Sam Phillips, Rest in Peace

Sad day. That guy was something else.

Sam and Tom Dowd, behind the glass and mixing that badass band in the sky.

 

Sam Philips

Born on January 5th, 1923 in Florence, Alabama.

Producer and record company owner Sam Phillips will always be best known for the discovery of Elvis Presley. Yet prior to Presley and the birth of rock & roll, Phillips played an important role in Memphis blues. In his Sun Studios, he recorded future blues greats B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Roscoe Gordon and others.

As a talent scout, record producer, and record company owner, Phillips was to Memphis blues what Leonard and Phil Chess were to Chicago blues. Phillips hoped to study law but instead settled for a career in radio broadcasting and engineering. His first disc jockey job was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

By 1945 he was in Memphis on WREC. Five years later Phillips opened up the Memphis Recording Service, a small recording studio on Union Avenue, and the short-lived Phillips Records with disc jockey friend Dewey Phillips (no relation).

After one release, bluesman Joe Hill Louis's "Gotta Let You Go" backed with "Boogie in the Park," the label folded. Phillips then cultivated a relationship with the Bihari Brothers, who were about to launch RPM, a subsidiary of Modern, their Los Angeles-based label. The Bihari's hoped to build the new la bel' s roster with down-home blues talent and forged an agreement with Phillips to record Memphis artists for RPM. One of the first bluesmen Phillips sent to RPM was B.B. King. Phillips also set up an agreement with Chess Records similar to the one he had with RPM.

In 1951, Phillips recorded "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and leased it to Chess. Often called the first rock & roll record, "Rocket 88" went to the top of the R&B charts and forced Chess, RPM, and other labels take a serious interest in Memphis music.

Squabbles over talent acquisition with Chess and RPM led Phillips to rethink the idea of starting his own record company. In late 1951 he quit his disc jockey job at WREC. In 1952 he began Sun Records. Until the arrival of Elvis Presley and rock & roll two years later, Sun Records was largely a blues label. Although Phillips continued to make some blues records after Elvis had changed the course of popular music in 1954 and 1955, he mostly recorded country and rockabilly artists. Sun scored with records by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison in the mid- and late 1950s.

Phillips sold Sun Records in 1969. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.