RIP
Rock Pioneer Sam Phillips Dead
By Joal Ryan
The man who cut Elvis Presley's first record, helped Johnny Cash walk the line and brushed up Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," has died.
Sam Phillips (news), the founder of Sun Records, the label recognized as the birthplace of rock 'n' roll, passed away Wednesday at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis. He was 80.
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Phillips had been ill for several months. On Wednesday, he was watching a Chicago Cubs baseball game on TV when he took a turn for the worse and was taken to the hospital, his son told the paper.
"I don't think any other Memphian had any more effect on the world than Sam," Knox Phillips, the son, said in the Commercial Appeal.
Certainly, no other Memphis notable, outside of Elvis Presley (news), left a greater music legacy.
"Sam gave Elvis that all-important first break and was there to take him seriously and give him an opportunity to be heard," Todd Morgan of Elvis Presley Enterprises said Thursday. "Who knows what might have become of Elvis' dreams if Sam had not been there where he was?"
Among the classics recorded by Phillips: Elvis' debut single, "That's All Right (Mama);" Jerry Lee Lewis (news)' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On;" Cash's "I Walk the Line;" Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes;" and Jackie Brenston's "Rocket 88."
The latter song, while not the oft-played oldies' radio staple like other hits in the Phillips catalog, is arguably the most important of them all, with some historians regarding "Rocket 88," recorded in 1951, as the first rock record. Ever.
Little wonder that Phillips was regarded as "the Thomas Edison of rock 'n' roll" by Elvis' so-called Memphis Mafia entourage, according to the Commercial Appeal.
"Sam was a nurturing figure in a lot of people's careers," Elvis Presley Enterprise (news - web sites)'s Morgan said.
Roy Orbison and country crooner Charlie Rich (news) were others who got their start with the onetime disc jockey.
Born January 5, 1923, in Florence, Alabama, Phillips moved to Memphis in 1945, opening the doors of the Memphis Recording Service in 1950.
While segregation was the rule of order in the 1950s South, the doors at Phillips' studio were "open unconditionally--period," ex-wife Becky Phillips told the Commercial Appeal.
"A person could be black, white, down on his luck, big or little," Becky Phillips said in the paper. "A person's color was determined by what was in his heart and soul."
The open-door policy helped break down doors between genres, with R&B and country blending into a hepped-up hybrid called rockabilly.
"I always hated [that term]," Phillips once told the Commercial Appeal. "[T]o me it was rock 'n' roll. Whether it was black rock 'n' roll or white rock 'n' roll, it was rock 'n' roll."
Phillips founded Sun Records in March 1952. Through the next 16 years, the label released 226 singles, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Perhaps no single was more significant than Sun 209, released in July 1954. The artist: Elvis Presley.
Phillips and Presley met in the summer of 1953 when rock's future King walked into Memphis Recording Service to cut, as legend has it, a couple of songs to present to his beloved mama on her birthday. (Morgan points out that Gladys Presley's birthday was in April, casting doubt on the veracity of that oft-told tale.)
Whatever Elvis' motives, Phillips heard potential in the Mississippi-born baritone. He invited him back to record for Sun, hooking him up with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black.
"And magic happened," Morgan said.
Presley's first five singles were issued on Sun. In 1955, Phillips signed over Elvis' contract to RCA Records for $35,000.
The sun set on Sun in 1969 when Phillips sold off the label's catalog. Its offices stand in Memphis still today, rock's mecca a tourist attraction like Presley's Graceland seven miles down the road.
In 1986, Presley, who died in 1977, and Phillips were reunited, both men among the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's original inductees. Fellow Sun alum Jerry Lee Lewis was another Class of 1986 honoree. Orbison and Perkins followed in 1987 and Cash joined them in 1992.
"I am a sound freak. I could play around with sound forever," Phillips told NPR in 2001, in trying to explain his success. "There's no amount of brains and dollars and sense...that can bring you around to getting the joy out of doing something in sound that I see and feel until this day and always will until I'm no longer around physically."
