Published February 24, 2023, for Revival Theatre Company's production of Million Dollar Quartet
A Million to Two
Sam Phillips broke two formidable barriers on his way to the Million Dollar QuartetBy Jake Stigers
By the time the events of the fabled Million Dollar Quartet occurred, producer Sam Phillips had made an indelible name for himself as a recording impresario, a discoverer of future music legends … and a progressive thinker who effected remarkable changes in an industry, a culture and even a nation that were largely locked in a white-Christian-male hegemony.
When Phillips introduces himself at the beginning of the Million Dollar Quartet musical, he admits he “prob’ly could’a been a big wheel here. But there’s a cussedness ‘bout me.” That “here” was Memphis, TN, where in 1950 he’d opened the Memphis Recording Service—a cheap, hardly-any-frills storefront recording studio. Under the slogan “We Record Anything-Anywhere-Anytime,” he gave literally anyone who walked in off the street the opportunity to make an acetate recording of a song or a special message for a loved one.
But Phillips’ long game extended far beyond capturing endless renditions of “Happy Birthday” for people’s grandmothers.
In 1939, Phillips and his brother took a road trip that passed through Memphis, where he became enamored with the music of Beale Street. Yet-to-be blues and jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and B.B. King were helping define Beale Street as a vibrant, robust music scene celebrating and nurturing music by black artists … music that captured Phillips’ heart and forever defined his musical tastes and sensibilities.
Having grown up farming with his family in Alabama, Phillips was already deeply familiar with the gospel music he heard reverberating from black churches and with the songs he heard black sharecroppers sing as he worked alongside them. The world of Beale Street cemented his lifelong fascination with—and keen ear for—the music created and performed by black amateurs and artists alike.
Phillips started his career in the early 1940s as a deejay and radio engineer at station WLAY in Alabama. Unlike the prevailing standard that dictated stations restrict their programming to music only by black artists or only by white artists, WLAY employed an uncommon “open format” that at night broadcast a mix of music by both white and black artists—a practice that inspired Phillips to hammer at that artificial race barrier the rest of his career.
He moved to Memphis—home of his beloved Beale Street music scene—in 1945 to command the airwaves as an announcer and sound engineer for WREC, which gave him a bigger audience and broader access to the music, musicians and—most importantly—fellow deejays he’d work closely with as he established and built his recording empire.
By the time he left radio and opened his Memphis Recording Service studio, he’d amassed a network of industry connections and become a beacon for struggling artists—especially black artists—who wanted to get their work recorded and hopefully broadcast across the airwaves. To help facilitate this goal, Phillips launched his own label in 1952: The Sun Record Company.
In addition to creating the recording studio’s bread-and-butter “Anything-Anywhere-Anytime” recordings, Phillips and Sun Records slowly built a roster of music up-and-comers like Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf, and a 19-year-old songwriter and music impresario named Ike Turner.
A genuine fan of the black Beale Street artists and the music they created—particularly the blues—Phillips had hoped to both preserve their work and eventually push through restrictive race barriers to get their songs played on white radio stations instead of just black-only stations and late-night open-format programming.
But he couldn’t get anything he recorded to be played on the white stations—even with a decade of industry connections. “There were a LOTTA years when dee-jays wouldn’t play none a’my records. Back then I’d PAY ‘em, but they still wouldn’t play ‘em,” he explains in the Million Dollar Quartet musical.
So he devised a workaround.
Again, a quote from one of his fourth-wall monologues in the musical: “How would it be if I could find me a white kid who could light a fire under a song like the great Negro singers?”
Sam Phillips wasn’t the first person to put black music in the hands of white artists. And while there are endless discussions to be had about white artists appropriating black music, culture and their attendant successes, the narrative can honestly be parsed to allow that Sam Phillips was among an early few who were more interested in getting the music he loved to wider audiences and navigating a racist culture and industry to the best of his ability to make that happen. He saw music as a mechanism of democracy, and he wasn’t above tinkering with elections to give the people what he knew they wanted.
“As Sam saw it,” biographer Peter Guralnick writes, “what he was doing was to help open doors through which black artists and white artists alike—poor people deprived of education and opportunity but possessed of innate wisdom, talent, and imagination—might someday pass.” He brought to Sun an underpinned mission to make recordings that “would help knock down the wall between black and white musicians and markets” and contribute to the fall of racial segregation.
And despite deeply established racial barriers, Phillips’ philosophy and business model worked. In its 16-year run, Sun Records produced more rock-and-roll records—including an impressive 226 singles—than any other record label of its time. He slowly changed opinions, broke down barriers and got black artists to the table … and on the white airwaves.
The white singers and musicians Phillips discovered and promoted through Sun Records are a veritable who’s-who of 1950s icons including Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, Sonny Burgess and the four men he assembled on a fateful December night in 1956: Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and a fresh-faced Jerry Lee Lewis.
Not content with using black voices and music to disrupt current radio standards—and flush with cash from recently selling Elvis Presley to RCA Records—Phillips broke through another radio barrier in 1955 when he launched an all-female radio station with the delightful call letters WHER.
Radio stations weren’t entirely devoid of women’s voices at the time—many stations had one female announcer to cover homemaking, society events and other things traditionally seen as of interest only to women—but an all-women-all-the-time format was truly transformative and profoundly groundbreaking.
Staffed entirely with women both on-air and off, WHER was both progressive for its time and now very cringey from our modern perspective. The station broadcast from a studio he patronizingly called The Doll Bin in the nation’s third-ever Holiday Inn. (Phillips was one of the original investors in this innovative hotel-franchise concept, and it eventually earned him a fortune.) But—again from our modern perspective—the misogyny gets worse: He painted the studio pink and purple and decorated it with bras and panties hanging from a clothesline. I wish I were making that up.
To round out the cringe, he managed to objectify the invisible faces behind the radio voices with the slogan “1000 Beautiful Watts.”
But still: Women. On the radio. In the South. In the 1950s, when women weren’t even allowed to open bank accounts in their own names. Phillips was incredibly progressive, incredibly brave and—if you’ll excuse the gratuitously gendered expression—incredibly ballsy.
WHER was such a hit that it quickly inspired women-only stations to pop up around the country. It broadcast continuously from 1955 until 1973, two years after the National Press Club opened its membership to women and started making the concept of women-only radio less and less remarkable.
The Million Dollar events of December 4, 1956, propelled Phillips and Sun Records into a heyday that lasted through the end of the decade. But as rock and roll slowly disappeared under the waves of pop, funk, folk, psychedelic and the other rock genres that defined the 1960s, Phillips quietly disappeared from the public eye. The artists he discovered and launched into stardom continued to produce iconic music—and the race and gender barriers he challenged continued to crumble—but Phillips turned his attention to other broadcasting, investment and development interests.
And the music he loved and the industry he changed continue to rock and roll forward as his million-dollar legacy.
Jake Stigers is a frequent contributor to theater programs in the Corridor and can often be seen on stages in the Cedar Rapids area. His program notes and essays on art, history, mental illness and anything else he finds interesting are archived on TheOneWhoMumbles.blogspot.com
