Season of Sam
Nashville exhibit to honor Sun founder Phillips
More than a decade after his death, it appears that 2015 is going to be the year of Sam Phillips.
This past week, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville announced a major exhibit focusing on the life and work of the Sun Records founder, producer and American music visionary. Titled “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll: The Cosmic Genius of Sam Phillips,” it will open Aug. 28 and run through June 12, 2016.
“Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll” will be co-curated by the Hall of Fame’s Michael Gray and author/historian Peter Guralnick. Guralnick’s long-anticipated biography, “Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll — 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!,” will be published Nov. 10 by Little, Brown & Co.
“It’s really a fantastic time for Sam Phillips,”
says his son, Jerry Phillips. “It’s hard to put into words what this means to our family. To be recognized this way by the people from the Country Music Hall of Fame … I know he would be thrilled to be honored with an exhibit of his own.”
As the Hall’s Michael Gray explains: “This is not, for lack of a better term, just going to be an ‘Elvis exhibit.’ It’s not just Sun Records, either. It’s really going to tell Sam Phillips’ whole story. It’ll be an instructive look at who he was, his drive to succeed and his personal experiences. It’s really about Sam’s entire journey.”
The Phillips exhibit follows a series of broader roots-music efforts from the Country Music Hall of Fame, including one focusing on the Nashville R&B scene, one on the career of Ray Charles and the current “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats” exhibit.
“Sam is important on so many levels,” adds Gray. “With the blues and country and rock and roll and gospel he was recording, his influence can be felt across the history of music in America and throughout the world.”
Phillips was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001. “He grew up on country music listening to WSM and the Grand Ole Opry,” says Jerry Phillips. “He also bought the Grand Ole Opry (station) transmitter that we still have. It shows you how devoted he was to that kind of music.”
The Phillips family — including his sons Jerry and Knox Phillips — opened up their company and personal collections to curators. “They’ve embraced this fully — 100 percent, 110 percent,” says Gray. “They basically told us we could borrow anything we want. And Sam kept everything, and the family’s kept everything. So we’ve had just amazing access through them.”
“We’ve uncovered some things that would blow your mind,” says Jerry Phillips. “Letters between Sam and (Chess Records’) Leonard Chess talking about Howlin’ Wolf, things like that. The kind of correspondence where you can read and see history happening behind the scenes.”
Among the artifacts expected to be part of the collection in addition to such newly unearthed documents is some of the original equipment used at Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service, as well as rare acetates and family photos. “And we’re adding things from our own collection, and piecemeal from other museums and other collectors,” says Gray. The multimedia exhibit will include vintage video and audio clips and will make use of many hours of unseen interviews from Guralnick’s 2000 documentary on Phillips for the A&E network.
The Hall of Fame will also host a series of complementary events and programming, beginning Aug. 29 with a daytime Phillips tribute concert at its 800-capacity CMA Theater. Although the lineup has not been finalized, Gray notes the show will feature “some of the people who are still around that worked with Sam directly, and younger artists who were influenced by the music that he created.”
The following weekend, Gray will conduct a public interview with former Sun artist Dickey Lee as part of his “Poets and Prophets” songwriters series. In the fall, Guralnick is expected to do a talk and book signing; members of the Phillips family will also be part of a planned symposium later in the year.