Sam Phillips and Sun Records

Overview

Elvis Presley was one of the most legendary rock and roll performers of all time. In this lesson, we focus on Presley’s early career in order to understand how and why he was so successful during the 1950s. Elvis’s crossover success and immense commercial appeal turned him into one of the most important musical figures of the twentieth century. Although he continued to sell millions of albums in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1950s were the most important part of his career and the period that had the most profound influence on the development of rock and roll in the United States.

Objectives

Examine Elvis Presley's music and his particular blend of many different styles and genres.
Identify the key figures and institutions that helped turn Presley into the cultural phenomenon that he became during the 1950s
Examine ways in which Presley was turned into a commodity through television appearances and Hollywood films

Sam Phillips and Sun Records

Sam Phillips

In 1950, Sam Phillips started the Memphis Recording Studio. For two dollars, anybody could come into the studio and record a side on an acetate disc a type of gramophone record that was able to be recorded in real time and played back immediately. The Memphis Recording Studio was the only convenient recording studio for Memphis blues artists, and as a result, Phillips recorded artists such as B.B. King, Jackie Brenston, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf simply because he offered one of the few available recording spaces. Although Phillips initially leased his masters to the Chess and Modern labels, he eventually launched his own label, Sun Records record company launched by Sam Phillips in 1952; located in Nashville, in 1952.

One day in 1953, Elvis Presley came in to Phillips’s studio to record two songs for his mother’s birthday. A year later, Presley returned to the studio to record some country tunes. Phillips had brought in country instrumentalists Scotty Moore and Bill Black from a neighborhood Memphis club band to practice and record with him. The first recording Presley made with Moore and Black was a cover version of Big Boy Crudup’s "That’s All Right, Mama ♫."

Sun Studio

Presley recorded ten sides for Sun Records before his contract was sold to RCA-Victor. These recordings do not feature a drum set but instead, include only Presley with Moore on electric guitar and Black on string bass. None of these recordings include a drum set because drums were typically associated with rhythm and blues, and Moore and Black were country musicians. Elvis’s first single for Sun Records included "That’s All Right ♫" on the A side and "Blue Moon of Kentucky ♫" on the B side. "Blue Moon of Kentucky ♫" includes an echo effect that Sam Phillips called slapback an echo effect used by Sam Phillips that was used on many of his recordings, which was a key sonic element of Presley’s early Sun Records recordings. Other Sun recordings such as "Mystery Train ♫" and "Blue Moon ♫" were covers of blues songs, country and western numbers, and Broadway songs.

“Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.”

-Elvis Presley

“Elvis was the major contributor to an entirely new genre of music. Sometimes their exploits were distasteful to people, but they left behind an enormous body of work that endures.”

-Bob Beckel

"Elvis recorded more than 600 songs, but did not write any of them."

Heather Jarvis