Description
Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun Records in Memphis, is frequently remembered for a single sound bite: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars!” He seems cynical at best, racist at worst.
He found his white man, of course. One day a 19-year-old Elvis Presley wandered into his tiny studio. The music they recorded in 1954 and 1955 was a sensation, and it brought other poor, desperate, unknown and wild Southern boys into Phillips’s doorway: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison.
The sound these men made in the 1950s, in unfettered songs that Phillips (1923-2003) coaxed onto tape, changed the feel of American life. Phillips just might be, as one music writer has suggested, America’s real Uncle Sam.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.