Narrator Kevin Stillwell deftly tells the story of Memphis legend Sam Phillips—the man who discovered Elvis Presley. Millions lay claim to having “invented” rock and roll, but, judging by this fascinating bio, Phillips has a stronger case than most. Recording both black and white artists simultaneously, Phillips and his tiny label, Sun, exemplified the whole notion of crossover. Long after Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and the other Sun legends left for greener pastures, Phillips remained a vital part of the Memphis scene—despite growing increasingly paranoid and eccentric—as this book’s unwieldy second half makes clear. Stillwell doesn’t try to imitate Phillips’s presumed drawl, but he does project the laconic quality typical of a Southern gentleman, although his sleek enunciation suggests a cool refinement that’s more New York than Memphis. J.S.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day.
With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.
The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day.
With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll
Narrated by Kevin Stillwell
Peter GuralnickUnabridged — 29 hours, 32 minutes
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll
Narrated by Kevin Stillwell
Peter GuralnickUnabridged — 29 hours, 32 minutes
Overview
The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day.
With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.
Editorial Reviews
Guralnick…first met Phillips in 1979…and he interviewed him many times over the ensuing 24 years before Phillips's death in 2003. Guralnick draws from his deep mine of knowledge about Phillips and his world—a mine with passageways to some dark places—to produce a book so thoroughly steeped in its subject that it is almost an autobiography in the third person.
…beautiful and meticulous…Mr. Guralnick is the perfect man to tell this story.
New York Times Bestseller
One of The Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2015
"Mr. Guralnick is a sensitive biographer who has landed upon a perfect topic in Phillips, the brilliant Memphis producer who, in the 1950s, recorded the earliest work of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin' Wolf. This is vital American history, smartly and warmly told."—Dwight Garner, New York Times, Top Books of 2015
"Definitive...With Presley's story at its core, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll is in some ways the third volume [to] Guralnick's double-volume Elvis bio. What makes it more illuminating and arguably truer is seeing Elvis in the broader context of Phillips' career, [which was] in many ways a mission to transform [t]his nation's history of bigotry....You may come away born again."—Rolling Stone
"A book so thoroughly steeped in its subject that it is almost an autobiography in the third person.... 'This is a book written out of admiration and love,' Guralnick states frankly in an author's note. As such, it honors Sam Phillips elegantly, by devoting itself to the one subject Phillips seemed to admire and love as much as he did music: Sam Phillips himself."—David Hajdu, New York Times Book Review
"Lovingly crafted.... With crisp prose and meticulous detail, Guralnick gives Phillips the same epic treatment he previously employed in acclaimed biographies of Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley.... An astonishing feat.... It is difficult to imagine a more complete or poetic account of his life than this remarkable volume.... 'I didn't set out to revolutionize the world,' Phillips once told Guralnick in a moment of humility, but in this book [the author] convincingly argues that Phillips did just that."—Charles Hughes, The Washington Post
"Peter Guralnick isn't just a music writer or a biographer—he's one of the essential chroniclers of American popular culture, and his work illuminates some of the crucial components of our national identity: race, religion, fame, and the big business of having fun, among others. In this epic biography of Sam Phillips, Guralnick bears witness to the birth of rock and roll and the cultural revolution it inspired. It's not only an unforgettable portrait of an eccentric visionary, it's a testament to the power of ordinary people to change the world with nothing more than a beautiful idea and a handful of songs."—Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers
"When Elvis Presley stepped into a Memphis recording studio with producer Sam Phillips in 1954, they defined rock 'n' roll as we know it. Peter Guralnick already gave us Elvis's story in two landmark books. He now returns with a brilliant, intensely human look at Phillips, the endlessly fascinating figure who also recorded Johnny Cash, B.B King, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis. It's a bold, insightful work that tells us in novelistic detail about the obsessions and struggles of the man who presided over the uneasy birth of rock 'n' roll."—Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash
"Sam Phillips is an epic biography, at once sweeping and personal, in which the gifted writer Peter Guralnick captures the voice and life of a transformational figure in American music."—Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
"A monumental biography of the larger-than-life loner who fought for the acceptance of black music and discovered an extraordinary group of poor, country-boy singers whose records would transform American popular culture.... A wonderful story that brings us deep into that moment when America made race music its own and gave rise to the rock sound now heard around the world."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Guralnick wrote definitive biographies of Elvis and now does the same for Phillips, a visionary who gave voice to a rich and diverse culture long marginalized.... Essential reading for music fans."—Ben Segedin, Booklist (starred review)
"Epic, elegant and crisply told."—Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., BookPage
"Acclaimed music historian Guralnick has written landmark accounts of Elvis and the history of American roots music, and he now turns his considerable skills to the life of Sun Records producer Sam Phillips in this delightful and comprehensive volume. Guralnick energetically tells the must-read tale of a Southern boy intent on enacting his vision of freedom and justice through music."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The book is a labor of love. Guralnick is passionate about the music, but he doesn't let his passion overinflate his prose, and he seems to know everything about everyone who was part of the Southern music world... It's natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism and good luck...and shape them into a heroic narrative....But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes — which is why it's good to have Guralnick's book."—Louis Menand, The New Yorker
"With his latest book, Guralnick has penned his most intimate work yet. Over the course of 700-plus pages, Guralnick documents Phillips as both a musical visionary and a champion of a kind of humanist democracy—someone who sought to document the expressions of the poor and disenfranchised, those consigned to the narrow margins of society. In trying to understand Phillips' work, legacy and philosophies, Guralnick doesn't shy away from the more difficult aspects of his life. By doing so, Guralnick creates a complex, compelling and unflinching portrait."—Bob Mehr, Memphis Commercial Appeal
"Peter Guralnick tells it like it was. If you want to dig into the truth and read about what really went down in Memphis in the '50s, this is the definitive book."—Lucinda Williams
"Mr. Guralnick has conjured the magic of Elvis in the Sun studio as Presley's biographer, but his knowing Sam Phillips makes this the superior version... Mr. Guralnick takes you right to the room, and rather than gliding past a scene that has been written about many times, he immerses himself comfortably in it and revives its original intensity....[He] has produced the gold-standard Presley bio and now a complete portrait of his inspiration. Mr. Guralnick, the historian, writer and fan, has captured what was different, real and raw about a great artist."—Preston Lauterbach, Wall Street Journal
" With this book, Peter Guralnick brings popular music and the man who gave us so much of it, Sam Phillips, to the very centre of American social history. And he does it quite brilliantly."—Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments
"Superb.... No one could tell Sam's story — a complex mixture of music business reportage and personal narrative — with the level of detail and affection that Guralnick brings to these 700-plus pages. Sam Phillips may well be the capstone to Guralnick's career.... This book gives Phillips and his judgments their due. Bridging American music's racial divide and transforming its pop, he was as much an original as the artists he nurtured."—Matt Damsker, USA Today
"Guralnick's book is comprehensive, warm, thorough, captivating, and compulsively readable....It may just be the best music book of 2015."—Henry Carrigan, No Depression
"A rollicking good time. Sometimes reading can rattle the cage and stomp the floor, and no one rattled the cages more than Sam Phillips."—Memphis Flyer
"A cornerstone addition to Guralnick's unmatched backlist of music history and biography."—Shelf Awareness
" A deeply intimate portrait that never veers into hagiography....For Guralnick and for the reader, the book becomes the quintessential Phillips production: an altogether profound and revelatory experience."—Memphis Commercial Appeal
"A sprawling, engaging biography stuffed with stories and tidbits."—Knoxville News
"Much-anticipated and long-awaited, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, is as much a labor of love for Peter Guralnick as Sun Records was to Sam Phillips. And that's saying something."—Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This
"Thoroughgoing and thoroughly satisfying.... Guralnick has injected enough helium and momentum into the material to get it airborne and moving stately forward."—Peter Lewis, Christian Science Monitor
"If his two-volume life of Elvis Presley, biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie, and trilogy on southern roots music haven't convinced you that Peter Guralnick is our finest chronicler of American music, [this] should do the trick....Magisterial yet lively....it's a book that places Guralnick in some pretty heady company. Arguably, he is to music what Robert Caro is to politics: a dogged researcher and graceful writer who has a genuine feel for his subjects and the knowledge to place them in a larger context.... A wonderfully nuanced and shaded portrait."—Best Classic Bands
"What shines through this sympathetic but warts-and-all bio is that for Phillips it wasn't about the money or even just about the music. It was about music's ability to bridge the considerable racial divide that existed at the time....Compelling and even revelatory to those who thought they knew it all."—Curt Schleier, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Phillips's stories and philosophies light up these pages....By the book's end, the weight of Guralnick's mission comes into full view. Phillips had advised him early on, "It ain't for you to put me in a good light. Just put me in the focus I'm supposed to be in." And that's exactly what Guralnick has done. His subject would no doubt be proud that he got it right."—James Reed, Boston Globe
"Guralnick's biography of Sam Phillips is a key work of Americana."—Downbeat
Narrator Kevin Stillwell deftly tells the story of Memphis legend Sam Phillips—the man who discovered Elvis Presley. Millions lay claim to having “invented” rock and roll, but, judging by this fascinating bio, Phillips has a stronger case than most. Recording both black and white artists simultaneously, Phillips and his tiny label, Sun, exemplified the whole notion of crossover. Long after Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and the other Sun legends left for greener pastures, Phillips remained a vital part of the Memphis scene—despite growing increasingly paranoid and eccentric—as this book’s unwieldy second half makes clear. Stillwell doesn’t try to imitate Phillips’s presumed drawl, but he does project the laconic quality typical of a Southern gentleman, although his sleek enunciation suggests a cool refinement that’s more New York than Memphis. J.S.H. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
★ 2015-08-17
A monumental biography of the larger-than-life loner who fought for the acceptance of black music and discovered an extraordinary group of poor, country-boy singers whose records would transform American popular culture. Celebrated music historian Guralnick (Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, 2005, etc.) recounts the life of Sam Phillips (1923-2003), an Alabama farmer's son who founded Sun Records in Memphis, where, during the 1950s, he first recorded the music of Ike Turner, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, and others. In earlier books, including a two-volume Presley biography (Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love), the author has written about such artists and the rise of rock 'n' roll, "this revolutionary new music that combined raw gutbucket feel with an almost apostolic sense of exuberance and joy." Now he turns to "unreconstructed individuali[st]" Phillips, who opened the door to untutored talents, recognizing their originality and mentoring them with "patience and belief." A sickly child who became enamored of African-American music while picking cotton alongside black laborers, Phillips was bright, observant, and much influenced by a blind black sharecropper who lived with his family. He started out as a radio DJ and engineer and realized when he recorded Ike Turner's hit "Rocket 88" (1951) at Sun that black music had potentially universal appeal. His discoveries—related here with contagious excitement—were not happenstance but rather the result of his dedication to finding the "pure essence" of performances. Guralnick met the charismatic Phillips in 1979 and became a close friend, and he makes no secret of his affection and admiration. However, he also covers his subject's problems and foibles: his early mental breakdowns, his troubled marriage and affairs, his financial difficulties, his later drinking, and his penchant for bragging about his (rightful) place in music history. A wonderful story that brings us deep into that moment when America made race music its own and gave rise to the rock sound now heard around the world.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170292851 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
| Publication date: | 11/10/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Sam Phillips
The Man Who Invented Rock 'N' Roll
By Peter Guralnick
Little, Brown and Company
Copyright © 2015 Peter GuralnickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-04274-1
CHAPTER 1
"I Dare You!"
Nothing passed my ears. A mockingbird or a whippoorwill — out in the country on a calm afternoon. The silence of the cottonfields, that beautiful rhythmic silence, with a hoe hitting a rock every now and then and just as it spaded through the dirt, you could hear it. That was just unbelievable music: to hear that bird maybe three hundred yards away, the wind not even blowing in your direction, or no wind at all. But it carried, it got to my ears. I would hear somebody speak to a mule harshly, I heard that. I mean, I heard everything. It wasn't any time until I began to observe people [too], more by sound — I certainly didn't know what to do with everything I heard, but I knew I had something that could be an asset if I could just figure out what to do with it.
In later years Sam Phillips would always refer to the moment of his arrival on this earth with a wonderment not altogether free of caustic amusement. "You take my ass dying when I was born, and you take a drunk doctor showing up — man, he didn't even make it till I was born — and my mama being so kind she got up out of bed and put him to bed until he sobered up, and then the midwife comes and Mama feels so sorry for Dr. Cornelius she named me after him!"
Nobody ever took more pleasure in his own story than Sam Phillips. It was, in his telling, a poetic as much as a realistic vision, a mythic journey combining narrative action, revolutionary rhetoric, Delphic pronouncements, and the satisfaction, like that of any Old Testament god, of being able to look back on the result and pronounce it "good." He would return again and again to the same themes over the years, with different details and different emphases, but always with the same underlying message: the inherent nobility not so much of man as of freedom, and the implied responsibility — no, the obligation — for each of us to be as different as our individuated natures allowed us to be. To be different, in Sam's words, in the extreme.
But it always started out with a slight, sickly looking tow-headed little boy looking out at the world from the 323-acre farm at the Bend of the River, about ten miles outside Florence, Alabama. His daddy didn't own the farm, just rented it, and by the time Sam was eight years old, his two oldest brothers and older sister had all married, leaving him at home with his seventeen-year-old sister, Irene, his fifteen-year-old-brother, Tom, and the next youngest, ten-year-old J.W. (John William, later to be known as Jud), who was, like Sam, something of an afterthought for parents who were forty-four and nearly forty by the time their youngest child was born.
He and his family worked the fields with mules, along with dozens of others, black and white sharecroppers, poor people — his daddy was a fair man, he treated them all the same. His daddy didn't say much; the one thing that really made him mad was if someone told him a lie — it didn't matter who it was, he would stand up and tell them to their face. Daddy had a feel for the land, he grew corn, hay, and sweet sorghum, and the cotton rows were half a mile long. His mama was kind to everyone, believed wholeheartedly in all her children, and worried a lot — there was nothing she wouldn't do for any of them, and nothing she couldn't do as well as any man. Sometimes at night she might dip a little snuff and pick the guitar, old folk songs like "Barbara Allen" and "Aura Lee," the guitar took on all the properties of a human voice, but she didn't sing, it was almost as if she were quilting the music together.
Just like Daddy, she taught them how to work, by her example. She taught them responsibility by the kindness she and Daddy showed to others less fortunate, including relatives, passing strangers, and, by the presence in their own home, her sister Emma, blinded in one eye and made deaf and mute by Rocky Mountain spotted fever when she was three. Sam observed Aunt Emma closely and, in order to communicate with her (she was a well-educated woman, a graduate of the internationally renowned Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind at Talladega), learned to sign almost before he could read. He was the only one in the family who could communicate fully with her except for Mama and his sister Irene, who wanted to become a nurse. Even when he was working (and there was seldom a time that he wasn't), he was watching, listening, observing: the interactions of people, the scudding of the clouds across the sky, the communication of crickets and frogs (he was convinced that he could talk to them — and not just as a little boy either), the flow of the beautiful Tennessee River. He couldn't understand why all the little black boys and girls he worked and played with couldn't go to the same little country school that he did; he registered the unfairness of the way in which people were arbitrarily set apart by the color of their skin, and he thought, What if I had been born black? And he admired the way they dealt with adversity — he envied them their power of resilience, their ability to maintain belief in a situation in which he doubted he could have sustained belief himself. But, for the most part, knowing how different his feelings were even from those closest to him, from his very family, and knowing how much more different he intended to be, he kept his thoughts to himself and listened to the a cappella singing that came from the fields, testament as he saw it, whether sacred or secular, to an invincible human spirit and spirituality.
They found a way to worship. You could hear it. You could feel it. You didn't have to be inside a building, you could participate in a cotton patch, picking four rows at a time, at 110 degrees! I mean, I saw the inequity. But even at five or six years old I found myself caught up in a type of emotional reaction that was, instead of depressing — I mean, these were some of the astutest people I've ever known, and they were in [most] cases almost totally overlooked, except as a beast of burden — but even at that age, I recognized that: Hey! The backs of these people aren't broken, they [can] find it in their souls to live a life that is not going to take the joy of living away.
Samuel Cornelius Phillips (remember Dr. Cornelius) was born on January 5, 1923, in the only home that his father would ever own, in a tiny hamlet six or seven miles north of Florence called Lovelace Community, named for his mother's family and populated with musically talented Lovelaces and practical, hardworking Phillipses. When he was just nine months old, the house burned down, and the family moved in and out of town, then to the old Martin place on Chisholm Highway and then further out in the country to the old Pickens place in Oakland, which was an eight-year-old's (and later a seventy-eight-year-old's) 323-acre vision of Eden. His overwhelming impression, his overwhelming experience, was of hard work — his mama and his daddy never stopped, and his brother Horace, older by fourteen years, was, everyone acknowledged, a "mechanical genius," who would make a career in heavy equipment. The sensibility of the two youngest, though, Sam and his brashly self-assured brother J.W., was different in type if not in kind. J.W. possessed the sort of robust personality to which everyone, adults and children alike, was inevitably drawn. He was confident, articulate, outgoing, a natural leader, even if Sam sometimes mistrusted just where his leadership might be taking them. He was warmhearted and trustful just like their daddy, but unlike Daddy there was no holdback in his speech: he proclaimed his views eloquently and convincingly, although his younger brother occasionally questioned whether J.W. really knew what he was talking about.
Sam saw himself as set apart and wasn't about to apologize for it. He prized independence and artistry, even when he was too young to put a name on them. He saw Daddy as an artist of the soil, he saw music as an expression of innate spirituality. He was a delicate child, "a runt that really had a rough time surviving," as he frequently said, but for all of that, he was determined to go his own way. "I got impatient with children doing the same things other children did. I had the ability to love other people, but I also had the ability to tell them what I thought, even at an early age. I wasn't a spoiled person, but for some reason or another I was totally an independent cat, and to be that, and be as sickly as I was and not be screaming for Mama must have signified something." What it signified, Sam firmly believed, was that he had his own eyes and ears to assess things with, and they were going to lead him to the greater goal he had in mind, even if he couldn't say precisely what it was. It was not lost on him, however, what he sacrificed in terms of popularity. It was impossible not to like J.W., as his younger brother was well aware, and for J.W. the approval of others was the greatest authenticator. As for himself, despite all his bravado, he couldn't help but regret the absence of that same easy camaraderie. He was, he recognized with some asperity, "the greenest persimmon on the tree. If you took a bite of me, you didn't like me too much."
Growing up, he was surrounded by music — square dances, round dances, once a month, at a neighbor's, a relative's, sometimes at home. On those occasions you pushed all the furniture out of the room and everybody would sing and play — fiddle, banjo, ukulele, guitar — sometimes his sobersided daddy might even call. His sister Irene made sure to take him and J.W. along, from the time they were no more than four or five years old, and he would sit in a corner, just watching all of his grown-up brothers and sisters and all the others, hardworking farmers and their wives, dancing and having a good time. When he was six, just before the October stock market crash, they got a Graphophone record player at Kilgore Furniture Store — they set it on the floor and wound it up and played the one record they were able to afford with their initial purchase, Jimmie Rodgers' "Waiting for a Train," over and over. Though Rodgers has come to be universally invoked as the "Father of Country Music," the song was a blues, profound in its portrait of loss and displacement and uncanny in its foreshadowing of the Great Depression that hovered unseen just over the horizon. "'All around the water tank,'" Sam would quote sixty, seventy years later at the drop of a hat, "'Waiting for a train / A thousand miles away from home / Sleeping in the rain ...' And then he walks up to a brakeman 'to give him a line of talk'— you know, he was trying to get in that boxcar — and this brakeman says, 'Well, you got any money, I'll see that you don't walk.' But Jimmie didn't have any money, and 'he slammed the boxcar door.' If you can just visualize that — Depression, hard times, won't be another train for a long time. Let me tell you something, Jimmie Rodgers didn't waste a word."
The depression didn't hit the Phillips family as hard as some, but it hit hard enough to inalterably change the pattern and outcome of their lives. Charlie Phillips was able to hold on for the first few years, but then in 1933, when cotton was down to five cents a pound, he recognized that he could no longer make a living off the land, and the family moved to town. It was like being cast out of paradise.
Sam's daddy's first job off the farm was flagging on the old L&N railroad bridge, which had a single lane for vehicular traffic, working from six in the evening till six in the morning seven days a week for thirty dollars. He moved the family in and out of town over the next few years, keeping the job as the salary increased to thirty-five and then forty dollars a week but continuing to farm simply because of his love of the land. He grade-contracted for others, he terraced the Florence State Teachers College amphitheater with mules and sodded it with Bermuda grass ("He was," said Sam, "the greatest sculptor of the soil I've ever seen"), he grew an experimental vegetable garden for Dr. Willingham, the president of the college, he held out a helping hand to others when he could barely afford the rent himself — and his youngest son took it all in. The way he was with people, the way he was with animals, the kindness he showed to others, the expectations he had of himself. "My daddy didn't do things I didn't see. He didn't know I was looking at him, I wasn't staring — but my daddy never ceased to amaze me. He knew the soil. He knew mules. I mean, he knew mules! My daddy never used a stick or a whip or anything. Mules would work for him, people would work for him — and they would rise and achieve above their normal capacity." His daddy was never truly happy in town, the little boy felt. Even as a small child he saw his father fueled by an agrarian vision — though he certainly couldn't have named it at the time. There was an idealism, he believed, that fed his father beyond faith and hard work. His daddy would never have chosen to make a living off the land if he hadn't had to. "There was something clean about the soil, there was something clean about plowing a mule — he could just take the soil in his hands and watch it produce for him." It was the purity of a dream.
He was a frail but determined child. Even though his brother was twice his size, and much more physically commanding, he and J.W. fought like cats and dogs — but they always got together again afterwards. You just couldn't help but love J.W., but it was his aunt Emma who truly fascinated him for her refusal to be intellectually inhibited by her inability to hear or speak. He was well aware of the example of Helen Keller, across the river in Tuscumbia, and he had long, animated signing discussions with his aunt, who read the newspaper cover to cover every day and irritated some members of the family with her strong opinions and behavior that could just as easily be described as willful as strong-willed. Only Sam and his mother were able to calm Aunt Emma down, and of all the nephews and nieces he was clearly her favorite.
When he was in the sixth grade, the family moved to Royal Avenue in North Florence, directly behind the cotton gin where they had once brought their cotton. When the circus came to town, it passed right by their house, with the elephants at the head of the parade, before pitching tent by the railroad track in East Florence, a mile and a half away. The carnival set up in back of the store right across the alley from them. And any children in the neighborhood could ride for free.
It was in the sixth grade, too, that he had his first drum lesson, on the kind of "field" drum that you wore around your neck, from the city music director, Mr. D. F. Stuber. Sam had been begging his mama and daddy for music lessons, beating on pots and pans till he like to drove his mama crazy, and he had to rake leaves and mow Mr. Stuber's yard while his daddy grew a garden for Mr. Stuber to help pay for the lessons. He wasn't the best drummer in the world, he knew, but he was diligent in his application, and with sufficient practice, Mr. Stuber assured him, he could join the marching band the following year when he entered junior high school.
It was during this time that Uncle Silas joined the Phillips household. According to the official Phillips Family Reunion book, Charlie and Madgie Phillips "never turned anyone away who needed food, clothing, shelter, comfort, love, and affection." They raised three children in addition to their own, and many others, including Aunt Emma, lived with them, so that there were frequently as many as "nineteen or twenty ... around the Phillips supper table." In this case it was Silas Payne, a poor black sharecropper, originally from Louisiana, who had worked on the old Pickens place and was, said Sam, a "genius with chickens" even after he went blind from syphilis. Another family had taken him in after the Phillipses moved to town, but when the Miles family could no longer afford to care for him, Charlie Phillips borrowed the cotton gin manager Mr. Wiggins' 1929 Chevrolet and moved Uncle Silas in with them.
The story of Uncle Silas is at the epicenter of everything that Sam Phillips ever believed both about himself and the "common man," in that most uncommon narrative that became the lodestar for his life. It was not sympathy for this old black man's plight that drew him to Silas Payne — far from it, Sam Phillips always insisted. Rather, it was admiration for those same qualities of imagination, creativity, and invincible determination that he had first noted in the black fieldworkers on his father's farm — that and the kind of emotional freedom, the unqualified generosity and kindness that he himself would have most liked to be able to achieve.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sam Phillips by Peter Guralnick. Copyright © 2015 Peter Guralnick. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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