Sam Phillips says he never spoke the words long attributed to him, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” However, he did believe that a white man who rocked could change the world. He was right, and no individual proved more crucial to that revolution than Phillips.
Money was never Phillips’ only motivation. He loved music with a driving rhythm, and the more he recorded it, the more he realized that this music—the sound of poor Southern blacks and whites—deserved a wider hearing.
“From the Depression to World War II, there was so much in common between the black man’s music and the Southern white poor man’s music, between Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson, and between Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe,” Phillips told me in an interview at his home in Memphis in 1999. “I recognized that, not because I was so smart, but because I enjoyed these kinds of music. Instead of the differences between them, I could see the likeness.”
Phillips, who died on July 29 at the age of 80, knew the power of rockin’ blues. The records he cut on Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Bobby Bland, Rufus Thomas and Junior Parker from 1950 to 1954 at his Memphis Recording Service jumped with a power that ignited nearly everyone who heard them. Cut off from mainstream broadcasters, however, the music had no way to reach a larger audience.
“Black music just could not get the play it needed,” said Phillips, who started Sun Records in 1952 with the hope that he could do a better job than the Chicago and New York record labels that had been issuing his blues recordings. “They couldn’t get recognized even close to the level of a country musician—and back then, country singers were looked down on by most everyone except working people.”
Phillips became increasingly determined to popularize the music he loved. It wasn’t an easy job. Whites spit racist barbs at him, and he had to work to win the trust of the black artists, who at first figured he was just another record man ready to rip them off. Still, he came upon an idea: He began hunting for a young white man who could sing with the authority and energy of his favorite black artists. It wasn’t long before Elvis Presley showed up at Sun, asking for an audition.
“It took Elvis to give the music wings,” Phillips said. “Elvis’ talents sanctioned the music of blacks and poor whites, who had a lot more in common than most people imagine today.”
In the next couple of years, he saw the uniqueness in other dirt-poor, young white men from the South who brought their dreams to Sun. Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins all grew up in dire poverty. Roy Orbison and Charlie Rich, middle-class by comparison, were sensitive, introspective young men with a feel for blues, country and pop music when Phillips made their first recordings.
“You have to remember that the poor Southern farmer was treated disrespectfully by the comfortable white classes too,” Phillips said. “These men all understood the loneliness and hunger that poor whites and poor blacks had in common. Right up to the day they showed up on my doorstep, they were outcasts. They felt inferior, like poor people always have, but they were proud men too. They came to Memphis because, after Elvis, they thought they might have a chance to sing their music and tell their stories.”
Despite all the resistance it met, Presley’s success opened the gates. Young rockers filled studios across America, and blues singers, though still beat down by the appalling limits of racism, began to get heard on a larger scale too.
“All of a sudden, people from the poorest places in America were on the radio and eventually on television,” Phillips said. “It was the first time poor people had a real voice, the first time they were making the most popular music of America. You can’t comprehend now how important this was. I’ll tell you, it unequivocally changed our culture. It caused social revolution, started moving us towards civil rights and all that. By God, it changed the world! That’s the truth, and can’t nobody change it.”
