Rock’s delivery room

When Sam Phillips opened a storefront recording studio in a former auto glass shop here in 1950, there were lots of people whose first reaction was “It’s a good thing he’s keeping his day job at the radio station.”

How could he ever compete with the major labels in New York and Los Angeles that had pop stars like Perry Como and Patti Page?

But the doubters didn’t know two things about Sam Phillips: First, he had an unshakable faith that “poor people’s music” -- the country and blues he loved growing up in the South -- would revolutionize pop culture.

Second, he had the good fortune to set up shop just 12 blocks or so from the home of a young singer named Elvis Presley.

Those forces collided on a hot, humid night 50 years ago this week when Phillips went into his 18-by-32-foot studio on busy Union Avenue to see if he could capture the potential he heard in the shy, eager-to-please teenager with sideburns.

Future generations would think of rock ‘n’ roll as something that had always been around, like school bells and the World Series, but rock as we know it today was for all practical purposes born that night in Memphis.

In attempting to explain the magic of that moment, writers, musicians and fans have talked about all the elements that came together in one fateful week -- including a spontaneous mixture of country and blues sounds that crossed cultural and racial boundaries.

Invariably, the focus has been on Presley, who went on to be the music’s biggest star. Yet everything about the session was crucial -- from the Memphis setting to the choice of Scotty Moore as a guitarist.

And nothing, people who were in Memphis at the time say, was more essential than Phillips, whose vision shaped that evening.

As Presley took his place at the microphone, Phillips was in the adjoining control booth, looking at him through a window. To avoid intimidating the youngster, Phillips, wearing his customary sport coat, had Presley face away from the window and sing directly at guitarist Moore and bassist Bill Black.

The studio wasn’t air-conditioned, so it was sticky and uncomfortable as they got underway around 8 p.m. It was Monday, July 5, and fireworks were marking Fourth of July celebrations in nearby parks, a day late because the fireworks weren’t allowed in the city on the Sabbath.

To help Presley relax, Phillips suggested he just sing some of his favorite tunes, and over the next four hours that meant mostly songs like a slow, hesitant version of “Harbor Lights,” a top 10 hit for Bing Crosby four years before, and “I Love You Because,” a country song Presley had learned from an old Ernest Tubb record.

Phillips’ heart sank. This wasn’t what he had been looking for.

As Presley kept doing pedestrian versions of various ballads, Phillips stopped the tape and started recording over it. Tape was expensive. Finally, he suggested that everyone take a break. The night looked like a lost cause.

So he was startled when Presley began strumming playfully on his acoustic guitar and singing an old blues tune Phillips recognized as Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right.”

Phillips was obsessed with the country and blues sounds he heard as a boy in Florence, Ala. He’d even opened his studio to record the bluesmen from Beale Street, which was just a couple of miles away.

And now this sound was coming from a 19-year-old white singer.

Phillips swung open the control booth door and asked what was going on.

Just fooling around, Moore said.

“Well, it didn’t sound too bad,” Moore recalls Phillips replying. “Try it again. Let me get in there and turn the mikes on.”

Presley taught the tune to the other two musicians, and after a couple of run-throughs, Phillips rolled tape. When they finished, Presley and the others didn’t know what to make of this country/blues hybrid. They listened to a playback and turned to Phillips for a sign.

He was thrilled.

Phillips’ oldest son, Knox, was only 9 at the time, but he clearly recalls his father’s excitement when he played “That’s All Right” for the family, something he rarely did with a new record.

“I still remember the joy on Sam’s face,” the young Phillips says. “It wasn’t like he was just telling my mother, ‘I like this, let me play it for you.’ It was more ‘This is the thing I’ve been searching for.’ ”

Memphis’ mystique

Perhaps the sound that caught Phillips’ ear that night could have been forged only in Memphis. It’s less than three hours from Nashville, but the cities are so different that it’s hard to believe you haven’t crossed a state boundary when driving between them on Interstate 40. There’s even an old saying: Nashville may be the capital of Tennessee, but Memphis is the capital of Mississippi.

For poor white boys like Elvis Presley in Tupelo, Miss., or the great blues singers from the Delta, roads and railroad tracks all seem to lead to Memphis -- and Beale Street, arguably the country’s leading showplace of black music for much of the first half of the last century.

Presley’s parents moved there with their 13-year-old son in November 1948, hoping for work. They lived in Lauderdale Courts, a federal housing project in a worn-out neighborhood at the edge of downtown.

Walking those streets today, it’s amazing to see how compact his world was 50 years ago. The red brick buildings of the project are still there, but they have been purchased by a private developer and are being turned into upscale apartments.

Presley’s favorite movie theater, the Suzore No. 2, and favorite record shop, Charlie’s, were within a couple of blocks of the apartment on Winchester. They’ve been torn down to make room for the Memphis Convention Center and the Pyramid arena. Gone too is the old Ellis Auditorium, where the wide-eyed Presley attended numerous gospel concerts and dreamed of joining a gospel group.

Most striking, the old apartment building was about equidistant from Beale Street, where you could absorb the excitement of the blues and other black music strains that filled the air, and Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service.

Phillips first saw Beale Street when he was 19 and was drawn back by the sights and sounds in 1945.

Blessed with a great sense of oratory, he had toyed with becoming a minister or a criminal defense attorney. But when his father, a cotton farmer, died, he had to drop out of school to support his aunt and mother. His voice landed him a succession of jobs as a radio announcer, including one at a major Nashville station.

“If you look at Sam’s resume, you can learn a lot about his cast of mind,” Knox says. “If you are in broadcasting, WLAC in Nashville is the place to be. It’s a clear channel, 50,000-watt station that you can hear at night all the way to South America.

“And if he just wanted to open a recording studio, he could have done it in Nashville. That was one of the biggest recording centers in the country. But Sam goes from WLAC to WREC in Memphis, which most people would see as a step back because it’s a smaller radio market. The reason is, he was on a mission.”

Five years after he moved to Memphis in 1945, Phillips opened a studio and started recording many of the area’s talented black artists, who were largely ignored by the major pop record labels. Even indie labels that specialized in blues and R&B; merely sent producers to town for hotel room recording sessions.

Phillips’ plan was to use his studio to record blues and R&B; artists for such indie outfits as Chess Records in Chicago or Modern in Los Angeles. He started with jazz pianist Phineas Newborn Jr. and went on to find or record artists including B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Ike Turner and Howlin’ Wolf.

The rent on the studio on Union Avenue, a street lined with many of the city’s most successful car dealerships, cost $75 a month. Boldly, he took a 10-year lease.

After “Rocket 88,” a lively novelty record he made with Turner and Jackie Brenston, became a No. 1 R&B; hit for Chess in 1951, Phillips had the confidence to start Sun Records, but keeping it afloat was a struggle.

With just one employee, a receptionist-secretary who handled most of the books, Phillips worked endlessly. He didn’t just record artists, he also had to drive hundreds of miles a week in a 1947 DeSoto, hoping to persuade DJs in the region to play the recordings on the radio and record shops to stock them.

All this helped push Phillips toward two nervous breakdowns, for which he received electroshock treatment.

Contributing to the stress was the racial tension of the time. In an age of strict segregation in the South, the idea of a white man working with black musicians caused friction. Co-workers at the radio station, Phillips’ son says, made insulting comments along the lines of “You don’t smell so bad today, Sam.” The suggestion was that Phillips must not have been in the studio that day with blacks.

On the night he went into the studio with Presley, racial anxiety filled Memphis. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark desegregation ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, was little more than a month old. A letter to the editor in the Commercial Appeal newspaper warned blacks that pushing too hard too fast could lead to a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Fourth of July celebration in the park that night was for whites only. A separate fireworks show for “coloreds” was scheduled for the next evening.

Integration, however, was already underway in music. White and black teenagers here and across the country were tuning in to radio shows that played the black and white, country and blues sounds that Phillips so embraced.

“If I can find me a white man who can sing like a black man” is a quote that has been widely attributed to Phillips, though there is no evidence he ever said that. Yet he started working with white country artists at Sun in 1953, hoping to have a wider base of customers.

“I had grown up on the South, and I felt a definite kinship between the white Southern country artists and the black Southern blues or spiritual artists,” Phillips told me in 1981. “Our ties were too close for the two not to overlap.

“It was a natural thing. It’s just that the record business in those days looked at the music as totally separate. They didn’t realize that it was a natural exchange and that the public would eventually accept it.”

To help pay the bills, Phillips also operated a recording service, taping weddings or graduation ceremonies and making vanity recordings for anyone who stopped in with $3.98. His first business card read, “We record anything -- anywhere -- anytime.”

When Presley walked into the studio in the summer of 1953 to make one of those vanity records, Phillips had found the voice to meld his love of blues and country music -- but it took him almost a year to realize it.

Change in the air

Traces of a rock revolution were already in the air when Phillips met Presley. Dozens of R&B; singles, released on labels such as Atlantic, Chess and Specialty, had become underground favorites across America.

These records were embraced by teens, black and white, who were enjoying a post-World War II prosperity and freedom. The old social order was under attack.

Rebelling against the stiffness of mainstream culture, teens looked for something sexier and more explosive than the music of their parents. Later, their music, rock ‘n’ roll, would become the soundtrack for social movements, from civil rights to antiwar protests.

Conventional pop, including Kitty Kallen’s sweet “Little Things Mean a Lot” and the Four Aces’ dreamy “Three Coins in the Fountain,” still topped the national charts that summer. But teens in Memphis were already grooving to the R&B; sounds of such spirited records as the Chords’ “Sh-Boom” and the Midnighters’ scandalous “Work With Me Annie.”

Still, there was no consensus yet about the essential elements of the music that DJs around the country were beginning to call rock ‘n’ roll, not even its chief instrument. Some records featured saxophones, others piano. Some records drew their appeal chiefly from exaggerated jump blues rhythms, others from doo-wop harmonizing.

Phillips was interested in the emerging teen sounds, but he wasn’t looking to imitate them. He was searching for the sound he had been hearing in his head for years.

“Sam’s strength wasn’t in telling people what to play,” former Sun guitarist Roland Janes said recently. “His gift was in recognizing it when something was good.”

It was Phillips’ good fortune to run into someone like Presley, who shared the same musical passions.

The teenager not only loved blues and country music, he’d even befriended some of the gospel singers at the Assembly of God Church in South Memphis, hoping to join their group.

None of that was apparent, though, when Presley stopped in to record two ballads, “My Happiness,” a pop tune from the ‘40s, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” which had been recorded by the Ink Spots.

“He was very nervous,” Phillips said in 1981. “He would sing a couple of words and then look over at me. But we finally got it together.... They came off good. It wasn’t the type of song I was looking for, but his voice was sure interesting. I wrote his name down on a piece of paper -- the only time I can recall doing that with a singer -- and I mentioned the possibility of making a real record if we could find the right song. He lit up like a Christmas tree with 1,000 bulbs on it.”

Presley kept stopping by the studio, often just talking to Phillips’ receptionist, who sat at a desk in the front room. He even cut another vanity record, but he didn’t get the call about a real recording session until the following June, when a Nashville publisher sent Phillips a new ballad that Phillips thought might be perfect for Presley.

It wasn’t. Presley had trouble with the song, and Phillips thought the vocal was too plain.

Maybe he had been wrong about the kid.

Before taking Presley into the studio for possibly one last time, he asked Moore, a guitarist whom he admired, to size him up. It was Saturday, July 3, 1954.

Moore invited Presley to his house the next afternoon. Presley showed up dressed in the sporty duds he bought at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street: a white lacy shirt, pink pants with a black stripe down the legs and white buck shoes. He sang all or part of dozens of songs, mostly pop, country or R&B; ballads.

Nothing sounded all that special to Moore, but two things impressed him:

“Most singers have to sing to the music, but Elvis had such great timing that he could carry the tune by himself,” Moore says. “It was like he had a built-in metronome. Plus he knew every song in the world.”

Moore reported back to Phillips with mixed feelings.

Finally, Phillips cut to the chase. Should he give Presley another chance in the studio?

“Sure,” Moore replied.

Less than 30 hours later, Presley was recording the song that would launch his career.

A strange hybrid

Phillips was familiar with Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s original version of “That’s All Right,” but what Presley played with Moore and Black on July 5 was nothing like it. Crudup was in his early 40s when he recorded the song, but his vocal was so slow and sleepy that he could’ve been in his 70s. Presley’s version rocked.

The recording was so captivating that most Presley fans over the years wouldn’t even notice the words didn’t make much sense.

Either because he forgot some of the lyrics or simply changed them in the studio, Presley left out the lines in Crudup’s song that explained a woman has done her man wrong.

In Presley’s version, it sounds like he is standing by his girlfriend despite his parents’ objections, which was a common theme of early rock.

Well, mama she done told me, papa done

told me, too.

Son, that gal you’re fooling with,

She ain’t no good for you.

But that’s all right,

That’s all right,

That’s all right now mama.

Any way you do.

There’s a raw sex appeal and authority in Presley’s vocal. Moore’s memorable guitar break, influenced by the thumb and finger style of country guitarists Chet Atkins and Merle Travis, adds energy and color.

In “That’s All Right,” the guitar took its place as the essential rock ‘n’ roll instrument.

Where hundreds of rockers, from John Lennon to Bono, have talked about the magic of Presley’s voice on the cut, an equal number of guitarists -- from Keith Richards to Jimmy Page -- have marveled over how Moore’s solo made the guitar seem full of youthful promise and adventure.

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

Phillips took it all in that night. Long after the others had left, Phillips remained in the control booth, listening to the song. It wasn’t just that the music pleased him aesthetically. It also touched him on a deeper level.

He found dignity and liberation in the blues and country music of his youth. He had seen how country music raised the spirits of working-class whites in weekend square dances, and he saw how singing spiritual and blues numbers eased the burden of blacks who worked the fields.

Finally, he had brought these traditions together.

But would anyone share his excitement? This wasn’t blues. It wasn’t country. It was some strange hybrid, and what DJ would play it?

He turned to his friend Dewey Phillips, whose nightly “Red, Hot and Blue” radio show on WHBQ was immensely popular with Memphis teens, for an opinion.

Dewey, no relation, dropped by the recording studio one night that week after his 9 p.m.-to-midnight program and listened as Sam played “That’s All Right” over and over. He was intrigued, but he wasn’t sure it was right for his upbeat R&B; show. The next morning, though, he called Sam, saying he couldn’t get “That’s All Right” out of his head.

The DJ introduced “That’s All Right” to his rabid listeners around 9:30, and they flooded the phone lines with requests to hear it again. By the end of the show, Dewey Phillips had played it 14 times, maybe more.

Kids started asking for “That’s All Right” at local records stores the next day. Soon, Sam Phillips had orders for 5,000 copies. Within weeks it was a regional hit.

“I’ve heard people talk about that night just being luck,” Knox Phillips says. “But Sam absolutely knew what he had when he heard it that night. His whole mind-set was geared toward that moment.

“I remember him telling my mother, ‘We might have a little more money now.... You might even be able to get a fur coat.”

The flip side

WHEN everyone returned to the studio later in the week to record the flip side of the “That’s All Right” single, the musicians again struggled to come up with something that caught Phillips’ ear.

You’d think that Phillips would have simply encouraged Presley to record another song in the same spirit as “That’s All Right,” but that wasn’t his style.

“I could see people coming in thinking, ‘Man, this is our opportunity. Let’s not blow it. Let’s give him some fancy licks or some Nat Cole stuff,’ ” Phillips said in 1981. “I wasn’t interested in that. With Elvis, for instance, I wanted him tossing the music the way he felt it, not the way he thought he was supposed to sing to get it on the radio.”

So Phillips just kept listening as Presley went through another round of pop and country ballads. Even after the strong response to “That’s All Right,” Presley obviously didn’t realize what had made it work.

Moore remembers that Phillips was so disappointed that he didn’t even tape most of the night. Was “That’s All Right” a fluke?

The answer came, as it had the first time, during a break.

Black, who would later sell millions of records as the leader of the Bill Black Combo, was a jovial man who liked to clown around on the upright bass. During the break, he went into a zany version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” one of the signature tunes of bluegrass founder Bill Monroe.

Rather than play it as a slow waltz as Monroe did, Black sped it up.

Presley recognized the song and began to sing:

I say blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shinin’.

Shine on the one that’s gone and left me blue.

Phillips stuck his head out of the control booth, just as he had done the earlier night, and said, “That’s the one!”

On July 19, “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” were released as Sun record No. 209. Billboard, the music business weekly, gave it a glowing review.

Though the record didn’t get much attention outside the South, it sold about 20,000 copies, enough to encourage powerhouse Columbia Records to have one of its rising country singers, Marty Robbins, record his version of “That’s All Right.” Though far inferior to Presley’s version, it did well enough, thanks to Columbia’s hefty promotion budget and distribution system, to break into the country Top 10.

Phillips knew he’d always have trouble going up against the major labels, so in 1955 he sold Presley’s contract to RCA for $35,000, which was reported to be the largest amount ever paid for a recording contract at the time. Phillips used that money to launch the careers of some other seminal country and rock figures, including Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Charlie Rich -- who all came to 706 Union Ave., hoping to follow in Presley’s footsteps.

No lightning bolts

As the only member of that 1954 recording session who’s still alive, Scotty Moore, 72, is mobbed by fans whenever he makes public appearances, especially in Europe, where he recently played. They want to see him re-create those guitar licks or just talk about the magic of that night 50 years ago.

Moore lives just outside Nashville in a modest house whose walls are covered with photos and other reminders of the old days. He was in the studio with Presley when he went to RCA and recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” the first of 104 Top 40 singles -- more hit singles than the Beatles and Michael Jackson combined -- and he appeared in some of Presley’s movies.

Fourteen years after Presley and Phillips entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 as part of its first induction class, Moore too was voted in.A shy, soft-spoken man, he often feels he disappoints fans when they ask him to relive the details of that night in Memphis.

He just smiled last month when asked if it felt like a lightning bolt went off that night in the studio. Lightning bolt, he shrugged. There weren’t even lightning bugs.

Gail Pollock, a longtime friend, tried to help Moore when he struggled to describe how everything came together. “Maybe,” she said, “God just smiled on them that night.”

For his part, Phillips, who died in August at age 80, never claimed to be the father of rock ‘n’ roll, but he took pride in what he accomplished at 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,” Phillips said late in his life. “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?”

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