It’s said, where you live determines everything. Rock ’n’ roll lives at 706 Union Avenue in Memphis. In fact, 75 years ago, the place became integral to its birth. If 1950 saw the birth of Memphis Recording Studios, two years later it evolved into Sun Studio and the world had to wait another summer before a teenager walked in, slicked back his greased hair and waited his turn to cut a disc for his Ma.
Elvis Presley sang one of his favourites, the Ink Spots’s My Happiness, and then tried the country tear-jerker, That’s When Your Heartbreak Begins. All it needed was time. And then, a legend was born. Not just Presley, the address became home to the music of Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. The list has only touched the tip of the musical iceberg that chilled t2oS when we walked in through the door recently.
After all, Sun Studio — in many ways — brought down racial barriers like few other cultural institutions have. Behind the legend was a phenomenon called Sam Phillips, who sort of gave birth to the popular soundtrack of the world. “Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles,” goes the famous John Lennon quote. Actually, without Sun Studios, pop music may have sounded very different.
Sun Studio is where several of the tracks critics have claimed as the first rock ’n’ roll songs were cut.
An enigma named Sam Phillips
The studio’s founder Sam Phillips was raised as ordinary as it could get. The youngest of eight children, he was raised on a farm on the Tennessee River, just outside Florence, Alabama. At first, it was a life of comparative comfort. “Then came the Crash of 1929. One day, my father had money. The next thing he knew, it was gone. A few hundred dollars left maybe. All gone. That kind of thing could break you, but my father had courage and determination and refused to give up,” Phillips once said.
In 1941, he had to leave high school to help make ends meet at home. His father had died just after Pearl Harbour, and Phillips had to help support his mother and aunt. He worked at a grocery store and later, a funeral parlour where he learned a thing or two about interpersonal skills, about “how to handle people and their problems later on”.
He wanted to study law, but his economic reality forced him to look at radio. He broke into radio when he conducted and emceed a band for a college concert. Impressed by his performance, Jim Connally, station manager at WLAY, hired him.
The music of his era — Black blues, hillbilly and spirituals — inspired him. The music he favoured was that of hardship. He lived in an era when it was impossible not to grow to love the music of oppression and that which uplifted people — blues, country and gospel — either in the fields or on a weekend.
The book Good Rockin’ Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll finds him saying: “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.”
He married Rebecca Burns from Sheffield in 1942, and they began a journey that would take them to WMSL in Decatur, Alabama, for three years and then to WLAC in Nashville for a few months before settling in Memphis in June 1945 to take up a position with WREC where he hosted the Songs of the West show under the pseudonym of Pardner.
To get on top of his game, he applied his engineering expertise to the operation of a recording studio. Ultimately, he started Memphis Recording Service in January 1950. It was a tough time to keep a musical venture going in Memphis. His bosses at WREC warned him against starting a recording business. He did.
The rent at 706 Union was a princely $150 a month. Phillips opened the doors of the Memphis Recording Service in January 1950. Becky Phillips took a photo of her husband standing outside the studio and pasted it into the scrapbook with the caption: ‘A Man’s Dream Fulfilled — What Next?’
Inside Sun Studio, often considered the birthplace of rock 'n' roll.
The story of Sun Studio is incomplete without the mention of Marion Keisker, Phillips’s assistant. She was born in Memphis in 1917. Keisker joined WREC in 1946, a year after Phillips. When Phillips opened his own recording studio, she came along as his office manager, although she continued to work part-time at the station until 1955. She had a background in light classical music but that didn’t stop her from taking an interest in the blues at Sun Studio. She shared Phillips’s vision. She was the one who called musicians, kept records, paid them and handled day-to-day affairs. And she was present in the studio when a young man named Elvis Presley turned up.
A young boy walked in
Life is an accident and so is fame. Presley used to drive past Memphis Recording Service in his battered Ford pick-up. He knew all about the place and wanted to cut a platter for his mother — $4, two sides.
In 1953, like any other hustler in Memphis carrying a guitar, he arrived at Sun Studio. Keisker asked him what he could sing. He replied: “Anything.” He recorded two tracks but didn’t like the sound of his own voice.
Phillips, who loved black music and sold it, was on the lookout for a white man who could sing it. The kid in the studio was probably influenced by Joe Hill Louis’s We All Gotta Go Sometime and Rufus Thomas’s Bear Cat. Keisker decided to put the boy on tape.
Some of the records produced by Stax Records. Picture: Mathures Paul
The young man finished his session and took home the platter for his mother. When Phillips heard the tape later, he was impressed, but said Presley needed some work.
Keisker had his address and the phone number of a friend. A few months later, in January 1954, Presley returned to cut another private record. He sang Casual Love Affair and I’ll Never Stand in Your Way.
Meanwhile, Phillips had come across a song called Without You. Keisker thought Presley had the right voice. He was awful.
After a coffee break, Phillips asked Presley what he could do and he demonstrated with western, gospel and whatnot. This is when Phillips arranged a meeting between Presley and a skinny guitarist known to all as Scotty Moore. Later, they were joined by Bill Black, a bass player. Everything was about to change.
Phillips was in the control room, the boys were slugging cola and Presley tried one of his favourites: Arthur Crudup’s That’s All Right Mama, a jumping blues number. Presley cut into it, singing high and mean, his guitarist and bassist followed suit. Phillips felt electrified. Almost by accident, he had found what he wanted. The vocal on That’s All Right Mama is high, urgent and sensual.
Rocket 88 moment
Presley was one part of the Sun Studio story. The studio’s roster remains envied by every big record label in the world. March 1951 became memorable. Ike Turner drove into Memphis with a band featuring a young singer named Jackie Brenston. Ike, Jackie and the band had a rollicking R&B number — called Rocket 88, after the hot Oldsmobile coupe — and they decided to audition it for Phillips.
During the drive from Clarksdale, guitarist Willie Kizart’s amp fell off the top of the car, breaking the speaker cone. It was impossible to get it fixed. Phillips took a chance and overamplified it, making it the centerpiece of the rhythm track. He later characterised Rocket 88 as the first rock ’n’ roll record, though that’s debatable. Turner said later that he thought the record was R&B instead of rock, but he noted its enormous influence: “I think Rocket 88 is the cause of rock ’n’ roll existing.”
“I opened the Memphis Recording Service,” Phillips told writers Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins, “with the intention of recording singers and musicians from Memphis and the locality who I felt had something that people should be able to hear. I’m talking about blues — both the country style and the rhythm style — and also about gospel or spiritual music and about White country music. I always felt that the people who played this type of music had not been given the opportunity to reach an audience. I feel strongly that a lot of the blues was a real true story.”
He felt there was a “bigger audience for blues than just the Black man of the mid-South. There were city markets to be reached, and I knew that whites listened to blues surreptitiously”.
Over to Stax
Records
While the music was getting louder at Sun Records, a few miles away, music of a different kind was getting made at Stax Records, known for soul classics by such giants as Otis Redding, Rufus Thomas, and Sam and Dave. Among the first singles that first put the Memphis company on the map was the memorable ballad You Don’t Miss Your Water, written and recorded in 1961 by a local musician named William Bell. It somewhat managed to have a brush with the charts but it was the cornerstone for Southern soul sound.
Leading the charge at Stax Records was Jim Stewart, who founded the music institution with his sister, Estelle Axton. Stewart entered the music business in 1957 by establishing Satellite Records in a relative’s garage. The idea was to release country and rockabilly music. Within three years, it went on to produce music that defined Black popular music.
“I had scarcely seen a Black person till I was grown,” Stewart, who grew up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a farm in rural West Tennessee, has been quoted in Peter Guralnick’s 1986 book Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.
Little did he know that Stax went on to deliver over 100 singles on the pop chart during Stewart’s time at the label, including Eddie Floyd’s Knock on Wood and Isaac Hayes’s theme from the movie Shaft. The music produced here went on to shape musicians who define pop and rock music, like Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones, besides countless hip-hop and R&B artistes.
At Stax, one highlight of the exhibit is Isaac Hayes’ massive white and red tufted-velvet desk and chair.
Stewart’s decision to record Black music could be traced to him hearing Ray Charles sing What’d I Say. “I was converted immediately,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “I had never heard anything like that before. It allowed me to expand from country to R&B, into jazz, into gospel, wrapped all in one. That’s what Stax is.”
The label began to be taken seriously soon after operations moved to 926 McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. It was just another day when local disc jockey and singer Rufus Thomas walked in and said he wanted to record a duet with his daughter Carla. ’Cause I Love You turned out to be a regional hit but the ballad Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes) by Carla reached both the R&B and pop Top 10. Then came 1961’s Last Night by the Mar-Keys, an R&B combo that gave shape to Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Stax’s legendary band.
Funky onions
The duo at the top of Satellite Records understood music was taking different directions. The label acquired a new name, combining the first two letters of the owners’ last names to form the portmanteau Stax. That was just the beginning. In 1962, Green Onions, by Booker T. & the M.G.’s left an indelible mark on the soul music scene. The song was based around an organ line young Booker T. Jones had written. Guitarist Steve Cropper later said the original title was ‘Funky Onions’, but, according to Jones, it sounded like a cuss word. “So we retitled it Green Onions.”
Stewart was a genius. He was often the credited producer on many records made at Stax, including Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness and Wilson Pickett’s In the Midnight Hour.
Just when things were moving into top gear, tragedy struck when Redding and a few members of the band Bar-Kays died in a plane crash in 1967. It took place around the time when Stax dissolved its distribution deal with Atlantic. The following year, in April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis brought in the dark clouds. Later that year, Stax was sold to Gulf & Western in exchange for stock in the company. In 1975, creditors forced Stax into bankruptcy and with it some 800 golden gems.
Stax Museum of American Soul Music serves as a reminder of the contribution Stax Records made to soul and blues music.
Stax’s headquarters were demolished in 1989, but in 2003, a new building came up, with a reproduction of the studio, opened as the Stax Museum of American Soul Music and the Stax Music Academy.
Sounds of Memphis
Memphis, of course, is more than just Stax Records, Sun Studio or Presley’s home, Graceland. The city gave birth to music that’s “grittier than Motown”, in the words of Isaac Hayes, a co-writer of songs like Soul Man and writer of Theme from Shaft for which he won both Grammy and Academy Awards. “It’s closer to where blues began. It’s down-home soul music, born out of blues and gospel,” Hayes told The New York Times.
Memphis soul has been the soundtrack of the Civil Rights Movement. When you take a walk through Beale Street, you can feel the vibe that B.B. King or Al Green once felt. Standing outside the Lansky building, one can’t help but remember how Presley bought his clothes back in the 1950s. You can still find guitarists and harmonica players at the pubs in the evening, singing sweet notes. You can still hear musicians belting out Muddy Waters songs.
Memphis has also taught the world how to develop economic opportunity around musical heritage. After his death in 1977, Presley’s Graceland became a Mecca for music lovers. Sun Records routinely draws a healthy share of musical devotees.
Music continues to spill from juke joints and blues clubs. There are always the souvenir shops on Beale Street that you shouldn’t avoid. The problem with Memphis is that two days is not enough.
The throbbing Beale Street in Memphis.
The number of hit singles that flew out of Memphis recording studios between 1950 and 1975 continue to inspire musicians. Be it That’s All Right Mama, Presley’s Sun hit, Dusty Springfield’s Son of a Preacher Man and Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, there is so much the city has given.
It’s a city you will easily fall in love with because of how it embraces history... of all kinds. Sun Studio is a stone’s throw away from the gravesite of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan. Martin Luther King Jr was shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
But the folks of the city rose above all problems. They were always motivated to see a better tomorrow… they were dreamers. Presley started out poor but he went from a small house in Tupelo to Graceland mansion in Memphis. At Stax, Isaac Hayes dived into his gospel background for potential hits for performers such as the Soul Children.
Even after Presley left the building, music continued to play — Cat Power’s brilliant indie effort and Justin Timberlake’s dance-y numbers. You can still hear the words of Sam Phillips floating through the Memphis air: “If you’re not doing something different, you’re not doing anything.”