![]() The second southern rock pioneer from Tennessee was Carl Perkins, who grew up listening to country music on the radio and the blues in the cotton fields. Yet most music writers believe Presley never had as much fun or sounded as fresh and exciting as he did in his early recordings with Sun Records. Phillips sold Presley’s contract to RCA Records, where Elvis had success making hits out of an extraordinary variety of music. Elvis’s compatriots at Sun included other rockabilly pioneers such as Johnny Cash from Arkansas, Jerry Lee Lewis from Louisiana, and Carl Perkins from Tennessee. The term “rockabilly” blended the new term rock music with the popular Tennessee stereotype of the hillbilly. Presley’s rhythm-n-blues side is well known, but the country aspects of his early career were equally important. Presley’s “That’s All Right” surprised Phillips with its popularity, and his second record, “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” was even more successful. He supposedly claimed, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”Įlvis Presley turned out to be that man. Phillips began to look for a white musician to play the songs black musicians were turning into hits. ![]() In 1952 Phillips opened a new studio he called Sun Records, where the recordings tended to be lean and raw, with one track, a powerful string bass, and few backup musicians or singers. It had a rough, raucous sound, in part because the band had broken an amplifier and Phillips repaired it with a piece of paper that made a guitar sound like an electrified, out-of-tune saxophone. In 1951 he recorded “Rocket 88” by Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm, a song Phillips later called the first rock-n-roll song. Rockabilly was the first rock-n-roll tradition that Tennesseans contributed to the rock music revolution, a tradition traced to the work of Sam Phillips in Memphis during the 1950s. The A side was “That’s All Right,” a blues song by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, and the B side was Bill Monroe’s bluegrass standard, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” From its very beginnings, two traditions–blues and country–and two cities–Memphis and Nashville–have shaped southern rock music. The first record Elvis Presley released in 1954 shows the inspired ways Tennesseans merged musical traditions into something new and exciting called rock music.
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