Sam Phillips
Sam Phillips created Sun Records, the label that brought out a new rock-a-billy sound by fusing rhythm and blues, country and western, and rock and roll. If you know the sound of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King, and Roy Orbison, then you know the sound of Sun Records. Born in 1923 in Florence, Alabama, Phillips started as a radio announcer and station engineer. In 1950, he created the Memphis Recording Service for private functions including weddings and funerals, as well as recording blues artists to lease to independent labels. The same year he also started his own label, Phillips, but it folded after one release, that of Joe Hill Louis. Two years later, after growing tensions with the independent labels over fees, Phillips started another label, Sun Records. This time, it worked - did it ever work. Phillips, not only as the owner, but also as the producer of Sun Records emphasized the new blues sound of electric guitars, giving them prominence in the sound levels of the recordings. In 1954, Phillips brought Scotty Moore and Bill Black, who had both previously recorded with another Sun artist, together with a young man named Elvis Presley to record a few ballads. The session wasn’t going well, until they started working through a song during a break. That song, "That’s All Right Mama", launched Presley’s career and Sun Records’ position as the go-to studio for a new sound. Elvis made five more singles for Sun before Phillips sold his contract to RCA for $35,000 in 1955 - Phillips needed the money to keep the studio going. Soon after the Presley sale, Sun had a national hit with Carl Perkins’ "Blue Suede Shoes". By the mid-sixties, Sun Records was no longer at the top, and Phillips began to focus on his other investments, including one with Holiday Inn. He sold the the Sun catalog in 1969. Although Sam Phillips died in 2003, the original Sun studios is open now for tourists to see and hear a bit of American music history.
