Sun Records on CMT

I've been watching it and the casting does seem a little weak, like washed out versions of the originals. The characters I've liked the best are the portrayals of Col. Tom Parker and Sam Phillips. The rest seem very vanilla and largely uninteresting.

The series I am enjoying is Fued. Great casting and dynamic performances from top to bottom.

BBT would have been great as Sam Philips

The mike and molly dude play colonel tom Parker is the star of the show

The southern fried accents are laughable at times. Chad Michael Murray as Sam Philips seems to be channeling Mathew mcconaughey doing his an Elvis impression

The biggest beef I have with the show is the stories are incredibly slow developing

2 episodes in. I'm going to stick with it for the story. But I agree with everyone that casting and accents take away.

I feel like this would have been better if it were a documentary. Make it more like Muscle Shoals.

My wife is watching it.

The few times I've walked through the room while it has been on has made me cringe due to the accents.

Chad Michael Murray is fricking terrible.

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I do wonder how accurate the stories are.

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the bare bones of the stories seem pretty accurate, the timelines and historical sequences are severely fricked up and almost as laughable as the accents


cracks me up how ERRYBUDDY be smokin' in dey house

I had no clue about this when I was at LSU. If I'd known I would've buried her in questions...

Retired LSU professor recounts her days at historic Memphis record company

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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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Barbara Sims and friend c. 1958

also, they used some primitive electric shock therapy on the guy.

scary shite

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Anybody else watching it?

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I've been binging it On Demand.

For a show that purports to be "historical drama", I find it to be extremely poorly researched. The actors playing Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart look like 12 year old kids. I like the kid they have playing Elvis, but I think if Elvis were alive, he'd take exception to the way they portray Vernon Presley as a semi-abusive drunk, when by all accounts, he was pretty much a doting and supportive father.

Elvis' first hit for Sun was "That's All Right", not "Blue Moon of Kentucky" (which was the B-side). And I'm pretty sure the Presleys were too poor for Elvis to have had a motorcycle in HS. And he didn't drive a truck for Crown Electric until AFTER he had graduated from Humes High.

Colonel Tom Parker, while a scoundrel IRL, wasn't the borderline criminal the show portrays him to be.

There's a lot of other little stuff but that's the main stuff I caught.

Frankly, I'm disappointed. I went into the series WANTING to like it. I mean, I understand artistic license and all, but given the subject matter, this show could've been so much better had they just done their homework a little bit more diligently and stuck to the script. It's a fascinating enough story as it actually happened.