Sam Phillips' first love: the blues

" From early age Sun founder respected black culture "

By Norm Shaw

If you only think of Sam Phillips as the man who made the first rock 'n' roll records, you're missing a whole part of his life.

And it may well be the part he loves the most.

When it comes to music, for the 73-year-old founder of Sun Records it all comes back to one thing: the blues.

Phillips opened Memphis Recording Service in 1950 primarily to record what was then called "race music." What Phillips wanted to do was give black performers a place to record, something that was rare in that era. At his small studio at 706 Union Ave., he opened the doors for such greats as B.B. King, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Big Walter Horton, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Milton, Junior Parker, the Prisonnaires and a host of others.

There was one bluesman, though, who stood above all the rest, both literally and figuratively: the Howlin' Wolf.

Phillips recorded most of his blues artists before he started Sun Records. He says he wasn't ready to launch his own label at that time. Instead, he recorded the artists and licensed the sides to other labels, such as Chess Records in Chicago.

His interest in blues and black culture didn't begin in Memphis, though. It started almost at birth in rural Alabama.

"Growing up, I loved black people. I could listen to them sing forever," Phillips says from his Memphis home. "I heard a lot of words I could equate with. Sure I was young, but the bigger I got, the more I understood that I had been hearing this stuff all my life."

Phillips' young life was not easy. He worked in the fields side-by-side with blacks. His respect grew as he got older. Once he was recording, he says he took verbal abuse from others about working with "colored folks." He tells of going into the Peabody Ballroom to engineer a radio show, and co-workers would say he must not have recorded that day because he didn't smell bad. To this day, such sentiment angers Phillips.

"Let me tell you, you cannot express to people how much the black man has meant to our culture," Phillips says. "People just do not know the integrity of the people. I know what I have learned from black people. I have learned, man, that everyone is the same. I don't care if you're green, yellow, white, red or black."

He talks fondly of "Uncle Silas," an old black man blinded by syphilis who schooled a young Sam on life. He talks longingly about hearing the singing and humming of field workers. He talks with pride about the people he worked with who rose above the hatred. It all led to his desire to create a place where blacks could record the music he had grown to love.

"All of these things made me love and appreciate the black culture," Phillips says. "History should know how I felt it, how I was attuned in every way. There was nothing to give rise to me that I was seeing anything wrong at all. There was never one damn thing that said not to do this."

So Phillips opened his doors to anyone. Word spread fast in the Delta. Soon, Phillips began recording a virtual hall of fame of blues artists. Of them all, though, Chester "Howlin' Wolf" Burnett stood out. And it was not just his talent. It was who he was a person.

At a recent press conference announcing a scholarship in honor of the late Charley Rich, Phillips cited Rich and the Wolf as two of the greatest men he had ever worked with. What made the Wolf great, Phillips says, was his belief in himself.

"The wolf was the epitome of a certain type of arrogance, that was exactly what he needed," Phillips says. "It was the type of arrogance that you will not find in a dictionary. It was a thing he felt. He said, 'Look, I don't care what you think of me.' This is exactly the way I read him. Every conversation I had with him.

His arrogance was, 'I know I'm not a Nat King Cole. I know I'm not going to play the piano perfectly. And I'm certainly not going to be a Count Basey. I'm not going to be, you name it. But I know who I am. And I know that what I sing, I believe.'"

If Phillips has any regrets about his work with the Wolf, it is that he let the Wolf move away. Phillips believes the Wolf had the talent and charisma to be much more than he became.

"He would have made more believers out of young people had he not left and gone to Chicago. (Len) Chess (of Chess Records) messed up on that. He got Wolf because I didn't want to start a record label," Phillips says. "But Chester Burnett had such a soulful sound that even though his words were always good blues words, that man didn't have to say a word.

Just like his song 'Moaning at Midnight.' He could have sat there and moaned or hummed to me. Just sat there flat-footed like this, feet this long, and moaned. When it come out, it was if everything just stopped, everything that was going on. Time stopped. Everything stopped. And you heard the Wolf. You heard the Wolf."

Phillips seems lost in memories of hearing the Wolf, who died in 1976. Born in the Delta in 1910, Burnett earned his nickname by his ability to imitate a wolf howling. He learned harmonica from his brother-in-law, Rice "Sonny Boy Williamson" Miller. After World War II, Burnett moved to Memphis to take a job as a disc jockey. His radio show, performances and recordings led to great popularity in the South. It was then he moved to Chicago.

He went through a rough period in the late 1950s and early '60s. When the young British rockers such as the Rolling Stones rediscovered the blues, Burnett saw his career rise again, but this time for a white audience.

Although he remains regarded as one of the blues legends, Phillips believes he could have been even more popular.

"He would have been in my opinion one of the greats," Phillips says. "Had the young people truly got to hear him more, had he played on more programs listened to by young people, who knows. Had this guy gotten that break, the kids would have absolutely gone crazy. He would have been one of the all-time music heroes. I mean that.

"He was a combination of jazz, a combination of unbelievable blues. He was historically what you call a communicator, even if he had no music behind him."

At that point, Phillips drops to one knee and begins the guttural moan that is "Moaning at Midnight." It is a special moment.

"It was kind of like when B.B. sang. It was unique. Nobody's voice, to me, was as bad as the Wolf's. Nobody voice could be that bad. It was so bad, there was not another like it in the world. And I can tell you when you've got something that nobody else has got, and add to that know what to do with it, you got something, baby."

The same could be said for Phillips. He had something no one else had: the vision to see what could happen if he put any racial bias behind him.