Sam Phillips was often greeted crudely by the citizens of Memphis who couldn’t understand the traffic of black musicians in and out of his recording studio. Back in the early days of his Memphis Recording Service Blues legends-in-the-making such as Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Little Milton, Rufus Thomas and dozens more were making regular trips to 706 Union Ave.
Today, Sam Phillips is in the history books as the man who first recorded Elvis, the man who midwifed the rock ‘n’ roll revolution and the man who helped set in motion the biggest cultural upheaval of this century. But before Elvis Presley ever walked through the door of the Memphis Recording Service, Sam Phillips’ place in history was already assured, thanks to the hundreds of powerful Blues recordings he produced in the early ’50s. It is for that body of work, some of the best, most classic Blues recordings of all time, that he is now being inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
When Sam was making Blues history, integration was still light years away from Memphis. ‘Colored’ water fountains and restrooms, the back of the bus and other separate-but- equal-in-name-only facilities were a daily fact of life in the Home of the Blues and throughout the South. In that social setting, many people in Memphis thought Sam Phillips was completely out of his mind.
Born 75 years ago in Florence, Alabama, the hometown of W.C. Handy, Sam first visited Memphis in 1939, on a family auto trip to Dallas to hear a particularly charismatic preacher. Within a decade he had moved to Memphis and, barely out of his teens, was supporting a growing family as an engineer at WREC. His duties included running the radio station’s remote broadcasts of the big bands playing at the Peabody Skyway, the most deluxe supper club in the Mid-South.
‘Here I am in the Peabody Hotel and the finest studios in Memphis, which WREC had in the basement of the Peabody,” Sam recalls. ‘And I was taking care of the all the PA systems in the Continental Ballroom and the Skyway. Hell, what more could a 22-year- old kid want?’
But he did want more. And in January, 1950, he spent $1,000 converting a small auto repair shop into a studio. Long before camcorders, he helped pay the $75-a- month rent by recording weddings, funerals and other social events. To Sam Phillips, capturing an event, a unique moment in time, was what recording was all about. That same recognition of charisma and personal magnetism that had first brought him through Memphis remained a constant throughout his career and helped make him the Father of Modern Record Production.
‘He looked into my eyes in the same way he must have looked at Elvis and Howlin’ Wolf and I reached a whole new level of music,’ says producer/musician and Phillips disciple Jim Dickinson, recalling his early ’60s sessions with the Jesters at Sam Phillips Studio (the one Sam opened a few blocks away after he closed Sun). ‘I never had an experience like staring into Sam’s eyes. This is what he does, going into the artist’s head and getting more than what they’re capable of.’
The Delta Blues scene was ripe for recording. There had been no regular sessions in Memphis since the big labels like Victor and Vocalion stopped field recording trips during the depression years of the ’30s. But the music never stopped; by the end of World War II, a new generation of Blues men had come of age, performers who came out of the deep Delta tradition, but added the raw, distorted power of electric guitars and amplified harmonicas.
Back then, those sounds never made it on record or the radio, both of which emphasized music based on smoothness, polish and professionalism. ‘I knew that there had to be something far beyond just the things that we were hearing, ‘Sam recalls. ‘I wasn’t trying to make any great statement other than the fact that you don’t just hear this and not give it some kind of an exposure. We had very limited facilities to do the things we wanted to do but we had the courage to try. And that is what I am proudest of, far and away. I’m prouder of beginning this project, of giving these people the emotional opportunity with their music, than I am of any hit record I ever had or of any single artist, be it black or white.’
That was how Sam Phillips first earned a national reputation in the record business, giving that ’emotional opportunity’ of recording to B.B. King, Chester ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett, Junior Parker, Joe Hill Louis, James Cotton, Doctor Ross and many more, leasing the sides to labels such as Modern, Chess and R.P.M.
Competition for those artists heated up to the point that record labels began setting up their own operations in Memphis to record R&B, while some of Sam’s favorite artists headed north, to St. Louis or Chicago. That might have been the end of Memphis Recording Service, except for the Blues-inspired young white musicians who began making their way to the storefront studio.
But even after recording that pantheon of first-generation rockers — Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Billy Lee Riley and the rest — and setting the rock revolution in motion, Sam Phillips’ first love remained the Blues.
‘Wolf was, and still is, probably the most exciting person to record in the studio of any person I ever recorded, black or white,’ he still asserts. ‘It was just his soul coming out his mouth.’
And that, more than any other reason, is why we honor him today. At a time of strict social segregation, facing ostracism and public ridicule, Sam Phillips crossed that line to Beale Street and the juke joints of West Memphis to recruit and record several generations of black Blues men, from veterans like Sleepy John Estes to such young guns as Junior Parker and James Cotton. Long before the music became accepted in ‘mainstream’ (i.e. white) culture, Sam Phillips recognized the deep, authentic power of the Blues.
‘I just did not feel that the gutbucket Southern Blues that was here was being displayed as something that we should not only not be ashamed of, but (that) was the real-life essence,’ he states. ‘I wasn’t out to change the world or anything like that; I was out for these people to be heard.’
He accomplished both, succeeding far beyond his wildest dreams, as the music he recorded half a century ago continues to move and inspire Blues lovers and musicians of all sorts the world over.
— (Blues Foundation press release, 1998.)