Sam Phillips
| Sam Phillips | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Samuel Cornelius Phillips |
| Born |
January 5, 1923 Florence, Alabama, United States |
| Died | July 30, 2003 (aged 80) Memphis, Tennessee, United States |
| Genres | Rockabilly, country, rock and roll, R&B, blues |
| Occupation(s) | Record producer |
Samuel Cornelius "Sam" Phillips (January 5, 1923 – July 30, 2003) was an American musician, businessman, record executive, music producer, and disc jockey who played an important role in the emergence and development of rock and roll and rockabilly as the major form of popular music in the 1950s. He was a producer, label owner, and talent scout throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
He was the founder of both Sun Studio and Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. Through Sun, Phillips discovered such recording talent as Howlin' Wolf, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. The height of his success culminated in his launching of Elvis Presley's career in 1954. He is also associated with several other noteworthy rhythm and blues, country, and rock and roll musicians of the period. Phillips sold Sun in 1969 to Shelby Singleton. He was an early investor in the Holiday Inn chain of hotels. He also advocated racial equality and helped break down racial barriers in the music industry.
Phillips was the youngest of eight children, born on a farm near Florence, Alabama, to poor tenant farmers, Madge Ella (Lovelace) and Charles Tucker Phillips. As a child, he picked cotton in the fields with his parents alongside black laborers. The experience of hearing workers 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 attended the former Coffee High School in Florence. He conducted the school band and had ambitions to be a criminal defense attorney. However, his father was bankrupted by the Great Depression and died in 1941, forcing Phillips to leave high school to look after his mother and aunt. To support the family Phillips worked in a grocery store and then a funeral parlor.
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