New bio celebrates Sam Phillips, rock-and-roll pioneer, discoverer of Elvis

Who invented rock-and-roll?

Peter Guralnick, the justly esteemed biographer of Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke, calls his richly immersive new book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll (Little, Brown, 748 pages, $32). Phillips was the owner of Sun Studios in Memphis, where many of the early greats recorded.

Presley was the chief popularizer, the charismatic King whose gyrating hips set off a worldwide youthquake while he led a charge with fellow trailblazers such as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bill Haley.

In 1954, Presley teamed up with guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black for his first single, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right." But there were plenty of songs in the previous decade with a claim to being the first legitimate rock-and-roll record.

Among the wildcat R&B and jump-blues tracks in the running are Wynonie Harris' 1948 "Good Rockin' Tonight," Jimmy Preston & the Prestonians' 1949 "Rock the Joint," and "Rocket 88," the electrifying 1951 cut credited to Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats.

("Credited to" because, although Brenston was the "Rocket 88" vocalist, the song was the work of Ike Turner & His Kings of Rhythm, the outfit led by a 19-year-old piano-pounding genius better known for later scoring hits with - and physically abusing - his wife, Tina Turner.)

Of the pre-Presley claimants, the closest thing to a consensus has formed around "Rocket 88." That song has something in common with "That's All Right" and the rest of Presley's astounding initial recordings, not to mention early work by American vernacular pioneers B.B. King, Carl Perkins, Rosco Gordon, Charlie Rich, and Roy Orbison: They were all recorded by Phillips at Sun Studios.

Which is why Guralnick calls Phillips The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll. The word invented might be pushing it. Discovered, which Guralnick uses in the mouthful of a subtitle - How One Man Discovered Howlin' Wolf, Ike Turner, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Elvis Presley, and How His Tiny Label, Sun Records of Memphis, Revolutionized the World! - is more accurate.

Guralnick, however, argues that invented fits because of the active role Phillips took in the studio. This son of Florence, Ala., was an artist who shaped great works as Michaelangelo sculpted David. ("In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action," the Renaissance man wrote. "I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it.")

"That was what Sam Phillips saw not in marble," writes Guralnick, "but in untried, untested, unspoken-for people: an eloquence and a gift that sometimes they did not know they even possessed." That sounds like the job description of a record producer, a title that Phillips, Guralnick writes, "would always disdain: I think he might have preferred to be called a practicing psychologist."

Phillips, who died in 2003 at 80 - still looking shockingly youthful with a full head of red hair and Wolfman beard - made his psychological rounds while rock-and-roll was still being defined.

He preferred to be a studio owner rather a label head, and he formed Sun Records only after being victimized in sketchy business dealings with owners like Leonard Chess in Chicago and the Los Angeles-based (but Pottstown, Pa., born) Bihari brothers.

In Sun's 1950s heyday, Phillips remained stubbornly independent - he famously sold Presley's contract to RCA for $35,000 and used the money to get out of debt and finance Johnny Cash's career - while turning the label into a hit factory.

In addition to the well-known brand names, Phillips released all sorts of terrific music that "tickled" him, to use one of his favorite words. His artists ranged from the inimitable Howlin' Wolf - the bluesman who, along with Rich, Phillips considered the most profound human he ever encountered - to Lewis, who looked poised to become as big a star as Presley until word got out that he had married his 13-year-old cousin Myra.

Other singular talents included one-man blues band Joe Hill Louis, gospel convict group the Prisonaires, and rockabilly slapback star Charlie Feathers. Bob Dylan once wrote: "Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself created the most crucial, uplifting, and powerful records ever made."

The fabulous Guralnick-compiled two-CD, 55-song sound track to the book is also titled Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll (Yep Roc) nolead begins **** nolead ends . As it amply demonstrates, Phillips was a great believer in "imperfect perfection." That meant, as Guralnick writes in the notes to the set, "grabbing hold of the moment, whatever the moment might be, and once you had it, never letting go."

A perfectly imperfect example: Phillips stuffed newspaper into guitarist Willie Kizart's broken amplifier during the recording of "Rocket 88," thereby creating the distorted sound of this ode to "oozin' and cruisin' and havin' fun" and bolstering its claim to be the first true rock song. Another example would be when he realized he had found what he was looking for when Presley, Black, and Moore started throwing themselves into "That's All Right" with reckless abandon.

Phillips is famous for looking for - and finding - someone like Presley. Marion Keisker, Phillips' assistant at Sun, told Guralnick that Phillips would repeatedly utter what would become his most-quoted phrase: "If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars."

Guralnick argues that Phillips' motivation was less that billion dollars than finding a vehicle to bring all that was great and good about blues and gospel and country music - the whole mélange of improperly disrespected American music - to the audience it deserved. "I knew the physical separation of the races, but I knew the integration of their souls," Phillips told Guralnick, talking about why he first opened a studio in Memphis in 1950, "when Negro artists in the South just had no place to go."

From today's perspective, Phillips' greatest discovery is often portrayed as a mere cultural appropriator - "Elvis was a hero to most / But he never meant [anything] to me," in Chuck D. of Public Enemy's damning formulation. But just as the two magisterial volumes of Guralnick's Presley bio - Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love - paint a much more nuanced picture of Presley, so The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll captures the complexity of the colorful Phillips, a flawed visionary known for his "eloquence, loquacity, and Ciceronian circularity of expression."

The author loves his subject - and loves writing about him. On the opening page, Phillips commands Guralnick: "Don't let history down." Charged with that task, the historian produces a book that can stand with his best, and that is far more entertaining and lively than Dream Boogie, his 2005 Sam Cooke bio.

Guralnick can get carried away, as when he compares Phillips to Mark Twain and William Faulkner, but a parallel to another bearded populist is apt. Like Walt Whitman, Phillips "heard America singing, and like Whitman, he was determined to celebrate that song in all its variegated glory, giving voice to the dispossessed, both black and white, providing a forum . . . that was at the heart of the democratic experience." Phillips may not have invented rock-and-roll, but without him, those voices might never have been heard. For that, rock-and-roll fans should be eternally grateful.

ddeluca@phillynews.com

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