Radio Luxembourg: Black Blues & A White Singer

(An updated excerpt from Save The Last Dance for Me by Tom Poland and Dr. Phil Sawyer, University of South Carolina Press)

Many years after his days at Sun, Sam Phillips served up a telling perspective. “There is nothing greater to do than the blues if you would be a musician. Whether vocally, instrumentally, there is nothing easier yet more difficult; there is no way for anybody to write the essence of the blues as a score. That has to come instantaneously. So much of what is here now is owed to the blues, both black and white. And if you listen to the blackest black cat or the whitest white hillbilly, you’re gonna hear something worthwhile. It’s a symphony of the soul. There is no question about it.”

By the spring of 1954, Phillips had lost his symphony. With the old hard race lines softening, many of his successful black artists had jumped to larger labels. Undeterred, Phillips sought new ways to establish the Sun Records’ sound. Phillips talked about this musical fork in the road.

“I’d been looking for a person, a white-skinned person that could put the feel of a black person into a phonograph record, knowing we grew up in the same fields, so to speak—cotton fields, corn fields, even before we grew soybeans, watermelon patches, whatever—blacks and white. I knew the power of the feel between the races, and I was not interested in forming another record company and trying to compete even with the bigger independents at that time—I had no interest in that if I couldn’t broaden the base of music and let white kids enjoy black music and black kids enjoy white music.”

The late Sam Phillips wanted to open the door to race music. In one of music’s great ironies, Phillips would be among the factors that led to the shag’s Dark Ages.

It started with Phillips’s assistant Marion Keisker. She had heard Elvis sing, “Why don’t you try that young truck driver?” Suppose she had said, “Well, damn Sam. What are you going to do?” But she didn’t. And so in the summer of 1954, Elvis Presley, that truck driver for the Crown Electric Company walked into Sun Records yet again, this time to record “Without Love.” The reticent truck driver, however, couldn’t do “Without Love” justice, disappointing Phillips.

Phillips nonetheless asked the young singer to audition another time with Winfield “Scotty” Moore and bassist Bill Black. Again the audition wasn’t working out. Then one of recording’s seminal moments arrived on July 5, 1954. The musicians took a break and the duck-tailed singer loosened up while singing “That’s All Right Mama,” a song written by Arthur “Pop” Crudup, a delta blues singer and guitarist. Like fog off the Mississippi, the elusive sound Phillips sought materialized right in front of him.

Said Phillips, “I heard this rhythm, just by himself and I said, ‘Jesus! Elvis have you been holding out on me all this time and have cost me this much time?’ “

Elvis, seeing Phillips’ reaction, said, “You like that Mr. Phillips?”