Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  “There were two types of downtrodden people back then. There were the black field hands and the white sharecroppers. It was impossible in those days not to hear and grow to love all the music of oppression and the music that uplifted people—blues, country, gospel, all of it … The only hope they had was to sing the blues and to sing religious songs, and to hope and pray that times would be better … One man in particular, Uncle Silas Payne, an old black man, taught music to me. Not musical notes or reading, you understand, but real intuitive music … Did I feel sorry for them? In a way I did. But they could do things I couldn’t do. They could out-pick me. They could sing on pitch.”

  Education, they say, begins at the kitchen table. “I was raised to respect black people,” continued Phillips. “My father and mother made us understand who was Uncle Silas and who was Aunt Minnie, and how they were to be treated with respect. I never for one time—and I think this had great influence on me—I never heard my father ever abuse a black person. That, to me, showed a sense of kinship. It ensconced in me a type of feeling for the South; although we had all sorts of segregation, we also had a great amount of integration in spirit and common problems.”

  Phillips had caught his first glimpse of Memphis in 1939 when his father took his five sons in their Dodge coupe to see a Baptist preacher in Texas. When they passed through Memphis it was four o’clock in the morning and raining. Cruising down Beale Street with the roof down, the sixteen-year-old Sam watched bug-eyed as the storied Negro thoroughfare moved past—crowds pouring out of bars, hotel signs flashing, hookers, people walking in the middle of the street. Although he didn’t know it yet, the dreamlike passage would replay through his mind for years, eventually drawing him back as a young man.

  Thanks to his older brother Jud, he secured a hobby-job, presenting a religious radio show, Hymn Time, mixing up white quartets and black spirituals. He was also fascinated with justice and spent afternoons at the local courthouse admiring the “almost evangelical” style of lawyers. “A lot of the time it didn’t matter what the facts were,” thought Phillips watching from the gallery. “All you had to do was sway the jury.”

  When his father suddenly died in 1942, he dropped out of school to support his mother and deaf-mute aunt. Working at a mortuary, he learned how to handle the bereaved and how to respect silences. In December 1943, he headed to Nashville in the hope of landing a job at the famous station WSM, which broadcast The Grand Ole Opry. He didn’t get the job, but was told that a presenter at a smaller Nashville station had just been drafted; they needed an urgent replacement. Here he spent eighteen formative months working as a full-time deejay, until he learned of a job vacancy in Memphis. Without a moment’s hesitation, he drove to Memphis and walked into the WREC radio studio in the Peabody Hotel. “Just down the block was Beale Street, and I thought, Wow.”

  Working as a spotter at the Peabody Hotel, Phillips had to relay technical information to the radio control room where live performances from the opulent Skyway Ballroom were fed to the nationwide CBS network. At age twenty-two, he was given his own show, Saturday Afternoon Tea Dance, on which he played eclectic rarities, usually with a rawer sound than was popular in the late forties.

  By 1949, he began dreaming of his own recording studio. Phillips had a family of six to support, so his motivation was partly financial. Many of his radio colleagues predicted failure, citing a previous Memphis studio that opened and closed within a year. The one person to believe in his dream, however, was a talk-show host, Marion Keisker, the divorced mother of a nine-year-old son. Like so many, she was hypnotized by something magical in Sam Phillips’s eyes—“swirling pools of insanity” as another associate described them.

  He leased a store at the corner of Union and Marshall avenues and named his business the Memphis Recording Service. With a budget of just $1,000, both Phillips and Keisker refitted the old store, while a third WREC employee lent them the money for two domestic standard reel-to-reel tape machines, a four-channel mixing table, and his prized possession, a portable Presto PT 900 tape machine. The studio opened for business on January 3, 1950. Its motto read “we record anything—anywhere—any time.” So Phillips got to work chasing down odd jobs, recording bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, political speeches, civic functions, anything that paid.

  Phillips was struggling to pay the $150 rent and Keisker’s $25 salary, but his luck began to roll thanks to an R&B label based in Los Angeles, RPM. Its owners, the Bihari brothers, sent down their latest R&B hopeful, B. B. King. When King described his sessions in Memphis to a disc jockey in Clarksdale, Mississippi, by the name of Ike Turner, Phillips got another fateful call. An audition was arranged for which Turner’s band wrote an energetic number called “Rocket 88.” However, along the road to Memphis on March 5, 1951, the band’s amplifier fell off the roof of the car, breaking the speaker cone on impact. When the musicians arrived, Phillips couldn’t fix it, but stuffing it with paper, reduced the rattling to a tolerable fuzz. In the end, Phillips judged that the electric guitar played through a broken amplifier sounded a little like a saxophone.

  Written with car radio in mind, the song described cruising for women in a big steely V8 Cadillac and made a cryptic reference to amphetamines. Phillips sent a copy to Chess Records in Chicago, whose owner, Leonard Chess, released it in April 1951. By June, it was No. 1 on the R&B charts; by December, it was the second-biggest-selling R&B record of the year. Phillips had produced his first hit. It was a major confidence boost, but Sam Phillips was working eighteen hours a day, holding down two jobs. Exhausted, broke, and the object of racist jibes from radio colleagues, Phillips experienced a nervous breakdown and was administered electroshock treatment while hospitalized.

  Phillips slammed the door on his radio job to concentrate on the record trade. Unfortunately, he was about to taste its cruel side. Noticing the buzz in Memphis, both Leonard Chess and the Bihari brothers began poaching his best artists—first Ike Turner and then, saddest of all, his most treasured discovery, blues shouter Howlin’ Wolf. Measuring “six foot six with the biggest feet I have ever seen on a human being,” the Wolf was a Delta farmer whom Phillips noticed singing on a local radio station. “He had no voice in the sense of a pretty voice, but he had command of every word he spoke,” observed Phillips of this shamanistic blues man. “When the beat got going in the studio, he would sit there and sing, hypnotizing himself. Wolf was one of those raw people … God, to see the fervor in that man’s face when he sang. His eyes would light up, you’d see the veins in his neck and, buddy, there was nothing on his mind but that song.”

  Phillips realized he had no choice but to set up a proper label of his own with exclusive contracts and direct sales channels. He admitted, “If I’d had my way, I’d rather have done only the creative end and left the business to other people, but once you set up in business you have to carry it through.” It was time to start anew and do everything better. “I had chosen the name Sun right at the beginning of 1952 when I had determined to try to start issuing my own recordings. The sun to me—even as a kid back on the farm—was a universal kind of thing. A new day, a new opportunity.”

  Getting Sun off the ground would prove a monumental task. Marion Keisker was dipping into her savings to feed the company with cash flow when, just in time, an experienced record business entrepreneur from Nashville, Jim Bulleit, offered guidance. “He gave me most of the early insight into what I was confronted with—and that was frightening,” Phillips said of his business crash course. Introduced to forty regional independent distributors, Sun scored its first hit in March 1953 with “Bear Cat” by Rufus Thomas. It sold 100,000 copies, and Sun had a seat at the R&B table.

  At the time, Atlantic, having to move 60,000 records every month to break even, was probably the hottest of the pack. Unlike the competition, it was staffed with well-connected New Yorkers with a hotline to the national media. Atlantic’s founder, Ahmet Ertegun, was the son of a high-ranking Turkish diplomat whose family had moved between emb
assies in Paris, London, and Washington. His background provided the cosmopolitan spirit that imbued Atlantic’s epic life.

  His love affair with black music began at the age of ten watching Duke Ellington perform at the London Palladium. “This was my first encounter with black people,” recalled Ertegun. “I was overwhelmed by the elegance of their tuxedos, their gleaming instruments, and their sense of style … I fell under the spell of black music.” When his father was transferred to an influential post in Washington, D.C., young Ahmet began hanging out at a local record store, Waxie Maxie Silverman’s. While studying philosophy in college, he also made himself into an authority on jazz. With the help of a fellow jazz lover, Herb Abramson, and funding from his family dentist, he set up Atlantic Records in 1947.

  By 1953, Ertegun had recruited a formidable new partner, Jerry Wexler, the Billboard journalist who coined the “rhythm and blues” moniker. “The hip of my generation, who were teenagers in the thirties, had always been drawn to Afro-American culture,” the Bronx-born Wexler explained. “In fact, I had always known White Negroes, not pretenders or voyeurs but guys who had opted to leave the white world, married black women, and made Harlem or Watts their habitat. These guys converted.”

  Eloquent and crusading, the hulky Jerry Wexler believed his chief editor at Billboard, Paul Ackerman, was one of the great unsung heroes of these renaissance years. Thanks to Ackerman’s ethic, Billboard offered more than just charts, trade pulp, and advertising space; its editorial line actively supported independents exploring the margins. “In Jewish lore, in every generation the hope of the world rests on ten pure souls—tzaddikim—without whom the universe would fragment. Paul was one such soul,” claimed Wexler with due solemnity. “Nothing would offend Paul more than to be asked to print verbatim the handouts of the record companies. He drew a hard line between puffery and news. Not that he was averse to helping a friend with a harmless plug, but his kindness was leavened with righteous intolerance. Ackerman believed in true editorial content.”

  Above all, Ackerman actively transmitted to writers and readers alike the spirit of enlightened record men. “His heroes were Ralph Peer and Frank Walker, explorers who went with portable equipment to the Smokies, the Delta, the Savannah, the Piedmont, and the cotton bottoms to find Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Jimmie Rodgers and Robert Johnson and Hank Williams. That’s the stuff that Paul loved best—the beginnings, the earliest strain. He also identified with the pioneers who started the independent blues and country labels. He introduced me to many of these men, later to become my competitors—Herman Lubinsky, Syd Nathan, Leonard Chess, Saul Bihari. He dug them because they broke the stranglehold of the pop record labels.”

  When Jerry Wexler joined Atlantic, Ahmet Ertegun explained to him, “Here’s the sort of record we need to make; there’s a black man living in the outskirts of Opelousas, Louisiana. He works hard for money; he has to be tight with a dollar. One morning he hears a song on the radio. It’s urgent, bluesy, authentic, irresistible. He becomes obsessed. He can’t live without this record. He drops everything, jumps in his pick-up, and drives twenty-five miles to the first record store he finds. If we can make that kind of music, we can make it in the business.”

  Getting records to rural audiences relied on airplay. Most of the urban markets had at least one R&B maverick on the airwaves: Alan “Moondog” Freed in Cleveland; Zenas “Daddy” Sears in Atlanta; Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles; Hoss Allen, John Richbourg, and Gene Nobles in Nashville; Clarence “Poppa Stoppa” Hamann in New Orleans; Daddy-O Dewey in Memphis.

  Wexler soon began noticing a sea change. “The rhythm and blues of the late forties was adult in flavor and often spiked with booze,” but suddenly, what was being colloquially termed cat music began creeping into the traditional R&B market. “A picture was beginning to emerge: Kids, especially kids down South, were taking newly invented transistor radios to the beach,” noted Wexler. “White Southerners, I believe, in spite of the traditional aura of racial bigotry, have always enjoyed the most passionate rapport with black music, itself a Southern phenomenon. And in the fifties, white Southern teenagers started the charge towards ballsy rhythm and blues. As the Eisenhower decade became more conformist, the music became more rebellious, more blatantly sexual.”

  In 1953, Atlantic found its game changer in Ray Charles, whose slick musicianship took R&B into a new sound. For obvious reasons, the same task was trickier for Sam Phillips, operating as a lone ranger in Memphis. Everywhere Sam Phillips took his rougher-sounding R&B records, he’d hear the same refrain from storekeepers, café proprietors, and small-town deejays: Black music was corrupting the children of decent, white folk. Avoiding any moral arguments, he’d just lean on the counter and listen. Phillips knew these prejudices ran generations deep.

  Whether it was a reward for persistence or simply good luck, one Saturday afternoon in August 1953, a strange-looking kid walked in off the street to record a ballad for his mother. Spotty, nervous, and sporting a big mop of greasy blond hair, the eighteen-year-old was dressed up in a pink and black outfit bought on Beale Street.

  Keisker invited him to take a seat. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Elvis Presley.”

  As she misspelled his name and settled the $3.98 fee, the teenager tried to strike up a conversation, with a twitchiness that betrayed his best efforts to appear nonchalant.

  “If you know anyone that needs a singer?”

  “What kind of a singer are you?” asked Keisker.

  “I sing all kinds.”

  “Who do you sound like?”

  “I don’t sound like nobody.”

  “What do you sing, hillbilly?”

  “I sing hillbilly,” said Elvis, nodding.

  “Well, who do you sound like in hillbilly?”

  “I don’t sound like nobody.”

  Phillips appeared and ushered the young man into the studio, where Presley sang two old ballads. Within less than half an hour he was led back to the reception with an acetate under his arm. “We might give you a call sometime,” said Phillips, running off to his next job.

  Over the next ten months, Presley kept dropping by, almost making a nuisance of himself but remaining sufficiently polite—almost pitiful—for Phillips to joke as they watched him cross the street, “Here’s ol’ Elvis, coming to see what kind of a star we can make of him today!” Phillips kept his distance inside the studio while Elvis would always ask, “Ma’am, if you know anyone that needs a singer?” Keisker’s answer would always be a gentle no, followed by a few courteous niceties. Presley would close the door behind him, trying to conceal his dejection.

  Then one day in May 1954, while Phillips was visiting a Nashville prison, a black inmate presented him with a ballad that made him think of Elvis. When Keisker found his number and called him up, Elvis literally ran across Memphis so fast she got a shock to see him burst in the door so soon after putting the phone back on the cradle. The ensuing experiment didn’t gel, but Phillips was curious to see what Elvis had in his belly. He stopped taping, and for three hours, Elvis sang everything he knew.

  At the time, Phillips had a kindred spirit in a local electric guitarist named Scotty Moore. In their discussions of music over coffee in a nearby diner, Phillips had come to the conclusion that R&B records “appealed to white youngsters just as Uncle Silas Payne’s stories and songs used to appeal to me … but there was something in many of those youngsters that resisted buying this music. The Southern ones especially felt a resistance that they probably didn’t quite understand. They liked the music, but they weren’t sure whether they ought to like it or not.”

  Everyone had noticed Bill Haley, who recorded a softer cover of “Rocket 88” in 1951, omitting its references to pills. In 1954, Haley scored two massive hits for Decca, “Rock Around the Clock” and a version of Atlantic’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Joe Turner. Jerry Wexler was so intrigued by the phenomenon that he picked up his pen and wrote an essay for Cash Box exclaiming, “I
t happened in the twenties when Perry Bradford and Spencer Williams were as hot as Irving Berlin; it happened when Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters sold their records into millions of white parlors. Now it’s happening again.”

  It proved to be Sam Phillips’s conversations over coffee with Scotty Moore that led to the eureka moment. When Phillips started mentioning Elvis Presley as an example of this unfathomable white youth, Moore got curious and invited Elvis to a jam. Moore called Phillips to give him his thumbs-down, but Phillips persuaded Moore and bassist Bill Black to try Elvis out in a proper audition at Sun. One Monday evening in July 1954, the three musicians arrived. Sam Phillips sat waiting in the control room. The session began awkwardly with the Bing Crosby ballad they had been jamming at Moore’s apartment. Feeling they were stuck in corny territory, Phillips stopped the session and came into the studio.

  Beginning to loosen up, Elvis suddenly began goofing around in a very unfamiliar direction, strumming into a jiving version of an old blues song, “That’s all right mama, that’s all right with me…” Black perked up at the bouncing energy and joined in. Scotty followed with some darting riffs in the Bill Haley style. Phillips was amazed that Elvis even knew the 1946 number by Delta blues singer Arthur Crudup.

  “What are you doing?” Phillips asked excitedly.

  “We don’t know,” the musicians laughed back.

  “Well, back up. Try and find a place to start and do it again.”

  Moore and Black worked out a structure while Phillips advised Elvis to sing it raw, warning that if he was too fake, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for the whole take. Phillips hit the red button, and the musicians launched in.