The Rise of Sun Records

The son of a Florence, Alabama, farmer, Sam Phillips grew up with a love of traditionally black music. Born on January 5, 1923, Phillips befriended some of the black sharecroppers in the area as a child and learned to love the rhythmic blues music they taught him. This love of blues and country-based music eventually steered his career designs. With no money to go to law school, as he had aspired to do, Phillips instead studied audio engineering at the Alabama Polytechnical Instititute. He took his degree and settled into a DJ position at WLAY radio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. After a subsequent stop in Nashville, Phillips finally made his way to the musical Mecca where he would find his fame, Memphis.

From the first time he visited Memphis in 1939, Phillips fell in love the sounds emanating from the clubs and the street corner buskers on Beale Street. He was electrified by a town that seemed to run on music � good music. And so, in 1945 he moved his wife Becky, pregnant at that time with their eldest son Knox, to Memphis, where he was both an on-air personality and an engineer at WREC. On his nationally syndicated Saturday Afternoon Tea Dance show, Phillips mixed in some of his beloved rhythm and blues with the jazz and pop offerings of the day. Ultimately, though, Phillips yearned to do more than play music; he had to make it.