Sam Phillips

The son of poor tenant farmers, Samuel Cornelius Phillips was born in 1923 at Florence, Alabama, birthplace of W. C. Handy, the father of the blues. As a child, he picked cotton alongside black labourers, later recalling: “A day didn’t go by when I didn’t hear black folks singing in the cotton fields. Did I feel sorry for them? In a way, I did. But they could do things I couldn’t do. They could outpick me. They could sing on pitch. That made a big impression on me.”

Drawn to the emerging medium of radio, he worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals and Decatur, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, before settling in Memphis in 1945. There, he got a job as a disc jockey with WREC and operated as a talent scout, recommending artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. In 1950 he opened his Memphis Recording Service studio at 706 Union Avenue.

To pay the bills, Phillips recorded weddings, bar mitzvahs and political speeches, and on one occasion he taped a car muffler and testified in court about its decibel range. Later renamed Sun Studio, the business’s motto was “We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”.

Phillips soon began to audition some of the many local blues artists, including such future legends as Howlin’ Wolf and Bobby “Blue” Bland. In 1951, he recorded the local disc jockey and aspiring blues man B. B. King. Soon afterwards, he recorded Rocket 88, by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner, now regarded by many as the first rock’n’roll record.

At a time when smooth crooners such as Perry Como dominated the charts, Phillips discouraged musicians from polishing their sounds, and encouraged them to reproduce the raw passion of their live performances.

Although his Phillips label, begun in 1950, proved shortlived, he enjoyed some success in selling masters to leading independent labels such as Chess, Duke and RPM. After setting up Sun Records in 1952, he racked up a series of rhythm and blues hits with stars such as Rufus Thomas and Little Junior Parker’s Blue Flames.

Phillips, however, harboured much grander ambitions. According to a Sun receptionist Marion Keisker, he would often complain: “If I could find a white man who could sing with the natural feel and sound of a black man, I could make a million dollars.”

When he heard Elvis Presley sing, Phillips knew he had his man.

An 18-year-old truck driver, Presley had walked into Sun in the summer of 1953 to record a couple of sentimental songs which he said were for his mother’s birthday. At the end of the session, he paid his four dollars and left. Several months passed before Phillips listened to the tape. Always on the search for new talent, he was struck by something in the singer’s voice.

However, when Phillips eventually invited Presley back to Sun, the session started badly, a session of pop songs and ballads producing nothing of merit. Then Presley picked up a guitar and began to fool around with a blues song, That’s Alright, Mama. At that moment, the course of American popular music changed for ever.

However, when Phillips took the recording to a local radio station, the disc jockey proved reluctant to play it. “He was reticent, and I was glad that he was,” Phillips later remembered. “If he hadn’t been reticent, it would have scared me to death . . . What I was thinking was: ‘Where are you going to go with this? It’s not black, it’s not white, it’s not pop, it’s not country.’ ”

Having slept on it, the disc jockey changed his mind and played the song on his show that night. As he played it again and again, phone calls began to jam the station’s lines. Elvis mania had begun.

Days later, Presley returned to Sun to record the flip side, a joyous, uptempo version of Blue Moon of Kentucky by Bill Monroe, one of Presley’s country heroes. The two sides of the record thus encapsulated everything that made Presley special: a raw, sexually-charged fusion of styles that defied classification beyond the catch-all label “rock’n’roll”.

Phillips and Presley recorded a further four singles. But at the end of 1955 mounting debts forced Phillips to sell his contract as Presley’s manager to a major label, RCA Records, for $35,000.

Albeit indirectly, Presley would nevertheless fulfil Phillips’s prediction and make the producer a rich man. Rather than spend the RCA money on Sun, Phillips chose to invest it in the then fledgeling Holiday Inn chain. As a result, he was to make much more money from the hotel business than from records.

Having lost Presley, Phillips discovered a string of other stars — though none would ever come close to matching Presley’s incredible earning power. Phillips also scored his first national pop hit, and million-selling single, with Carl Perkins’s Blue Suede Shoes. For the rest of the decade, he focused on developing his roster of rockabilly talent.

However, Sun Records gradually began to lose its lustre. Cash and Perkins moved to Columbia Records in 1958 and Jerry Lee Lewis’s career was blighted by scandal when he married his teenage cousin. Roy Orbison achieved star status only in the early 1960s, after jumping to Monument Records.

Phillips set up an affiliated label, Phillips International, and opened a second studio in Memphis in 1960. He then bought a studio in Nashville and hired the budding engineer-producer Billy Sherrill to run it, but he eventually sold the studio to Monument Records.

After 1965 new releases on the Sun Label became infrequent. Phillips effectively retired in 1969, when he sold Sun and its catalogue to the Nashville-based entrepreneur Shelby Singleton.

He later oversaw operations at the WLVS radio station in Memphis. His public appearances became increasingly rare and he accepted few production assignments.

In 1986 Phillips became the first non-performer to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.

He is survived by his sons, Knox and Jerry, who are both record producers.

Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Studio and Sun Records, was born on January 5, 1923. He died on July 30, 2003, aged 80.