sam phillips the man who invented rock n roll

It wasn't Elvis who handed Phillips his first real smash. He was, innately, Sam thought, one of the most introverted people who had ever come into the studio.' Guralnick quotes Phillips as saying that Presley's 'insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person.' In 1954, Phillips found his white Negro: a 19-year-old who had initially stopped by to cut a record for his mother. 'Rock and roll was no accident,' Phillips asserted. It was 'the vision,' Guralnick states, 'it was what would come afterward.' That would turn out to be a revolutionary musical category, propelled by a few independent record manufacturers and maverick disc jockeys, that ultimately demolished the barrier between America's black and white audiences.

Phillips often said, 'If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars,' but the laugh that followed implied that money wasn't his real goal.

King, Wolf, and others, for labels that included Modern and Chess. ' He proceeded to record such black artists as Ike Turner and his band (performing 'Rocket 88'), B.B. And especially at that time the black man's spirit and his. Phillips had a musical mission: 'I was looking for a higher ground, for what I knew existed in the soul of mankind. He heard their music in the fields and pouring from a local church, and he admired their creativity, their 'invincible determination.' In 1950, while working at announcing and engineering for radio, he opened a small studio called Memphis Recording Service. There's plenty to savor in the main dishes Guralnick serves up.īorn poor on an Alabama farm, Phillips (1923≢003), as a boy, picked cotton alongside black laborers. Well, if you have a limited literary appetite, skip the side orders. Many rock'n'roll fans will relish every ingredient of this banquet of a book others won't care that Jack Clement got his job at Sun after bringing in a tape he'd made of Billy Riley, whom Clement had met while hitchhiking home with Slim Wallace after a night in jail with a girlfriend of Wallace's wife who'd drunk too much, and. This long, densely detailed biography is its affectionate culmination.

He dedicated Lost Highway to Phillips and the blues singer Howlin' Wolf, calling them 'the real heroes' of the musical genre, and a quarter-century relationship between Guralnick and Phillips followed. In Lost Highway, published soon after he was introduced to Sam Phillips, in 1979, Peter Guralnick said he had long dreamed of meeting the Sun Records founder, who produced the hits that introduced Elvis Presley and other pioneering rock'n'roll performers. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock'n'Rollīy Peter Guralnick.

Sam phillips the man who invented rock n roll