Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [41]
Chapter Four
Dixie’s Delight
In July 1953 Elvis was reading the afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, when he noticed a lengthy article that seemed to speak his name. Three years earlier, twenty-seven-year-old Sam Phillips had opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue. It was only about a ten-minute walk from the Peabody Hotel, where Phillips and one part-time assistant, a woman named Marion Keisker, worked for Memphis’s top radio station, WREC. Phillips had become an announcer there in 1945, but he held a number of duties, including engineering the big-band broadcasts of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller on a network hookup from the Peabody Skyway each Saturday night.
It was glamorous, mirrored ballroom kind of work. But in his new outlet, the Florence, Alabama, native who had grown up destitute on a tenant farm alongside black workers, intended to spotlight the opposite end of the social strata. Largely through his burgeoning Sun Records, located in the same small building, Phillips hoped to create a commercial market for rhythm and blues, the real rhythm and blues, the kind they sang over in West Memphis, Arkansas, in the cotton fields, and in the back parlors of Beale Street. Phillips would later say he was looking for “Negro artists of the South” who wanted to make a record but had no place to go. As Keisker noted, “There had never been an opportunity in Memphis for a Negro to get into a record company. Negroes weren’t even allowed to perform in white clubs.” In essence, Phillips sold hope to people who had none.
“Somehow or another, deep down in my soul, I guess I just had an affinity for music and people, especially people who had the ability to express themselves but didn’t have the opportunity to go to New York or Chicago and try to get somebody to listen to them. I didn’t want to work with anybody except untried and unproven talent, and I just had a desire to work with black people.”
The idea was both revolutionary and unpopular, and there was vitriol in some of the comments he got from his coworkers at the radio station. “Some of my best friends would kid me, say I smelled that morning when I came in, and ask why I would leave the Peabody and go out and start recording ‘niggers.’ ”
But Phillips had a fiercely independent heart. He began with men whose names would be legendary: B. B. King, Joe Hill Louis, and soon Howlin’ Wolf. In 1951, with Ike Turner’s band sitting in, he produced singer Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” probably the first rock-and-roll record.
Phillips lived for the creativity of the studio. He loved seeing what people would come up with in the exchange of energy in the room, in getting sound down on tape. He could alter sound with acoustics and engineering tricks, and in 1954, using two Ampex 350 recorders, developed a tape delay echo, or “slapback” technique to make the music sound “real alive,” as he put it. But the dynamics had to be created out of the musicians themselves (“the worst thing you can do is overproduce”), and he could pull things out of them that even they never knew were there. A slight man at the time—he weighed only 125 pounds—the black-haired Phillips was so charismatic that when he got talking in a big way, his rhetoric—half preaching, half reminiscence—had an almost mystical quality.
“None of these people that I recorded had ever had any experience. Some of them had never really seen a broadcast-type microphone. Most of them certainly had never seen a recording studio, and I kind of liked that.”
A homespun genius with an integral understanding of the blues, Phillips also had a mission—to cross the racial divide. His idea was to mix the music of the black man with the country sounds he’d grown up hearing all around him in Alabama—the first record his family owned was a 78 rpm of Jimmie Rodgers—and on such radio stations as Nashville’s WSM. He knew that great music—and it was great music he was always after—defied easy categorization. And if he could find a musician who wedded southern white and