re: Sun Records on CMT

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Local author Barbara Barnes Sims was there. LSU Press published her account of the record company, “The Next Elvis: Searching for Stardom at Sun Records,” in August.

Before Sims taught English at LSU for 36 years, she worked at Sun in promotion and publicity from 1957 to 1960. The label ceased to be commercially viable by the early 1960s, but by then its place in music history was set

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Sims, a native of Corinth, Mississippi, was 24 when she joined Sun Records. Except for the 34-year-old Phillips, the company’s staff consisted of young people in their 20s and teens. Like Sims, most of the company’s staff, artists and musicians came from within a 90-mile radius of Memphis.

Sims accepted a job at Sun even though she knew nothing about the record business. She’d previously searched the South unsuccessfully for a position related to her college degree in radio and TV and her experience as a reporter and radio host. In the late 1950s, women weren’t hired for such jobs. The only interviews Sims got were for writing commercials, a field she didn’t like.

In Phillips, Sims found a boss who disdained normal procedure. He not only hired women to work at Sun, he founded a Memphis radio station, WHER, that had an almost entirely female staff.

Phillips gave Sims respect, autonomy and a position that had national responsibility. During her calls to radio stations coast to coast, she never encountered a female disc jockey or program director. Nor did she encounter a female TV dance show host. In another example of male exclusivity, apparently all of the reporters and critics at Billboard, Cashbox and Music Reporter were men.

“Sam was a visionary,” Sims said. “He was so far ahead of his time.”

Sims never heard Phillips say so while she worked for him, but in interviews he gave years later he recalled the derision he experienced in the racially segregated South after he recorded black blues artists in the early 1950s.

“Sam was for the outsider,” Sims said. “He worked with blacks and poor whites. He said Elvis Presley looked as oppressed as any black person he ever saw. Blacks and poor whites in Southern society were ignored. Sam wanted the music of both groups to not be ignored. He thought their music had a vitality that commercial music didn’t have.”

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