Sam Phillips tot

Mod-Qualitäten, oder

Das ist sehr traurig. Jetzt sind er und Elvis im Himmel vereint.
Trotz seines Alters fand ich ihn sehr jung geblieben, das konnte man an den Augen sehen, ganz hellwache, junge Augen.
Ruhe in Frieden, Sam Phillips.
Carola

Find ich auch.Er sah gar nicht so krank aus.Geht schneller als man denkt.
Tut mir leid....ohne ihn gäbe es vielleicht nicht den Elvis.

Schade!


.....

Wirklich schade, dass der Mann, der soviel zur Weiterentwicklung des Rock'n'Roll und zur Karriere bedeutender Musiker beigetragen hat, nun auch tot ist.

Ein paar "Oldies" in Sachen Sam Phillips.


SAM PHILLIPS INTERVIEW
by Eric P. Olsen

<span style='color:blue'>The founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips was the first to record Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and more</span>



The founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips was the first to record Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, and many others, igniting a revolution that has shaped American popular music ever since.



Here, he gives a rare interview... The founder and sound engineer, Sam Phillips had entertained a steady stream of local black talent, most of whom had never seen the inside of a recording studio, and was leasing some sides to R&B labels with notable success. In 1951 Phillips recorded local disk jockey and aspiring blues artist B.B. King and shortly thereafter recorded "Rocket 88" by Jackie Benston and Ike Turner often cited by music historians as the first rock and roll record... Then in the summer of 1953 a painfully shy young truck driver wandered in to record a couple of sentimental songs for his mother. He hung around over the next few months, and Phillips made a mental note of the young man with the strange name and even stranger appearance, Elvis Presley.

There was something in that voice, he thought. Phillips was solicitous of just such unpolished talent. Indeed, he had staked his tenuous fortune on the artistic enfranchisement of the poor and the racially marginalized--those who had never had the opportunity to record. Phillips mentioned Presley to a couple of session men and finally decided to call the kid in.



After a lack-luster afternoon performing a repertoire of pop songs and ballads, Presley idly picked up his guitar and began to play around with a blues song, "That's Alright Mama." This anonymous moment with the microphone turned off could so easily have signified nothing.



"I was surprised Elvis even knew the song," Phillips later said.
No matter. What he heard, and what he understood about what he heard, changed American musical history. For he saw that Presley infused the simple country blues with an emotion and legitimacy that defied classification...



<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'><span style='color:red'>Foundry Father</span></span>

Sam Phillips and the Birth of Rock'n'Roll



by Eric P. Olsen

The founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips was the first to record
Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Howlin'
Wolf, Ike Turner, and many others, igniting a revolution that has
shaped American popular music ever since. Here, he gives a rare
interview.

t was a seat-of-your-pants operation. For four dollars you
could walk off the street and cut a record. The business cards
for the Memphis Recording Service promised to "record
anything--anywhere--any time." Not exactly a bid for artistic
exclusivity.
The founder and sound engineer, Sam Phillips, had entertained a
steady stream of local black talent, most of whom had never seen the
inside of a recording studio, and was leasing some sides to R&B
labels with notable success. In 1951 Phillips recorded local disk
jockey and aspiring blues artist B.B. King and shortly thereafter
recorded "Rocket 88" by Jackie Benston and Ike Turner, often cited
by music historians as the first rock and roll record.
Phillips also recorded bar mitzvahs and political speeches, and
on one occasion he recorded a car muffler and testified in court about
its decibel range. This was business, although the recording service
and the independent label that Phillips spun off of it, Sun Records,
barely paid the rent.
Then in the summer of 1953 a painfully shy young truck driver
wandered in to record a couple of sentimental songs for his mother.
He hung around over the next few months, and Phillips made a
mental note of the young man with the strange name and even
stranger appearance, Elvis Presley. There was something in that
voice, he thought.
Phillips was solicitous of just such unpolished talent. Indeed, he
had staked his tenuous fortune on the artistic enfranchisement of the
poor and the racially marginalized--those who had never had the
opportunity to record. Phillips mentioned Presley to a couple of
session men and finally decided to call the kid in. After a lackluster
afternoon performing a repertoire of pop songs and ballads, Presley
idly picked up his guitar and began to play around with a blues song,
"That's Alright Mama."
This anonymous moment with the microphone turned off could
so easily have signified nothing. "I was surprised Elvis even knew the
song," Phillips later said. No matter. What he heard, and what he
understood about what he heard, changed American musical history.
For he saw that Presley infused the simple country blues with an
emotion and legitimacy that defied classification.
Phillips quickly
recorded the song and took
it to local disc jockey
Dewey Phillips (no relation
to Sam). Dewey shared with
Sam Phillips an ardent
admiration for the blues and
black music, and the
listening audience of his
broadcast Red Hot and Blue
was arguably the most
integrated in the South.
"There are two kinds of
people in Memphis," wrote the Press-Scimitar: "those who are
amused and fascinated by Dewey, and those who, when they
accidentally tune in, jump as though stung by a wasp."
When Phillips played the recording, Dewey "was reticent, and I
was glad that he was," Phillips said in a later interview. "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, and I think Dewey was the
same way."
Dewey called Phillips the next morning. He couldn't sleep for
thinking about that record, he said, and he wanted it to play on his
show that night.
And so he did, and he played it again and again as phone calls
jammed the station lines, and American popular music began a slow
rotation around an axis suddenly fixed at 706 Union Avenue in
Memphis--the home of Sun Records and the most exclusive address
in the history of rock and roll.

Rising Sun

hillips and Presley returned to the studio to record the flip side
a couple days later. This remake of the Bill Monroe bluegrass
classic "Blue Moon of Kentucky" takes another entire genre of
vernacular music and charges it as with a bolt of lightning. On
an early take, you can even hear Phillips exclaim, "Hell, that's
different! That's a pop song now!" (a sentiment not lost on Monroe,
who rerecorded the song up tempo after hearing Presley's version).
Thus on a single 45, the full outline of a coming musical
tsunami had taken form: An obscure blues tune was transformed into
an almost celebratory anthem, and a lilting bluegrass standard was
unmoored from any recognizable country roots and transformed into
a raucous, blues-tinged pop song.
But the Presley-Phillips collaboration did more. By
spontaneously fusing disparate pop and folk influences, their
recordings opened a new emotional range that popular music had
hitherto not explored. One has only to listen to the leading pop
singers of the day--say, Perry Como or Doris Day--to appreciate
the emotional insurgency that Presley's uninhibited style represented.
The music "expressed a kind of pure joyousness," wrote Presley
biographer Peter Guralnick, "a sense of soaring release that in such
self-conscious times as ours seems unlikely ever to be recaptured."
This was certainly confirmed by Presley's stage performances,
which, like his singing, began as an altogether spontaneous and
unrehearsed extension of his highly charged musical inspiration.
Performers who had the misfortune of following Presley could only
shake their heads in disbelief. For nothing like Presley had ever been
seen, and the emotion wrung from the listening audience left the
hapless follow-up performer with the cold comfort of a
time-honored stage cliché: "that's a hard act to follow."
The fortuitous meeting of Presley and Phillips held
the drama and poignancy of the coming together of
separated lovers, the former embodying an inchoate
yearning and promise, the latter a purposeful and willful
quest. And there was effectively no venue where such a
convergence of talent and sense of mission could have
taken place other than the musical melting pot of
Memphis. "I know that Elvis couldn't have walked into
any other recording studio in the United States," claimed Marion
Keisker, a receptionist and close associate of Phillips at the time, in
an A&E biography of the Sun Records founder. The reaction that
poured forth from Memphis over Elvis' recording, she said, "stands
as the point where I realized that society was ready to change."
Sun Studio, indeed, was nothing less than a laboratory for a new,
youth-oriented sound that became the common ancestor of nearly all
American popular music ever since. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry
Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison--all products of a poor southern
background and first recorded by Phillips--unapologetically
borrowed from the blues, country, and gospel. Rock and roll
standards like Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," Cash's "I Walk the
Line," and Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On" were
electrifying examples of the fusion of folk and southern gospel
traditions. These artists, with the preeminent addition of Presley, laid
the groundwork for the wide integration of black music and black
performers into the mostly white commercial marketplace.
Yet Phillips' own estimation of his legacy depends perhaps less
on the success he found at Sun Studio than on his earlier pioneering
work with black performers. In 1949 Phillips had established the
Memphis Recording Service,
which recorded for Chess and
other rhythm and blues labels
before being reconstituted as
Sun Records. Seeking "to
record those people who didn't
have an opportunity to
record," Phillips coaxed some
heretofore unknown blues
artists into the studio for the
first time, including Howlin'
Wolf, Little Walter Horton,
and Bobby "Blue" Bland. B.B.
King, recorded by Phillips at
the beginning of his career,
went to become arguably the
most acclaimed and influential
artist of the genre.
Another typical product
of Phillips' iconoclastic vision
was his decision to launch the
nation's first all-girls radio station in October 1955, WHER.
"You're looking at a crazy man," was Phillips' explanation to this
writer. "I wasn't trying to revolutionize the world," he also allowed
at an October 1999 ceremony recognizing him at the Museum of
Television and Radio in New York City. "The girls' voices were
warm without being oozy. They didn't try to be sexy or too sweet. It
was just making contact with people--male, female, hermaphrodite."


A Life in Music

t seventy-eight, Phillips is by any standard a remarkable
specimen. With a piercing gaze, a head of brown hair, and full
beard without a trace of gray, Phillips looks every bit the
patriarch of postwar American music. The first nonperformer to be
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Phillips combines the
magnetism of a rock star with the courtliness of a patrician southern
planter. (Once asked how it is he looks so young, Phillips
characteristically explained, "I chase women every day, but I don't
know what the hell to do with them when I catch them.")
Phillips speaks in a gloriously unreconstructed southern drawl,
and with a conviction about his lifework that has not diminished over
the decades. Listening to him reflect on his motivations and early
experiences became almost a guilty pleasure. For he does not give
many interviews, and the warmth of his responses was a testimony to
the passion he still feels not just toward music but toward the
recognition due the artistically disenfranchised.
The son of poor tenant farmers, Phillips worked in the cotton
fields of Alabama with black field laborers in childhood. I ask him
about those early years and the attraction he felt toward southern
black folk music when it was accorded neither artistic respect nor
commercial acceptance.
"I worked in the fields when I was this high," Phillips answers,
measuring his height as a toddler. "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.
"You see, we've forgotten how much they have sacrificed to
please the white man," Phillips says. "For years white people have
denied what this old black man with four strings on his guitar could
do, just saying, 'OK, let's hear this nigger play.' A black man playing
for white folks was 'fun,' but that was all.
"The black man gave up so many things that were important to
him just to survive and to please. But think about the complexity, yet
simplicity of music we have gained from hard times--from the sky,
the wind, and the earth. If you don't have a foundation, you don't
know what the hell I'm talking about."
The Clarksdale, Mississippi, cotton field that gave the world the
bluesman Muddy Waters. Phillips knew the hardships of working the cotton
fields, as did many of the artists he would come to record.


"We were very poor," Phillips continues. "We had eight
children and lost everything in the Depression. But I will say this:
there was an indigenous part of me that looked for something
different in life. I had a certain temperament. I didn't care what
people thought of me. In this way I was like Elvis. We both had
walked in their shoes. And there wasn't anybody poorer than Elvis or
Carl Perkins.
"You may ask whether or not that was fortunate," Phillips says
of those hardships. "Hell, that was fortunate. For look what has come
from adversity. The blues, it got people--black and white--to think
about life, how difficult, yet also how good it can be. They would
sing about it; they would pray about it; they would preach about it.
This is how they relieved the burden of what existed day in and day
out. It is hard that it had to happen, but it did happen."
Keisker recalled that in the early
days of Sun Records, Phillips frequently
remarked, "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." What he found in
Presley, and what became the signature
sound of Sun Studio, was not only the
natural sound of the southern black but
the integration of this sound with
traditional country--so-called
rockabilly. Like "race" music, country ("hillbilly") music had a
slightly d&eacuteclassé air. Country purists, moreover, were aghast
at the uses traditional country was put to by the likes of Presley--at
least until record sales on country charts began to experience the
Presley effect.
Like the blues, country music drew inspiration from hard times,
and Phillips says this accounts for the essential continuity between
country and the blues, and the timelessness of the greatest country
and blues artists.
"If you lived through the Depression," Phillips says, "you knew
hard times, wondering if the next town, or the one after that, might
have a little work. You'd see people all around the water tower
waiting for a train. There weren't many choices. If you wanted to go
somewhere you had to hobo, you had to get on a damn freight train. I
remember the first record I ever heard:

All around the water tank, just waiting for a train
A thousand miles away from home, just sleeping in the
rain.
And I walked up to a brakeman just to give him a line of
talk
He said if you've got money I'll see that you don't walk.
I haven't got a nickel not a penny can I show.
Git off, git off you railroad bum, and he slammed the
boxcar door.

"Can a poet write that? That was Jimmy Rogers, the Singing
Brakeman. And that's how life treated so many people who couldn't
help themselves. How can a young person today relate to someone
waiting for a train? It's because they've been treated like that, just not
on a railroad track.
"Now we've learned so much from some of these people we
thought were ignorant, who never had any responsibility other than
chopping cotton, feeding the mules, or making sorghum molasses.
When people come back to this music in a hundred years, they'll see
these were master painters. They may be illiterate. They can't write a
book about it. But they can make a song, and in three verses you'll
hear the greatest damn story you'll ever hear in your life."

Memphis and Beale Street

lorence, Alabama, has the distinction of having given birth to
two forebears of American music: W.C. Handy, the father of
the blues, and Sam Phillips, the father of rock and roll. Handy
migrated to Memphis as a young man; Phillips followed a generation
later--partly for the same reason: Beale Street. A magnet for blacks
throughout the South, Beale Street was the nexus for that rich vein of
folk tradition that formed a central root of American music
throughout the twentieth century: the Mississippi Delta blues. The
hardscrabble laborers of the delta brought their hungers and
sorrows--and their art--when they came to live out their dreams on
Beale Street, if only for a night.
Philips first encountered the sounds of legendary Beale Street in
1939, when he came through Memphis on a trip to Dallas to hear a
noted Baptist preacher. He later took a job in Decatur, Alabama, as a
radio announcer. "I was mediocre," says Phillips. "I got a lot of South
in my mouth--I don't have to tell you that. Well, my boss told me
about a job in Memphis. I walked into the WREC studio in the
Peabody Hotel, and just down the block was Beale Street, and I
thought, 'Wow.'
"I had in my mind that I wanted to live in
Memphis," says Phillips. "Something led me.
Something guided me beyond my conscious
efforts. To get that opportunity was like a door
opening for me.
"I may not know much," Phillips continues, "but I do know
sound. And here I am thinking about opening a little recording
studio--for one reason: I wanted to record black people, those folks
who never had the opportunity to record. My unconscious mind was
just saying I should do it.
"I rented 706 Union in 1949 and finally opened for business on
January 1, 1950. I had the hardest time in the world convincing them
that the audition was for free, that they weren't going to be charged
for it on the way out the door. Elvis was
the same way, so shy about it that he
wasn't going to ask.
"I knew we had to get young white
people involved or it wasn't going to
succeed," Phillips adds. "Jazz could have
reached the young people as something
they could have called their own. But it
was taken and smothered by adults. The
teenage years are the toughest years of your life. Take the child who
has so much problem mixing and mingling with other people. Music
can be the greatest educator in the world for helping such people.
"Then Elvis walked in the door, and I knew this was exactly
what I was looking for. Elvis cut a ballad, which was just excellent. I
can tell you, both Elvis and Roy Orbison could tear a ballad to pieces.
But I said to myself, 'You can't do that, Sam.' If I had released a
ballad I don't think you would have heard of Elvis Presley. "I'm a
hell of a taskmaster," Phillips says with a laugh. "But there's times
that you use that and there's times that you use something else."
Phillips shares
with that other great
chronicler of
twentieth-century
folk music, Alan
Lomax, a gift for
capturing the
musical capabilities
of the unrecognized.
As with Lomax, this
ability was rooted
in trust, an empathy
that enabled the
humblest, most
unsophisticated folk
artist to relax and
perform with the
full measure of his innate talent.
"So many black people started out trying to play something to
'please' the white man behind the glass, thinking, 'He don't want to
hear what I do out on the back porch,' " says Phillips. "But that was
exactly what I was after. I don't care about making a hit record.
That's what I used to tell them. I only care about making a good
record."
Peter Guralnick has said that Sam Phillips "almost
single-handedly authored one of the most remarkable chapters in the
history of American popular music." But more telling than the
academic question of influence is the tangible legacy of joy his
pioneering work has brought to so many, even to the remotest
provinces of the world. "There is music and there is everything else,"
Phillips says simply. "Music has done more to bring glad news and to
bring nations and peoples into an understanding of each other than
anything else. I don't care what anybody says. All the diplomacies in
the world can't hold a candle to that one damn common denominator
called music."

see: <a href=' www.worldandi.com/public/2001/may/samphil.html ' target='_blank'> www.worldandi.com/public/2001/may/samphil.html

Taniolo, würdest du bitte den von mir erstellten Thread nutzen ?

Ich habe Deinen Thread wohl bemerkt, nur befand sich jener nicht unter den Elvis Themen. Aus meiner Sicht gehört das Thema "Sam Phillips" hier in die Elvis Themen, da dieser Mann eine derart grosse Bedeutung für die gesamte weitere Laufbahn des EP hatte, dass er nicht unter ferner liefen stehen darf.

Sam Phillips ist ein wesentlicher Teil in der Karriere von Elvis Presley. Es ist ein absolut wichtiges Elvis Thema, eines der wichtigsten überhaupt. daher die Eröffnung des Threads in den Elvis Themen. Ich sehe diesen Thread auch nicht als etwas, wo jeder nur drei Tränen reinsetzt, sondern als eine Hommage an einen der größten Entdecker des Rock'n'Roll und der populären Musik.

Der "Leute um Elvis"-Bereich ist reserviert für vergleichsweise unbedeutende Ereignisse, die zwar Leute um Elvis betreffen, aber nur noch sehr entfernt oder gar nicht mehr mit ihm zu tun haben, z.B. wenn James Burton ein Konzert in japan gibt, wenn Lisa Marie eine neue Platte heraus bringt, wenn Priscilla in einem neuen Film mitspielt oder Mike Stone sich mal wieder die Fussnägel schneidet.

Fast alles, was mit Sam Phillips zu tun hat, ist mehr "Elvis" als vieles andere. Sam Phillips ist aus meiner Sicht mehr ein Elvis Thema als Elvis Leichenwagen, das obere Stockwerk von Graceland oder Elvis' Sonnenbrillen.

darum habe ich den Thread HIER eröffnet.

Bye, Sam.

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So. Eben wurde Sam mit einer Meldung würdig begraben. Hier auf meinem Heimatsender.

...