Rockabilly's Sam Phllips Had A Passion For Music That Changed The World

Throughout history there have been examples of people with a particular passion for music. Most often we think of performers who succeeded against the nearly impossible odds of "making it big" as a musician. But there have been just as many passionate people behind the scenes and it's often been people like these who've made the biggest contributions to music. Sam Phillips is one of these people.

Samuel Cornelius Phillips was born in Alabama in 1923. Like so many rockabilly musicians of the 1950s, he grew up steeped in the blues and country music that he heard constantly growing up on his father's cotton farm. Phillips wanted to go to law school, but also like so many rockabilly musicians, his family didn't have much money and he couldn't afford that education. The law's loss was definitely rock and roll's gain.

Instead of attending law school, Phillips started working in the radio industry. Throughout the 1940s Phillips worked as a disc jockey, announcer, and sound engineer. It was this work as an engineer that would inspire him to rent a small building on Union Avenue in Memphis starting in 1950 and open his own recording studio which he called the Memphis Recording Service.

Phillips had worked for radio stations that were open to playing music by black musicians--the very blues and R&B music that he'd loved so much growing up. He carried this tolerance and respect for these musicians (which was rare in the racially segregated American South in those days) into his studio business and he began recording many blues artists.

Although he'd had plenty of experience as an engineer in the radio business, engineering a recording session is a different thing altogether. Learning as he went along, Phillips made mistakes that more experienced sound engineers wouldn't have made. For example, he overused echo effects compared to what others were doing. His microphone placement techniques may not have been standard, which was critical, especially at a time when the entire band was recorded with one microphone. All of these "mistakes" combined to start giving his recordings a distinct style and sound.

In 1952 Phillips decided to start his own independent record label to release the great music he was recording. He called the label Sun Records. Phillips and Sun Records made a real impact on the blues music scene. B. B. King, Howlin' Wolf, and Junior Parker all recorded at the Memphis Recording Service studios along with many others.

But it was Phillips' work with a young man named Elvis Presley who recorded some wonderful new and different material in 1954 that was released on Sun Records and changed everything. Elvis mixed the same blues and country styles that Phillips had loved into his music along with R&B and gospel to create a form of music no one had heard before. The music came to be called rockabilly. With Elvis' success, many other artists came to record for Sun Records and several of the biggest names in rock and roll and country made some of their first recordings in Phillips' studio. Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich...Phillips recorded them all.