represented the optimism of a new day.

Where most record executives in the ‘50s saw rock ‘n’ roll as simply another musical trend, Phillips saw it as a cultural revolution -- one that could be used by generation after generation to express deeply felt aspirations and ideas.

“Money, fame, none of this jazz gets in my way of knowing the greatest thing on this Earth is being able to feel something,” Phillips said. “That’s the greatest freedom in the world. That’s what I wanted my records to do.”

Reporting on his death Thursday morning, a CBS radio news program saluted Phillips by playing two of his recordings: Presley’s “That’s All Right” and Lewis’ “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.”

Like so much music that Phillips made in his storefront, single-story studio on Union Avenue, they were perfect records, filled with energy and passion. But the news report could easily have played a dozen more of the classic Sun Records, including Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” or Presley’s “Baby, Let’s Play House.”

If the program wanted to be a little daring, it could have really intrigued listeners by playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” or Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” or John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

They are all part of the Phillips legacy.

Before Sun, Phillips opened a recording studio to capture the sounds of some of the immensely talented black artists in the Memphis area, including Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Ike Turner.

After some success in licensing those recordings to Los Angeles and Chicago labels, he got enough confidence to open Sun Records, where he recorded white country and black blues artists.

In those segregated times, Phillips realized it would be hard to reach a wider pop audience because mainstream radio stations resisted hard-core R&B; recordings. That led to his search for a white artist who could sing effectively in a soulful blues style. He found that artist in Presley, who instinctively combined white country music and black blues. (That pragmatic move angered some of the black musicians in Memphis, who felt he had abandoned them.)

Phillips was a maverick, and he became disenchanted with the record business when it became clear in the ‘60s that his independent label couldn’t compete unless it was aligned with a major record company.

In some ways, Phillips’ impact on music was akin to the young Orson Welles’ on film. But where Welles spent his life battling hostile forces in the film world, often to his humiliation, Phillips -- a proud man with a fiercely independent spirit -- left the record business rather than answer to executives in New York or Los Angeles. He concentrated on his various radio station properties and other investments, including the Holiday Inn chain.

For years he avoided the spotlight, rarely showing up at industry functions or doing interviews. But he kept listening to music.

While many of the musicians and executives of the ‘50s felt little attachment to the rock ‘n’ roll of the Beatles and Dylan, Phillips loved the way the music grew from teen celebration to a forum for ideas. It was in keeping with his original vision.

When I got him to sit down in 1981 for an interview, Phillips, a gregarious man whose flair for oratory would have made him a great trial lawyer or minister, said the artist he’d most like to work with at the time was Dylan.

In the interview, which began in the afternoon at Phillips’ Memphis office and ended 12 hours later at his house, he demonstrated such vitality and enthusiasm that you could imagine how he enticed the best out of musicians in the studio. His goal with Presley and Lewis and the rest wasn’t to make music that fit the radio formats of the day, but to reach deep inside for something original.

Presley biographer Peter Guralnick wrote about Perkins’ memory of the way Phillips encouraged him to “walk out on a limb [and] try things I knew I couldn’t do; and I’d get in a corner trying to do it and then have to work my way out of it.”

Frustrated during a session, Perkins said, “Mr. Phillips, that’s terrible,” only to have Phillips snap back that the music was in fact “original....That’s what Sun Records is. That’s what we are.”

Cash has spoken of the same intensity, saying of Phillips, “He tried to find the uniqueness in each of us.”

Interestingly, rock ‘n’ roll also changed Phillips. In photos from the ‘50s, he’s very conservative in dress and hairstyle, in keeping with the business climate of the time. By 1981, however, he had grown his hair long and wore a beard, looking like a rock rebel himself. He seemed like a man liberated and was filled with pride when he spoke about the legacy of Sun.

“It’s really mind-boggling sometimes to think of how rock ‘n’ roll enabled us to bring this big world a little closer together,” he said during our interview. “It ended up doing more than all the damned diplomats did in all the years we’ve had diplomats. It’s something to realize you had a part in all that. I mean, rock ‘n’ roll was supposed to ruin us, remember?”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.