Sam Phillips was the youngest of eight children, born on a 200-acre farm near Florence, Alabama. As a child, he picked cotton in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers. The experience of hearing black laborers singing in the fields left a big impression on the young Phillips. Traveling through Memphis with his family in 1939 on the way to see a preacher in Dallas, he slipped off to look at Beale Street, at the time the heart of the city’s music scene. “I just fell totally in love,” he later recalled.
Phillips played in his high school band and had ambitions to be a criminal defense attorney. However, his father’s farm went bankrupt during the Great Depression and he died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave high school early to look after his mother and aunt. To support the family he worked in a grocery store and then a funeral parlor.
At the age of 19, Sam met Rebecca “Becky” Burns. She was just 17 and would become his future wife. She got him a job working at WLAY radio station in Sheffield, Alabama. He was an announcer and she was still in high school and had a radio segment with her sister as ‘The Kitchen Sisters’ where they played music and sang. A January 18, 2013, article in the Alabama Chanin Journal honoring Becky quoted Sam as saying, “I fell in love with Becky’s voice even before I met her.” Becky described her first encounter with Sam to journalist Peter Guralnick: “He had just come in out of the rain. His hair was windblown and full of raindrops. He had a smile unlike any I had ever seen. He sat down on the piano bench and began to talk to me. I told my family that night that I had met the man I wanted to marry.” The couple wed in 1943 and the marriage lasted 60 years until Sam’s death in 2003.
What made Sam so famous? Beginning in 1945, he worked for four years as an announcer and sound engineer for radio station WREC, in Memphis. But in January 1950, Phillips decided to open his own business called the “Memphis Recording Service”. He let amateurs record which drew performers such as B.B. King, Junior Parker, and Howlin’ Wolf, who made their first recordings there. Phillips then sold the recordings to larger labels.
Soon thereafter, Phillips started his own record label called “Sun Record Company”. The rest is somewhat a Forest Gump type story as Phillips becomes a massively famous American record producer with Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, producing recordings by Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Howlin’ Wolf.
In fact, many historians credit Phillips with launching the career of Elvis. On 18 July 1953, the eighteen-year-old Presley dropped into the studio to record an acetate for his mother’s birthday. A friend thought she heard some talent in the young truck driver’s voice, and so she introduced Phillips to Elvis. It was in 1954 that they released Elvis’s first smash hit, “That’s Alright Mama”. While still not known outside the South, Presley’s singles and regional success became a big draw for Sun Records, as hopeful crooners soon arrived from all over the region. Singers such as Sonny Burgess, Charlie Rich, Junior Parker, Billy Lee Riley and others, like Jerry Lee Lewis, BB King, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins, all became stars for Sun Records.
Phillips also became known as a very shrewd investor. He owned several radio stations and various restaurants. It’s also rumored that he was one of the first large investors in a motel chain that was about to expand into a nationwide franchise, Holiday Inn. Who would have ever guessed a high school dropout from a small farm in Alabama would have such a strange and storied career. You just never know where the path may lead… enjoy the journey!
