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Charleston est. 1670, pop. 127,999 (2013) • French Quarter
• Edward McCrady, Jr. (1833-1903) graduated College of Charleston, 1853 • prominent lawyer, state representative, historian & prolific author • his father, Edward McCrady Sr. (1802-1892) was Yale alum, opposed States Rights in the Nullification Crisis of 1832 • by 1850, no longer a unionist, McCrady Sr. resigned his District Attorney post & signed the Ordinance of Secession, 1861
• McCrady Jr. entered Confederate service as captain of Irish Volunteers • rose to rank of lieutenant colonel • wounded at Second Manassas in VA & again at Fredericksburg
“It was the consummation of the grand debate between Massachusetts and South Carolina. Webster and Calhoun had exhausted the argument in the Senate chamber, and now the soldiers of the two states were fighting it out eye to eye, hand to hand, man to man. If the debates in the Senate chamber were able and eloquent, the struggle on that knoll at Manassas was brave and glorious.” – Major Edward McCrady, 1st South Carolina (CSA)
• reflecting on causes of the Civil War in a speech at 1882 reunion of his regiment, McCrady contended that "it was not for slavery for which we fought, but... for the sovereignty of our State and for the supremacy of our race."
• as a conservative member of SC General Assembly, McCrady proposed legislation to impose a poll tax & literacy test (to prove ability to read candidates' names) on both black & white citizens' right to vote • to opponents who argued that this would disenfranchise thousands of white voters, he replied, "We care not if it does... To them, too, we say the schools are open."
• Edward McCrady Jr. obituary
• St. Philip's Church, National Register # 73001695, 1973 • designated National Historic Landmark, 1973 • French Quarter Historic District, National Register # 73001682, 1973
A friend designed the artwork for a scifi book see here for the book www.goodreads.com/book/show/57964887-planet-b-part-1-rewo...
I wish I could do stuff like this.
This piece wasn't part of my final portfolio, but I like how it turned out for the most part and decided to upload it. The oldest boy was a joy and very enthusiastic, but unfortunately he got scolded for it and I had trouble trying to coax a smile from him.
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That Potent Alchemy (Treading the Boards #3) Is his love her safe place to land…or just smoke and mirrors? Grace Owens danced her feet bloody to become the finest en pointe prodigy of her generation, but the only accolade she longed for—her father’s approval—never came. Finally, broken and defeated, she cut ties and fled to London to live life on her own terms. Now, after four years as an actress in London’s smaller theatres, a last-minute production change lands her right where she never wanted to be again. Front and center in the ballet—and back in toe shoes. From his perch on the catwalks, machinist and stagecraft illusionist Isaac Caird can’t take his eyes off Grace. A woman who wears men’s clothing, but not as a disguise. An exquisite beauty who doesn’t keep a lover. A skilled dancer who clearly hates every pirouette. The perfect lines of her delicate body inspire him to create a new illusion—with her as the centerpiece—that will guarantee sold-out shows. Maybe even attract a royal’s patronage. But first he has to get her to look at him. And convince her the danger is minimal—especially within the circle of his arms. Featuring a gender-fluid ballet dancer, an amateur chemist who only occasionally starts fires, and an old rivalry that could tear them apart. GoodReads | Amazon
Here is a summary of “Creep, Shadow!” posted on the Goodreads website (at www.goodreads.com/book/show/9126201-creep-shadow):
This Two Thousand Year-Old Sorceress Had the Power to Turn People into Shadows! Here is A. Merritt's masterwork, our publisher's pick for the best of all his classic fantasies. Creep, Shadow! Is based on legends of Ys and an old Breton song. "Fisher, fisher, have you seen/White Dahut, the Shadow Queen/Riding on her stallion black/At her heels her shadow pack?"
Had the last King and Princess of wicked Ys, returned after three thousand years? Why were they creating an exact replica of Stonehenge on their New Jersey estate? What was the Mael Bennique, the Breaker of Chests? And what was the dread Gatherer in the Cairn? And can men and women really be turned into shadows and made the helpless slaves of the one who transformed them?
Ethnologist Alan Caranac (who may just be the reincarnation of the Alain de Carnac who brought about the destruction of sinful Ys and its evil rulers) has to find out the answers, for one of his best friends has been killed, and perhaps transformed into a shadow, while his fiancee Helen, her brother, Bill, and the famed Dr. Lowell have already been marked for death or worse! But first Alan will have to enter the tower of the Demoiselle Dahut de Ys in New York and journey through it thousands of years into the past to her tower in the legendary city from which she draws her name. And then return, if he can!
In this stunning sequel to his classic “Burn, Witch, Burn!,” the great A. Merritt, an authority on ancient magic and civilizations, captured the feeling of sorcery and the supernatural as never before! Discover why the New York Times raved that Merritt's writings spin "a shimmering, glittering web of imagination" whose "fertility never seems to lessen"; andwhy Analog magazine called his stories "crammed with fascinating people and creatures." Here is a classic by the author the Science Fiction Encyclopedia crowned "the supreme fantasy genius."
Blessed be the memory of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Gazing back through the rosy haze of history, we recall the Dodgers as the cherished sons of Brooklyn, a noble band of knights-errant who brought honor to the land by playing baseball the way it was meant to be played, simply for the love of the game. Representing a borough of immigrants, they integrated earlier than any other team, their fans united in adoration of stars both black and white: Jackie and Pee Wee, Campy and Gil, Newk and the Duke. When "Dem Bums" finally vanquished the hated New York Yankees and brought a championship to Brooklyn in 1955, after having fallen short against their villainous crosstown rivals in each of their past five World Series appearances, it seemed to validate the belief, later phrased so eloquently by Martin Luther King Jr., that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
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Some guys with bats hanging out at Dodger spring training ahead of the team's triumphant 1955 season. From left to right: Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges.
This is the weirdest picture of the Dodgers I could find. They've just set a Major League record with ten straight wins to open the 1955 season, and manager Walter Alston is celebrating by breaking a record over the head of Don Zimmer, who went 4 for 4 with two doubles and a home run in their 14-4 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. Simultaneously caught mid-blink, from left to right, are Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, and Duke Snider. Gil Hodges is the only one who dares to gaze upon the scene with uncovered eyes.
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And so it was with great horror that Brooklynites watched the Dodgers, the borough's heart and soul, move to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. The greed. The deceit. The betrayal! Animosity for the team's owner, Walter O'Malley, ran rampant, expressed succinctly in this old joke:
If Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley are in a room and you only have two bullets, who do you shoot?
O'Malley, twice.
It's supposedly an old joke, anyway. You can find it repeated all over the place, but I haven't discovered a reference to it in any source published before 2000. I wonder if "memories" of the joke are just mutations of this story told in 1984's Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
On the larger subject of historical fidelity, who knows if the Dodgers were really as universally revered, as central to Brooklyn's identity, as the old stories make it seem. They certainly had their share of die-hard fans, and attendance at their home games at Ebbets Field exceeded the league average almost every year from 1919 on, but not always to the extent you might expect. During their final five seasons, they finished in first place three times but their home-game attendance was less than eight percent above the league average, and it even dipped below average in 1957. Perhaps decades of romantic reminiscences by a generation of fans whose youths were defined by the Dodgers' presence and then their absence have warped our view of the past, transforming a fairly popular ball club into the stuff of legend.
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A couple of ridiculous-looking, straight-out-of-central-casting fans await the start of game four of the 1949 World Series at Ebbets Field. You can see more photos of handsome Brooklyn fans here.
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But regardless of how grounded in reality it is, the Dodger mythos is now firmly established in the public consciousness. (Meanwhile, nostalgia for the New York Giants, who moved to San Francisco the same year the Dodgers left town, runs nowhere near as high. The Giants were the better team over the decades, with five World Series titles to the Dodgers' one, although they were less successful in the years leading up to their move. They did win the World Series in 1954, however, and they had a young man who would become one of the greatest players of all time, if not the greatest, Willie Mays, roaming center field. But their fan base, judging by their home-game attendance at the Polo Grounds, didn't quite match the Dodgers'; it probably didn't help that the eternally dominant Yankees played right across the Harlem River, one subway stop away. And being located in Manhattan, with all its iconic attractions, meant the Giants could never be as synonymous with their home borough as the Dodgers could.)
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Back in the early years of Ebbets Field, fans could watch games for free if they climbed high enough up in the trees that stood beyond the outfield walls. Youngsters were also known for lying on the sidewalk outside the stadium and peering beneath a big double door in right-center field to get a glimpse of the action.
Tree-climbing Giants fans would pull the same move up on Coogan's Bluff above the Polo Grounds. Their view wasn't as good, with the infield obscured, but they did get their exploits memorialized on a Life magazine cover.
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It was O'Malley's desire for a new ballpark to replace the aging Ebbets Field that drove his decision to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles. He originally had a plan to keep the team in Brooklyn, however, by building what would have been the world's first domed stadium, designed by Buckminster Fuller, on a site near the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. O'Malley wanted the city to use its power of eminent domain to help him acquire the land he needed, forcing unwilling property owners to sell under the premise that the new ballpark would serve the common good. His scheme would have also required heavy public expenditures on infrastructure to support the stadium. Robert Moses and other government officials were less than enthusiastic about the idea. Here's Brooklyn congressman John J. Rooney addressing the matter on the floor of the House of Representatives in 1957:
For years the Brooklyn Baseball Club has coined money for the few stockholders of its closely held stock. The owners never shared any of their profits with the fans. They took advantage of the Dodger fans at every turn . . . I say let them move to Los Angeles if the alternative is to succumb to an arrogant demand to spend the taxpayers' money to build a stadium for them in Brooklyn. I am opposed to uprooting decent citizens living in my congressional district in the vicinity of . . . Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in order to put more money in the pockets of my dear friend Walter O'Malley and the private profitmaking Brooklyn Baseball Club stockholders. . . . Let Walter O'Malley and his stockholders who have no civic pride for Brooklyn, where they made their money, move to the west coast in quest of more almighty dollars.
Ebbets Field was razed (with a wrecking ball painted to look like a baseball) a couple of years after the Dodgers left, in 1960, but numerous parts of the ballpark managed to escape destruction. After demolition began, fans were invited to come take seats for free. At an on-site auction held after most of the stadium had been torn down, a wide array of items were put up for bid, including "bats, balls, plaques, pennants, player stools, Ebbets Field sod, grand stand seats, bases, the pitcher's rubber, lockers, bricks, ushers' uniforms, pictures, electrical fixtures, bat racks and team schedules". The auction only raised about $2,300 in total, whereas you can now find many Ebbets Field seats selling online for more than that. Even a single brick can go for well over $1,000 these days.
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Fans carrying off some goodies from Ebbets Field. Note the pots of sod in their hands. The Baseball Hall of Fame has one such pot in its collections, although the sod died long ago and now it's just a pot of dried-up dirt.
An illustration of the unique bat-and-ball chandelier that lit up the Ebbets Field rotunda. This appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1913, the year Ebbets Field opened.
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Marvin Kratter, who purchased the stadium in 1956 and then built the Ebbets Field Apartments in its place (and who also built the Bridge Apartments — a.k.a. the Four Sisters, a name I continue to repeat in hopes it will one day catch on — above I-95 in Washington Heights), also gave away lots of stuff to be reused elsewhere. He provided 2,200 seats and some lights to furnish a pair of ball fields for workhouse inmates on Hart Island. The first game at the newly christened Kratter Field pitted the workhouse all-stars against a team of army men from the island's Nike missile battery. According to the NY Times, "the soldiers claimed seven runs in their first time at bat, but the inmate scorer and umpire said it had been only five. . . . The home side also got five runs in its first turn, but by then it was 3:50 P.M. and the game was called because it was time for the regular count of prisoners." (Here are a couple of photos from 1991 showing remnants of the seats at the abandoned fields, which have since been cleared.)
According to an article from 1961, one of the seats sent to Hart Island was subsequently "liberated", shipped across the country "by ferry, limousine and jet plane", and given to Chuck Connors, the star of TV's The Rifleman. Connors had previously enjoyed a glorious career with the Dodgers, grounding into a game-ending double play in his one and only plate appearance with the team, at Ebbets Field in 1949. (He also played 66 games for the Cubs in 1951, as well as 53 games of basketball with the Boston Celtics between 1946 and 1947.) When Ebbets was being torn down, Connors asked his agents to help him locate his favorite seat from the ballpark, K-16, so that he could have it installed at the new Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. It turned out the seat had already been taken to Hart Island, but the warden "agreed to pardon" it for Connors. Prior to the completion of Dodger Stadium in 1962, Connors used K-16 as his chair on the set of The Rifleman. I don't know if he actually succeeded in having the seat installed in the new ballpark. A photo from 1964 shows him with an Ebbets Field seat in his house, which suggests that may have been the final destination of K-16, but it's unclear whether the seat in the photo is K-16 or a different one. It has a plaque on it that reads "Last Chair From Ebbets Field, Presented To Chuck Connors By The City Of Brooklyn", while there was no such plaque on K-16 when it was photographed for the 1961 article.
Kratter sent 500 lights to Randall's Island, where they illuminated Downing Stadium. Many of the individual fixtures were swapped out for new ones over the years; I don't know what happened to the remaining original ones after Downing was torn down in 2002 and replaced by Icahn Stadium.
An outfield flagpole donated by Kratter was put up outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in East Flatbush. The VFW hall was later occupied for many years by the Canarsie Casket Company, and the flagpole remained standing until around 2007, when a church that had acquired the property began work to expand the building.
Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn's borough president at the time, heard about the flagpole coming down and alerted his buddy Bruce Ratner, who arranged to purchase it from the church. Ratner was the driving force behind the massive Atlantic Yards development (now called Pacific Park) that is, and will be for many more years, under construction in Prospect Heights. He and Markowitz, the cheerleader-in-chief for Atlantic Yards during his time in office, had the flagpole erected outside Barclays Center, the centerpiece of Atlantic Yards and the first of its buildings to be completed. They dedicated the pole in late 2012, after the arena had premiered as the new home of the NBA's Nets and been announced as the future home (for a few seasons, anyway) of the NHL's Islanders.
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The Ebbets Field flagpole outside Barclays Center.
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(News coverage of the flagpole, as well as the plaque on its base during its East Flatbush days, identified it as the center-field flagpole from Ebbets Field. If you look at old photos of the stadium, you'll see there was in fact a flagpole above center field, one of several located on the roof, but these poles look smaller than the Barclays pole to me. I suspect the Barclays pole is actually the larger flagpole that stood prominently in right-center field beside the scoreboard, capped with a ball finial that appears to match the one atop the Barclays pole.)
So why buy a flagpole from an old baseball stadium and put it outside a basketball arena? Well, Ratner and Markowitz surely understood the lure of the Dodgers — Markowitz was kind of obsessed with the team himself, in fact — and they were never hesitant to remind people that, as mentioned in seemingly every article written about the Nets' move from New Jersey, Atlantic Yards was bringing major professional sports back to Brooklyn for the first time since the Dodgers left, something Markowitz had been talking about doing since his first successful campaign for borough president in 2001.
Markowitz was also on hand at Barclays Center a few months after the flagpole dedication for a presentation of the Dodgers' 1955 championship pennant before a Nets game, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of Ebbets Field. The pennant has a very funny history, having been stolen from the Dodgers in Los Angeles in 1959 by a group of four sportswriters who decided it belonged back in New York. Coincidentally, when the pennant was originally displayed for the fans at Ebbets Field during the 1956 season, it was flown from the scoreboard flagpole, the one that (I believe) now stands outside Barclays Center.
(Of course, the Atlantic Yards crew was just the latest in a long line of profit-seekers trying to co-opt some of the Dodgers' warm fuzzies for their own purposes. When the New York Mets opened their new ballpark, Citi Field — named, like Barclays Center, for a scandal-tarred banking giant — back in 2009, "some of the team's fans complained loudly that the stadium, with its extensive tribute to Jackie Robinson and its architectural nod to Ebbets Field, seemed to be more focused on the Brooklyn Dodgers' history than on the Mets'.")
But beyond the obvious Brooklyn sports connection, there's another, subtler tie between Atlantic Yards and the Dodgers. Barclays Center sits right across Atlantic Avenue from the site that Walter O'Malley wanted for his dome. And like O'Malley's quest for a new stadium, Ratner's push to build Atlantic Yards was inevitably going to be controversial. It wasn't just that the 22-acre megaproject would dramatically reshape the neighborhood; it's that, as with O'Malley's plan, it would require loads of taxpayer funds and the seizure of private property to do so. But this time, with Ratner promising all sorts of affordable housing and new jobs in addition to a sports venue (developers are often better at promising than developing), the government has been on board all the way, forcing out residents and offering more than $700 million in public financing to help make the project a reality.
So if you're Bruce Ratner, and you're trying to show everyone that all the subsidies and tax breaks are beside the point, that you and the Russian oligarch you sold the Nets to are really all about serving the people and bringing joy to the masses, then it certainly couldn't hurt to take an old remnant of Ebbets Field, a physical reminder of the sainted Brooklyn Dodgers, put it up as a public monument with your name on it, and then hold a ceremony for it with Jackie Robinson's daughter in attendance.
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The plaque on the Ebbets Field flagpole.
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And could there possibly be a more appropriate place to pay tribute to a team remembered as the embodiment of all that is good and pure in sports than here at — yes, these are real names — the Resorts World Casino NYC Plaza, opposite the GEICO Main Entrance of Barclays Center?
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Postscript
The aforementioned ridiculously named plaza outside Barclays Center has taken on new life in 2020 as a community hub for protestors in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. On the evening of June 2, demonstrators raised a Black Lives Matter flag up the Ebbets Field pole. In response, someone on Twitter shared the following words written by Jackie Robinson in his autobiography, made all the more poignant when you consider that Jackie, an Army veteran who was once court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a bus, must have laid eyes on the American flag hanging from this pole countless times during his baseball career: "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world."
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Jackie Robinson, in Army uniform, signs a contract to play with the Montreal Royals, a Dodgers farm team, on October 23, 1945. He would spend the 1946 season with the Royals before breaking the major league color barrier with the Dodgers in 1947.
Long exposure sunset shot from the apartment
As seen on the front & rear covers of "The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Two (BNSSS #2)"
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www.goodreads.com/book/show/23462420-the-epigram-books-co...
Kachinas are spirit beings in western Pueblo religious beliefs, often represented through masks and dolls, as shown here. This snapshot is from a wonderful book by Barton Wright entitled ‘Kachinas: A Hopi Artist's Documentary’, which Adam got for me in a recent trip to New Mexico. I devoured it from cover to cover — and it’s given me a vision for my next art project: an interactive Kachina World with animatronics dolls. Each of the kachinas depicted in these pictures could be characters in that interactive play, dancing to the music and giving you inspiration about the spirits they represent. It was so nice of Adam to give me this marvelous book — he immediately thought of me and thought I should have it. :)
Learn more about Kachinas:
Learn more about the Kachinas book:
www.goodreads.com/book/show/1966616.Kachinas
View photos of our related Wonderbots experiment:
"Viddivvārpā". Poēma par maizi by Imants Ziedonis
www.goodreads.com/book/show/17616275-viddivv-rp-po-ma-par...
"Saltus, author of numerous histories and novels, had a predilection for unrestrained pessimism, radical style, and vicious wit, which earned him the friendship of contemporary writers such as Oscar Wilde and Henry Miller. For The Imperial Orgy, the last book published before his death, Saltus found another nation as steeped in murder and debauchery as Rome: Imperial Russia. Using these mad rulers as a subject, Saltus could easily display his genius for gruesome detail, and the excessiveness of the imagery surpasses even that of his most famous book, Imperial Purple. Beginning with Ivan the Terrible, Saltus chronicles his terrifying reign. Every ruler he documents is a cruel despot, and they are distinguishable from each other only by the particular inventiveness of their cruelties. Contents: Ivan the Terrible; Dmitri the Sorcerer; Peter the Great; Imperial Sables; The Northern Messalina; Venus Victrix; Paul; The Last Despot; King Terror; and The Whirlwind."
[Summary at Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/book/show/1089039.The_Imperial_Orgy_An_...]
www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_sear...https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35171984-fantasyland
“Don't look for peace. Don't look for any other state than the one you are in now; otherwise, you will set up inner conflict and unconscious resistance. Forgive yourself for not being at peace. The moment you completely accept your non-peace, your non-peace becomes transmuted into peace. Anything you accept fully will get you there, will take you into peace. This is the miracle of surrender”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/present-moment
The following is a brief biography of Fredric Brown (1906-1972) from the Goodreads website (at www.goodreads.com/author/show/51503.Fredric_Brown):
"Fredric Brown was an American science fiction and mystery writer. He was one of the boldest early writers in genre fiction in his use of narrative experimentation. While never in the front rank of popularity in his lifetime, Brown has developed a considerable cult following in the almost half century since he last wrote. His works have been periodically reprinted and he has a worldwide fan base, most notably in the U.S. and Europe, and especially in France, where there have been several recent movie adaptations of his work. He also remains popular in Japan.
"Never financially secure, Brown - like many other pulp writers - often wrote at a furious pace in order to pay bills. This accounts, at least in part, for the uneven quality of his work. A newspaperman by profession, Brown was only able to devote 14 years of his life as a full-time fiction writer. Brown was also a heavy drinker, and this at times doubtless affected his productivity. A cultured man and omnivorous reader whose interests ranged far beyond those of most pulp writers, Brown had a lifelong interest in the flute, chess, poker, and the works of Lewis Carroll. Brown married twice and was the father of two sons."
I think she's reading Murder She Wrote: Gin and Daggers but in some strange, weird, eccentric language that nobody knows (Italian).
By the way, are any of you on Goodreads? If so, a link to your profile would be lurvvelly. I can add you to my list of contacts and we can raise eyebrows at each others' choice of books.
Chota Khoti, Ruth Bryan Owen House (1911), 3504 Royal Palm Ave, Miami, FL, USA
Miami est. 1896, pop. 2.6MM
• significantly altered & largely forgotten, this was the 1920s-30s home of notable Miamian Ruth Bryan Owen (1885-1954) [photo], daughter of 3-time Democratic Presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, a Populist Democrat known as "The Great Commoner" • she was the Old South’s 1st U.S. congresswoman, 1st woman to serve on the House Foreign Affairs Committee & as Minister to Denmark, 1st head of a U.S. diplomatic mission [photo], appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt • the journey that led her to this distinguished career began in Coconut Grove
"Ruth had been overseas in the war, sent to Egypt as a nurse with the British. There she had met a retired major, Reginald Owen, who had some kind of service-induced malady called Bright’s Disease and was told to live in a warm climate. The two of them got married and came back to Coconut Grove and bought a big house called Chota-Khoti — which in Burmese means 'little house.' The little house behind it was called Burra-Khoti, which means 'big house.' Reginald's family had had tea plantations in Burma." —Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Voice of the River
"The house is a two-story white stucco building with two wings connected by a semi-open-air living room enclosing a patio. It is a combination of Mexican and Spanish styles, set well back from the street and bordered with shrubbery." — Guide to Miami & Environs, 1941
"The great living room is filled with furniture which has seen service in many quarters of the globe, and carries its own mellow charm with it. The grand piano is open and often in use." —Arkansas Gazette, December 6, 1928
"The neighbourhood spends happy evenings at Chota Khoti, curled up on cushions, in the white paneled drawing room with Chinese cabinets of red. The Major and his pipe sit in the chimney corner. Ruth Bryan ruffles her auburn hair, leans against the piano and sings: "I am not fair, but that he thought me so." —The Whole World and Company, 1936, by Gretchen Green, whose La Cabana Tea Room occupied a small cabin next door to Chota Khoti • the Owens hosted many events, e.g., parties, recitals, cultural activities, meetings & various YWCA & Miami Woman’s Club affairs [photo]
• the Royal Palm Ave. address notwithstanding, Chota Khoti's location was usually described as "on the Ingraham Highway" (later Main Highway) where the property had an entrance at the corner of Hibiscus St. [photo] • this entrance shortened the 10 min. walk to Marymont mansion, home of Ruth's parents
• photos: family portrait at Chota Khoti • 1924 photo of daughter Helen Rudd Owen (1920-2015), a Democrat who ran for Congress in California as Rudd Brown, losing in 1958 and 1960 • Ruth Bryan Owen pruning shrubs c. 1931
• Ruth Bryan Owen ("Big Ruth" to her grandchildren) was born in Jacksonville, IL • she loved fast cars • competed in the high jump & was a champion distance runner at the U. Of Nebraska • excellent polo player • spoke 3 languages • praised for her singing (mezzo-soprano) • championed feminist causes, • sponsored the designation of the Florida Everglades as a national park [photo] • vice chairman of the University of Miami board of regents • president of the Miami Woman's Club
• never one to be intimidated by predominantly male domains, Ruth was attracted to the movie industry, c. 1920 • considered it as a possible career & thought about studying professional direction
• she envisioned Miami as a major motion picture production center & in fact, a few movie companies had already sprung up, including Brush Photoplay Co., with 2 stages at 966 S.W. 8th St. • Field Feature Film Co. on S. Miami Ave. at 25th St. (Rd.) • Miami Studios w/ a lab & 4 stages at W. 9th St. & 2nd Ave. in Hialeah [photo] • Biograph Studios veteran Wray Physioc at 151 N.E. 5th St. — he had directed The Gulf Between (1917), world's 1st Technicolor movie • Dudley Read at 330 Ft. Dallas Park, arrived in Miami c. New Year, 1921, soon became known as the "Miami Cameraman"
• Mrs. Owen decided to finance, produce, write, direct & perform in Once Upon a Time, a motion picture she based on One Thousand and One Nights • she hired Dudley Read as cameramaman, an actor & a costume designer from NY & a cast of local amateur actors, members of the Community Players of Cocoanut Grove • she approached the project believing that if a movie looks good, it is good, i.e., poetic imagery sans any of the usual hackneyed storylines could & would engage an audience
"You know the movies have always had a lure and just the atmoSpehre [sic] spoiled them for me. Well it struck me this winter that I might plunge in [and] direct movies of my own, with no objectionable atmoSpehre. I wrote scenario, raised finance for the photography, hired a camera, organized over two-hundred amateurs, played a five-reel film, direct[ed] all five hundred pictures [shots] myself, designed costumes, trained the actors."
— letter from close friend Carrie Dunlap, June 13,1921, quoted in Women Film Pioneers Project, Columbia University
• following multiple rejections, she secured a distribution deal • the film (now lost) was released in 1922 • at least one review approved of a few of the visuals but beyond that found little to like: "amateurish attempt; society folk act out serious Arabian night drama with little regard to screen technique; story: told mainly through long Biblical titles, presents Sunday school ethics; direction: some fair effects, but as a whole very uneven; star: not the type for the role, often photographed to disadvantage; support: actors have a good time playing in pictures, but can't keep their eyes off the camera; exteriors: some pretty effects" —Film Daily, Jan-Jun 1922
• in spite of several unfavorable reviews and, apparently, disappointing revenues, Ruth was already thinking about her next project • with her father's decision to write screenplays, she planned to provide the "picturing" (produce) • when nothing came of this, she decided to go into the "family business"
"The community as well as the home needs a woman's viewpoint and it would be a good thing if Uncle Sam had a wife to help him with the national economy and national housekeeping." —Ruth Bryan Owen
"I've never asked a woman to vote for me because I was a woman, but I always ask men not to vote against me because I am a woman." —Ruth Bryan Owen
• Mrs. Owen lost her 1st election in Florida's 4th Congressional District, then won on her 2nd try after logging ~8,000 mi. at the wheel of her campaign car — a flivver she christened The Spirit of Florida • during the tour, she delivered about 500 stump speeches, a tactic her father invented for his presidential campaigns • like her “silver-tongued” dad, she was a gifted speaker who, represented by the Coit-Alber Lyceum Bureau or the Redpath Bureau, periodically incremented her wealth & fame by touring the Chautauqua Circuit, her appearances promoted with material such as this 1920s brochure that called her "one of the world's few great women"
• although Chota Khoti remained Congresswoman Owen's Miami residence well into the 1930s, in 1927 & '28 — the year of her 1st her successful campaign for Congress — she listed the address of this Coral Gables house on Avenue Altara as her residence, & received guests there • the house is said to have been built for her, possibly facilitated by her father who was a stellar salesman for the developers of Coral Gables until his death in 1925, annually earning $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in property, equivalent to about $1.36 million in 2016 dollars • Mrs. Owen built another of her houses, Golden Clouds, on 6 oceanfront acres at Oracabessa, Jamaica • there, as at her other residences, she entertained celebrity friends such as Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Noel Coward Ian Fleming & Charlie Chaplin
• Chota Khoti was eventually purchased by native Miamians who continued to refer to it by its given name, as did local tour guides in the 1970s-80s • over the years, rooms were enlarged & its facade altered • by the beginning of the 21st c., immigration had transformed the city around it from a racially segregated tourist Mecca to a dynamic Latin American metropolis which still happens to be located in the U.S. • with the passage of time, the location of Ruth Bryan Owen's Chota Khoti has nearly vanished from memory
The girl who modeled as Eve in my composite requested I take a few photographs in different styles for her. This was her more punk one.
This piece was also one of my Extras in my Hallmark Institute of Photography final portfolio.
© Julia Grace Arts
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Memphis, TN, est. 1819, pop. 650,000
• in the 1950s, in a small studio on Union, Ave., Sam C. Phillips (1923-2003) recorded music that is "one of the true touchstones of American culture" —Escott, Hawkins, Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll
• this two-story corner bldg. is located in Memphis's Edge district • before becoming the Sun Studio Café, the 1st floor housed Taylor's Fine Food restaurant (1948-1981) [photo] • owned by Dell Taylor (1911-2003) & husband, Carlos (1914-1976) • 2nd floor was a rooming house
• the 1908 bldg. shares a partywall with a 1-story storefront at no. 706, built in 1916 [photos] • this small adjacent structure became Memphis Recording Service & later, Sun Studio [discography], where Elvis Presley (1935-1977) began his recording career
"Dell M. Taylor served up country fried steak and gentle mothering to the emerging stars of Sun Studio… Mrs. Taylor saw to it that Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich and Carl Perkins, — along with the mechanics and other workers from the auto dealership row on Union — had the freshest greens and vegetables… Many a song was written in the booths, as the musicians would come in to eat during a break in recording at Sun Studio next door… Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips, credited with discovering Elvis and others, often did his bookkeeping at the restaurant." —Chris Conley, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), 24 Feb., 2003
• Sam Phillips, who claimed he didn't have a desk, had his own booth at Taylor's to pore over paperwork • "That's where all the guys did their writing and talking, and that's where the Sun sound was really born." –Jack Clement (1931-2013), Sun Studio producer
• exhausted musicians often spent the night in one of "Miss Taylor's" upstairs rooms • while recording at Sun the mid-1950s, Roy Orbison had a two-room apartment there
• the bldg. now serves as visitor center for the recording studio, which is open to the public for tours
Marker: Elvis Presley and Sun Records
In July 1954 Sun Records released Elvis Presley's first recording. That record, and Elvis' four that followed on the Sun label, changed popular music. Elvis developed an innovative and different sound combining blues, gospel, and country. That quality made Elvis a worldwide celebrity within two years. He went on to become one of the most famous and beloved entertainers in history. Sun Records introduced many well known people in all fields of music. Generations of musicians have been affected by those who recorded here and especially by the music Elvis Presley first sang at Sun Records
National Historic Landmark Nomination: (unedited version with citations available here)
Marion Keisker (1917-1989), Phillips's sole assistant & employee when he started his business said he "would talk about this idea he had, this dream, I suppose, to have a facility where black people could come and play their own music, a place where they would feel free and relaxed to do it. One day we were riding along, and he saw that spot on Union, and he said, 'That's the spot I want.' With many difficulties we got the place, and we raised the money, and between us we did everything. We laid all the tile, we painted the acoustic boards, I put in the bathroom, Sam put in the control room—what little equipment he had always had to be the best." — quoted by Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley
Phillips started his own record company, Sun Records, in 1952, "the first great rock 'n' roll record label." • Some of the artists Phillips recorded would redefine the musical genres in which they worked. Many of them made for Phillips not only their first recordings but also their best.
Before World War II most black music was blues, and a lot of those were country blues of the Mississippi Delta, the raw, gut-wrenching folk music of rural African Americans… Black migration out of the rural South accelerated during the First World War and exploded after World War II when manual cotton picking came to an end. Synthetic materials took over the market after the discovery of nylon in 1939, and the mechanical cotton picker, able to do the work of fifty people, arrived soon after. "The main musical result of the great migration was the blues came to town, and not to any old town: to Memphis, which acted as the local focus for migration from the Delta." — Sir Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization
In Memphis, WDIA started out in 1947 as a popular and country music radio station. The station switched formats in 1948 and began programming for a black audience after the success of a show called "Black America Speaks," hosted by Memphis's first black on-air personality, Nat Williams (1907-1983) [editorial: Color the Issue, A Point of View by Nat L. Williams]
Also in 1948, Dewey Phillips (1926-1968), a white radio announcer from rural Tennessee, began to host a show on WHBQ. "Red Hot and Blue" [listen] expanded from fifteen minutes to three hours daily during its first year on the air. Phillips played "an eclectic mix of blues, hillbilly, and pop that would become an institution in Memphis, and his importance to the cross-cultural miscegenation that became Rock 'n' Roll is incalculable." By 1951, word began to spread that white kids were buying "race records."
Sam Phillips was born on January 5, 1923 in the northwest corner of Alabama near Florence, about 150 miles east of Memphis. He got his first radio job in 1940 at WLAY in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and later took correspondence courses in radio engineering. He worked at WMSL in Decatur, Alabama, and at WLAC in Nashville before moving to Memphis in 1945.
In January 1950, Phillips started his own recording business in addition to his regular jobs. The Memphis Recording Service opened at 706 Union Avenue, about a mile east of the downtown area. The small one-story brick building had a reception area/office at the front of the building, a recording studio in the middle section, and a small control room in the rear. The entire building is only about 18 feet wide and 57 feet long. Phillips's business card read "We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime." Initially that included weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, advertisements for radio, etc., in addition to musicians in his studio.
"I opened the Memphis Recording Service 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 people who played this type of music had not been given the opportunity to reach an audience . . . My aim was to try and record the blues and other music I liked and to prove whether I was right or wrong about this music. I knew, or I felt I knew, that 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." —Escott, op. cit.
Phillips also functioned as a folklorist, documenting music that was fading into the past. "With the jet age coming on, with cotton-picking machines as big as a building going down the road, with society changing, I knew that this music wasn't going to be available in a pure sense forever."
Recording the Blues
video: Sam Phillips: The Man who Invented Rock & Roll Part 1 (44:22) & Part 2 (45:59)
His first deal, with 4 Star/Gilt Edge Records, was a song by a blind pianist from south Memphis. Lost John Hunter's "Boogie for Me Baby" [listen] was "a crude boogie blues that could pick up some southern juke coin," according to the review in Billboard, a record business trade publication.
In late summer 1950, Phillips launched his own record company with partner Dewey Phillips (the hot Memphis radio announcer, no relation) in order to issue and promote his own products. They called their label Phillips, but it only lasted a few weeks, issuing three hundred copies of Joe Hill Louis's "Boogie in the Park" in August 1950 [listen]
Phillips soon began working with Modern Records of Los Angeles, owned and operated by the Bihari brothers. Their new subsidiary, RPM Records, was looking for "new music with a down- home feel." Jules Bihari sent a guitar player from Indianola, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips to record. Riley King was already popular locally and known as B.B. King (for Blues Boy, or more likely, Black Boy). Phillips recorded King, one of the first artists on the new RPM label, from mid-1950 until mid-1951 [listen].
Even at this early stage in his career, Sam Phillips used recording techniques that were soon recognized as hallmarks of his records. He put up-tempo boogies on the front sides of records, slow numbers on back sides, and overamplified on faster songs to get a primitive fuzzy sound… These early recording sessions with King also document Phillips's skill as a record producer. King's version of a Tampa Red song had an explosiveness missing from the original record.
"Rocket '88'," a song about a hot Oldsmobile, is one of the contenders for the title "first rock 'n' roll record." It featured Jackie Brenston, the singer, and Ike Turner, the bandleader, on piano. "Rocket '88'" [listen] was released in April 1951. It hit number 1 on Billboard's R&B chart in June and eventually became the second biggest R&B hit of the year. According to Sam Phillips, "Rocket '88'" was the record that really kicked it off for me as far as broadening the base of music and opening up wider markets for our local music." Phillips resigned from WREC in June 1951 after "Rocket '88'" became a hit. — [more] on the history of “Rocket 88”
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), 28 Mar, 1951: "[Sam Phillips] has agreements with two recording companies to locate and record hillbilly and race music. Race numbers are those tailored for the Negro trade. Sam auditions musicians with original songs. When he finds something he's sure will sell, he gets it on acetate and sends it to one of the companies. He doesn't charge the musicians anything . . . Sam may branch out one day, so he says if anyone wants to bring him a pop song, he'll be glad to look it over." • full article
• Sam Phillips first recorded Chester Burnett (The Howlin' Wolf) in the spring of 1951. Born near Aberdeen, Mississippi, Howlin' Wolf (1910-1976) was a singer who gave the traditional Delta blues another dimension. They recorded "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" [listen] in August 1951… In Phillips's estimation, the Wolf was his greatest discovery.
• Even though he preferred the creative side of the business, Phillips started his own record company early in 1952… With his own label, Phillips could run the business like he wanted and release records that other labels rejected.
"When I was leasing to other labels, they wanted me to compromise. They wanted a fuller blues sound than I did. They were selling excitement. I was recording the feel I found in the blues. I wanted to get that gut feel onto record. I realized that it was going to be much more difficult to merchandise than what Atlantic or Specialty, for example, were doing, but I was willing to go with it."
Phillips named his new company Sun Records and selected an eye-catching record label [photo] designed by John G. Parker (1925-2012), who also designed the tiger stripe helmet for the Cincinnati Bengals football team and packages for Alka-Seltzer and Super Bubble gum… "The sun to me—even as a kid back on the farm—was a universal kind of thing. A new day, a new opportunity." —Sam Phillips
The first record issued on the new Sun label (March 27, 1952), Sun number 175, was an original instrumental, "Drivin' Slow," by alto saxophonist Johnny London.
"Even on this first release, all the hallmarks of a Sam Phillips Sun record were in place: the raw sound, the experimental origin, the dark texture, even the trademark echo. Phillips and London created the illusion of a sax heard down a long hallway on a humid night by rigging something like a telephone booth over London's head while he played. The record's appeal had more to do with feeling than virtuosity—in short, it offered everything music buyers could expect from Sun for the remainder of the decade." [listen]
The first recording on the Sun label considered to be a classic was Easy, an instrumental released in March 1953 by Walter Horton (1921-1981) (Little Walter, and later, Big Walter).
". . . Horton played the same theme five times, with mounting intensity. By the fourth chorus, he was playing with such intensity that his harmonica sounded like a tenor saxophone. Phillips' virtuosity with tape delay echo was rarely used to better advantage: he made three instruments [harmonica, guitar, drums] sound as full as an orchestra. Any other instrument would have been redundant." [listen]
Sun Records had its first national hit in the spring of 1953 with "Bear Cat," [listen] which went to number 3 on the national R&B chart. It was an "answer song" to "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton aka Willie Mae Thornton (1926-1984), sung by local radio announcer Rufus Thomas. "Bear Cat" was the first record to make money for Sun Records and it put the company on the map. "Feelin' Good" by Little Junior's Blue Flames (released in July 1953), was also commercially successful, reaching number 5 on the national R&B chart.
Sun's next hit was "Just Walkin' in the Rain" [listen] by The Prisonaires, a black vocal group of five inmates from the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They sang close-harmony gospel style and came under armed guard to record at 706 Union on June 1, 1953. As part of the warden's rehabilitation program, they were allowed to perform on radio, in concerts, and at the Governor's mansion, but "Just Walkin' in the Rain" was their only hit.
Phillips recorded a number of important blues artists in the early 1950s, including "Sleepy" John Estes, Little Milton Campbell, Rosco Gordon, Dr. Ross, Harmonica Frank Floyd, Willie Nix, Billy "The Kid" Emerson, and Bobby "Blue" Bland.
". . . It's safe to say that the blues has never sounded as mean, raw, or intense as it did on countless days and nights at 706 Union Avenue. Amplifiers were cranked way past the point of distortion, guitars slashed like straight razors, rickety drum kits were pounded with fury and abandon, and the stories both sung and shouted spanned the gamut of the black Southern experience…
"Even if he'd never issued a record on the shining yellow Sun label, even if Elvis Presley had never entered his small recording studio..., Phillips would rank as one of the most visionary record producers of our time on the basis of his early fifties blues work." —John Floyd, Sun Records: An Oral History
In May 1954, Phillips recorded "Cotton Crop Blues" with James Cotton on vocals and Auburn "Pat" Hare on guitar. This was "one of the truly great blues recordings," but recording of traditional blues at 706 Union fell off in 1954 with the growing popularity of R&B music. Sun Records soon became synonymous with rock 'n' roll, overshadowing Phillips's role in blues recording "and the insight that [he] brought to recording the blues. He worked hard to get the best from his artists . . . Phillips would sit behind his tape deck until sunup if he thought the musicians on the studio floor might capture the sound that he heard in his head."
Phillips struggled to make money in the record business for almost six years. Eventually he saw that the market at that time was too small for the kind of music he was recording.
"The base wasn't broad enough because of racial prejudice. It wasn't broad enough to get the amount of commercial play and general acceptance overall—not just in the South . . . Now these were basically good people, but conceptually they did not understand the kinship between black and white people in the South. So I knew what I had to do to broaden the base of acceptance." —Escott, op. cit.
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley graduated from Humes High School in north Memphis on June 3, 1953 and went to work at M.B. Parker Machinists on July 1. Later that summer, he recorded a personal record at the Memphis Recording Service. Presley paid $3.98 for an acetate with two sides, both ballads. While he was there, Presley talked with Marion Keisker, a long-time Memphis radio personality who helped Sam Phillips run his businesses at 706 Union, and asked if she knew of a band that needed a singer.
He made an impression on Keisker which she later remembered well, especially his answer to her question about which hillbilly singer he sounded like: "I don't sound like nobody." At that time, Presley had a child's guitar that he played in the park, on his porch steps, and in a band with his buddies around their housing project. He soon aspired to be a member of the Songfellows, an amateur church quartet. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Presley dropped by 706 Union a number of times after that initial meeting to see if Ms. Keisker had any leads for him. In January 1954, Presley paid for a second personal record, and tried out for a professional band that spring. Eddie Bond (1933-2003), the band leader, told him to keep driving a truck because he would never make it as a singer. Presley later revealed that Bond's rejection "broke my heart." —Guralnick, op. cit.
". . . There is little question that he stepped through the doorway [at 706 Union] with the idea, if not of stardom . . . at the very least of being discovered. In later years he would always say that he wanted to make a personal record "to surprise my mother." Or "I just wanted to hear what I sounded like." But, of course, if he had simply wanted to record his voice, he could have paid twenty-five cents at W. T. Grant's on Main Street . . . Instead, Elvis went to a professional facility, where a man who had been written up in the papers would hear him sing." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Marion Keisker finally called Presley on Saturday, June 26 to set up an appointment, almost a year after he recorded his first personal disc. On a recent trip to Nashville, Phillips had gotten an acetate of a song that reminded him of Presley's voice. They worked on "Without You" [listen] for a long time that afternoon, and Phillips had Presley sing a number of other songs after his unsuccessful attempts with "Without You."
A week later, Phillips set Presley up with two members of the Starlite Wranglers [photos], Scotty Moore (guitar) and Bill Black (bass), and the three of them went to the studio on Monday, July 5 so Phillips could hear them on tape. Nothing special happened at the session until they took a break and Presley began fooling around and playing an old blues song by Arthur Crudup, "That's All Right [Mama] [listen]."
"Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup—nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced . . . And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded—it was "different," it was itself." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Phillips got his friend and kindred spirit, disc jockey Dewey Phillips, to play "That's All Right" [listen] on his radio show "Red Hot and Blue," then near the height of its popularity. The response was immediate—hundreds of phone calls and telegrams. Dewey played the song a number of times that night and also interviewed Presley during the show.
By the time the record was pressed and ready for release, there were 6,000 orders for it locally. Sun record number 209 was released on Monday, July 17, 1954. Phillips had been "looking for something that nobody could categorize," and this song did not sound exclusively black or white or country or pop. Initially, many people who heard the song thought that Presley was a black man. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Elvis Presley's first big public appearance with Scotty and Bill, the Blue Moon Boys, was on Friday, July 30 at Memphis's outdoor amphitheater in Overton Park [photos]. The show featured Slim Whitman, a star from the Louisiana Hayride, which some called the Grand Ole Opry's "farm club." He drew a hillbilly crowd, but they went wild when Elvis shook and wiggled his legs, his natural way of performing.
The new record made Billboard's regional charts by the end of August, but it was the B side that was more popular. Phillips backed "That's All Right" with an unorthodox version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" [listen], a waltz that was a hit in 1946 for Bill Monroe, country music's elder statesman. By early September, "Blue Moon" was number 1 on the Memphis C&W chart and "That's All Right" was number 7. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Sun released Presley's second record in late September. "It was . . . an even bolder declaration of intent than the first, especially the strident blues number 'Good Rockin' Tonight' [listen], which rocked more confidently than anything they could have imagined in those first, uncertain days in the studio." The original jump blues version was written and recorded by Roy Brown in 1947 [listen]
Presley's growing popularity enabled Phillips to arrange a guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry for October 2, even though the Opry had never before scheduled a performer at such an early stage in his career. The performance of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill received a "polite, but somewhat tepid, reception," and the Opry's manager told Phillips that Presley "just did not fit the Opry mold."
It was a big disappointment for Elvis. But soon they were off to Louisiana for Presley's first appearance on the Louisiana Hayride, "the Opry's more innovative rival in Shreveport" that had a show every Saturday night. On the third Saturday of the month the show broadcast with a 50,000 watt signal that reached up to twenty-eight states.48 After only one guest appearance, Presley signed a standard one year contract to be one of the Hayride's regular members, and he and his band quit their day jobs. —Guralnick, op. cit.
For the next year, Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys toured almost constantly... Presley took his first airplane flight and first trip to New York City on March 23, 1955 to try out for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts contest, but he did not pass the audition. [A] tour with Hank Snow/Jamboree Attractions began on May 1 in New Orleans, visiting twenty cities in three weeks, including a number of stops in Florida. There was a "riot" backstage after the concert in Jacksonville …
The audiences had never heard music like Presley played before, and they had never seen anyone who performed like Presley either. The shy, polite, mumbling boy gained self-confidence with every appearance, which soon led to a transformation on stage. People watching the show were astounded and shocked, both by the "ferocity of his performance,"49 and the crowd's reaction to it.
Even in the early days, Elvis almost always stole the show from the headliners, and concert lineups had to be rearranged accordingly. Nobody followed Elvis. Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time in Odessa, Texas: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing . . . I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it."—Guralnick, op. cit.
"'He's the new rage,' said a Louisiana radio executive… 'Sings hillbilly in R&B time. Can you figure that out? He wears pink pants and a black coat . . .'" —Guralnick, op. cit.
Elvis caused a great commotion everywhere he went. Throughout the South, Presley had girls screaming and fainting and chasing after him.
Sam Phillips was also on the road constantly after the Overton Park performance in July 1954, promoting the new records to distributors, disc jockeys, record store owners, and jukebox operators. His experiences, however, were entirely different. Time and again, disc jockeys who were old friends and/or long-standing business associates told Phillips they could not play the Presley records. A country deejay said "Sam, they'll run me out of town." To an R&B deejay, "That's All Right" was a country song. A major pop station disc jockey told Phillips, "your music is just so ragged. I just can't handle it right now. Maybe later on." —Guralnick, op. cit.
WELO in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley's hometown, would not even play the record, in spite of many requests from teenagers, because the deejay did not like the new music. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Sam Phillips persevered in spite of all the rejection he was getting, and kept trying to turn it around. "I needed the attention that I got from the people that hated what I was doing, that acted like: 'Here is somebody trying to thrust junk on us and classify it as our music.'"—Guralnick, op. cit.
"He was a man swept up by a belief, in a sound and in an idea. And as discouraged as he might sometimes get, as harsh as the reality of selling this new music might be, he never strayed from his belief, he never allowed himself to be distracted from his main goal. Which was to get them to listen." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Phillips could feel a revolution was on the way. There were already lots of country boys coming to his studio to play the new music, which initially got the name rockabilly. "Sam knew that a day was coming . . . when the music would prevail." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Presley was still a regional sensation and unknown to the national market when he got the record industry's attention. By the summer of 1955, almost all the major and independent record labels were inquiring about him. Sam Phillips had mixed feelings about selling Presley's contract, but his operations could not accommodate the Presley phenomenon, his finances were very tight, and he had other artists who needed his attention.
Presley's parents signed a contract in August which soon forced the issue. Col. Tom Parker (1909-1997) became "special adviser to Elvis Presley." He was the head of Jamboree Attractions, one of the major promoters and bookers of country and western talent, and had booked Presley on the Hank Snow package tours earlier that year. At that time, Parker was known as the best promoter in the business. In October Parker asked Phillips to name his price for Presley's contract, and Parker made sure that it was met.
The deal was signed at 706 Union Avenue on November 21, 1955. RCA-Victor bought Elvis Presley's contract from Sun Records for $35,000, plus $5,000 in back royalties owed to Presley. The story ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar the next day:
"Elvis Presley, 20, Memphis recording star and entertainer who zoomed into big- time and the big money almost overnight, has been released from his contract with Sun Record Co. of Memphis . . . . Phillips and RCA officials did not reveal terms but said the money involved is probably the highest ever paid for a contract release for a country-western recording artist. 'I feel Elvis is one of the most talented youngsters today,' Phillips said, 'and by releasing his contract to RCA-Victor we will give him the opportunity of entering the largest organization of its kind in the world, so his talents can be given the fullest opportunity.'" —quoted in Guralnick, op. cit.
Sam Phillips never regretted his decision to sell Elvis Presley's contract. In many ways, Presley's departure was like a new beginning for Sun Records. Many country musicians aspiring to play rockabilly began to make their way to 706 Union Avenue. As Johnny Cash said many years later, "Elvis was a beacon that brought us all there." —Peter Guralnick, "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll," VHS (A&E Biography, 2000)
Sun Studio
After Sam Phillips moved his companies to the new location on Madison Avenue, 706 Union Avenue housed a number of different businesses in the 1960s and 1970s, including a barber shop, an auto parts store, and a scuba shop. The building was vacant in 1985 when it became the site of a family reunion of sorts. An album entitled “Class of '55: Memphis Rock 'n' Roll Homecoming“ was recorded here to celebrate and remember the "Class of '55" on their 30th "anniversary." Record producer Chips Moman convened Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record together for the first time at the Sun studio in September 1985.
Not long after that event, 706 Union Avenue became a stop for visitors on tours to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, which opened to the public in 1982. The building opened as the Sun Studio for tours in 1987—the name Sun Records and the original Sun record label design still belong to Shelby Singleton, who bought the company in 1969. The current property owner also purchased the adjacent two-story brick building that housed a café and a boarding house in the 1950s. That building now serves as a soda shop, gallery, and gift shop for visitors to Sun Studio.
The Sun Studio also operates as a full service 24-track recording studio for professional musicians, as well as anyone who wants to make a personal record, just like Elvis. In 1987, the Irish rock band U2 recorded several songs here for their album "Rattle and Hum," including "When Love Comes to Town" featuring B.B. King. Several hundred thousand visitors have made the pilgrimage to this extraordinary place.
• National Register # 03001031, 2003 • designated a National Historic Landmark, 2003
Memphis, TN, est. 1819, pop. 650,000
• in the 1950s, in a small studio on Union, Ave., Sam C. Phillips (1923-2003) recorded music that is "one of the true touchstones of American culture" —Escott, Hawkins, Good Rockin' Tonight: Sun Records and the Birth of Rock 'N' Roll
• this two-story corner bldg. is located in Memphis's Edge district • before becoming the Sun Studio Café, the 1st floor housed Taylor's Fine Food restaurant (1948-1981) [photo] • owned by Dell Taylor (1911-2003) & husband, Carlos (1914-1976) • 2nd floor was a rooming house
• the 1908 bldg. shares a partywall with a 1-story storefront at no. 706, built in 1916 [photos] • this small adjacent structure became Memphis Recording Service & later, Sun Studio [discography], where Elvis Presley (1935-1977) began his recording career
"Dell M. Taylor served up country fried steak and gentle mothering to the emerging stars of Sun Studio… Mrs. Taylor saw to it that Elvis Presley, Rufus Thomas, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich and Carl Perkins, — along with the mechanics and other workers from the auto dealership row on Union — had the freshest greens and vegetables… Many a song was written in the booths, as the musicians would come in to eat during a break in recording at Sun Studio next door… Sun Studio founder Sam Phillips, credited with discovering Elvis and others, often did his bookkeeping at the restaurant." —Chris Conley, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), 24 Feb., 2003
• Sam Phillips, who claimed he didn't have a desk, had his own booth at Taylor's to pore over paperwork • "That's where all the guys did their writing and talking, and that's where the Sun sound was really born." –Jack Clement (1931-2013), Sun Studio producer
• exhausted musicians often spent the night in one of "Miss Taylor's" upstairs rooms • while recording at Sun the mid-1950s, Roy Orbison had a two-room apartment there
• the bldg. now serves as visitor center for the recording studio, which is open to the public for tours
Marker: Elvis Presley and Sun Records
In July 1954 Sun Records released Elvis Presley's first recording. That record, and Elvis' four that followed on the Sun label, changed popular music. Elvis developed an innovative and different sound combining blues, gospel, and country. That quality made Elvis a worldwide celebrity within two years. He went on to become one of the most famous and beloved entertainers in history. Sun Records introduced many well known people in all fields of music. Generations of musicians have been affected by those who recorded here and especially by the music Elvis Presley first sang at Sun Records
National Historic Landmark Nomination: (unedited version with citations available here)
Marion Keisker (1917-1989), Phillips's sole assistant & employee when he started his business said he "would talk about this idea he had, this dream, I suppose, to have a facility where black people could come and play their own music, a place where they would feel free and relaxed to do it. One day we were riding along, and he saw that spot on Union, and he said, 'That's the spot I want.' With many difficulties we got the place, and we raised the money, and between us we did everything. We laid all the tile, we painted the acoustic boards, I put in the bathroom, Sam put in the control room—what little equipment he had always had to be the best." — quoted by Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley
Phillips started his own record company, Sun Records, in 1952, "the first great rock 'n' roll record label." • Some of the artists Phillips recorded would redefine the musical genres in which they worked. Many of them made for Phillips not only their first recordings but also their best.
Before World War II most black music was blues, and a lot of those were country blues of the Mississippi Delta, the raw, gut-wrenching folk music of rural African Americans… Black migration out of the rural South accelerated during the First World War and exploded after World War II when manual cotton picking came to an end. Synthetic materials took over the market after the discovery of nylon in 1939, and the mechanical cotton picker, able to do the work of fifty people, arrived soon after. "The main musical result of the great migration was the blues came to town, and not to any old town: to Memphis, which acted as the local focus for migration from the Delta." — Sir Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization
In Memphis, WDIA started out in 1947 as a popular and country music radio station. The station switched formats in 1948 and began programming for a black audience after the success of a show called "Black America Speaks," hosted by Memphis's first black on-air personality, Nat Williams (1907-1983) [editorial: Color the Issue, A Point of View by Nat L. Williams]
Also in 1948, Dewey Phillips (1926-1968), a white radio announcer from rural Tennessee, began to host a show on WHBQ. "Red Hot and Blue" [listen] expanded from fifteen minutes to three hours daily during its first year on the air. Phillips played "an eclectic mix of blues, hillbilly, and pop that would become an institution in Memphis, and his importance to the cross-cultural miscegenation that became Rock 'n' Roll is incalculable." By 1951, word began to spread that white kids were buying "race records."
Sam Phillips was born on January 5, 1923 in the northwest corner of Alabama near Florence, about 150 miles east of Memphis. He got his first radio job in 1940 at WLAY in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and later took correspondence courses in radio engineering. He worked at WMSL in Decatur, Alabama, and at WLAC in Nashville before moving to Memphis in 1945.
In January 1950, Phillips started his own recording business in addition to his regular jobs. The Memphis Recording Service opened at 706 Union Avenue, about a mile east of the downtown area. The small one-story brick building had a reception area/office at the front of the building, a recording studio in the middle section, and a small control room in the rear. The entire building is only about 18 feet wide and 57 feet long. Phillips's business card read "We Record Anything—Anywhere—Anytime." Initially that included weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, advertisements for radio, etc., in addition to musicians in his studio.
"I opened the Memphis Recording Service 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 people who played this type of music had not been given the opportunity to reach an audience . . . My aim was to try and record the blues and other music I liked and to prove whether I was right or wrong about this music. I knew, or I felt I knew, that 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." —Escott, op. cit.
Phillips also functioned as a folklorist, documenting music that was fading into the past. "With the jet age coming on, with cotton-picking machines as big as a building going down the road, with society changing, I knew that this music wasn't going to be available in a pure sense forever."
Recording the Blues
video: Sam Phillips: The Man who Invented Rock & Roll Part 1 (44:22) & Part 2 (45:59)
His first deal, with 4 Star/Gilt Edge Records, was a song by a blind pianist from south Memphis. Lost John Hunter's "Boogie for Me Baby" [listen] was "a crude boogie blues that could pick up some southern juke coin," according to the review in Billboard, a record business trade publication.
In late summer 1950, Phillips launched his own record company with partner Dewey Phillips (the hot Memphis radio announcer, no relation) in order to issue and promote his own products. They called their label Phillips, but it only lasted a few weeks, issuing three hundred copies of Joe Hill Louis's "Boogie in the Park" in August 1950 [listen]
Phillips soon began working with Modern Records of Los Angeles, owned and operated by the Bihari brothers. Their new subsidiary, RPM Records, was looking for "new music with a down- home feel." Jules Bihari sent a guitar player from Indianola, Mississippi, to Sam Phillips to record. Riley King was already popular locally and known as B.B. King (for Blues Boy, or more likely, Black Boy). Phillips recorded King, one of the first artists on the new RPM label, from mid-1950 until mid-1951 [listen].
Even at this early stage in his career, Sam Phillips used recording techniques that were soon recognized as hallmarks of his records. He put up-tempo boogies on the front sides of records, slow numbers on back sides, and overamplified on faster songs to get a primitive fuzzy sound… These early recording sessions with King also document Phillips's skill as a record producer. King's version of a Tampa Red song had an explosiveness missing from the original record.
"Rocket '88'," a song about a hot Oldsmobile, is one of the contenders for the title "first rock 'n' roll record." It featured Jackie Brenston, the singer, and Ike Turner, the bandleader, on piano. "Rocket '88'" [listen] was released in April 1951. It hit number 1 on Billboard's R&B chart in June and eventually became the second biggest R&B hit of the year. According to Sam Phillips, "Rocket '88'" was the record that really kicked it off for me as far as broadening the base of music and opening up wider markets for our local music." Phillips resigned from WREC in June 1951 after "Rocket '88'" became a hit. — [more] on the history of “Rocket 88”
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), 28 Mar, 1951: "[Sam Phillips] has agreements with two recording companies to locate and record hillbilly and race music. Race numbers are those tailored for the Negro trade. Sam auditions musicians with original songs. When he finds something he's sure will sell, he gets it on acetate and sends it to one of the companies. He doesn't charge the musicians anything . . . Sam may branch out one day, so he says if anyone wants to bring him a pop song, he'll be glad to look it over." • full article
• Sam Phillips first recorded Chester Burnett (The Howlin' Wolf) in the spring of 1951. Born near Aberdeen, Mississippi, Howlin' Wolf (1910-1976) was a singer who gave the traditional Delta blues another dimension. They recorded "Moanin' at Midnight" and "How Many More Years" [listen] in August 1951… In Phillips's estimation, the Wolf was his greatest discovery.
• Even though he preferred the creative side of the business, Phillips started his own record company early in 1952… With his own label, Phillips could run the business like he wanted and release records that other labels rejected.
"When I was leasing to other labels, they wanted me to compromise. They wanted a fuller blues sound than I did. They were selling excitement. I was recording the feel I found in the blues. I wanted to get that gut feel onto record. I realized that it was going to be much more difficult to merchandise than what Atlantic or Specialty, for example, were doing, but I was willing to go with it."
Phillips named his new company Sun Records and selected an eye-catching record label [photo] designed by John G. Parker (1925-2012), who also designed the tiger stripe helmet for the Cincinnati Bengals football team and packages for Alka-Seltzer and Super Bubble gum… "The sun to me—even as a kid back on the farm—was a universal kind of thing. A new day, a new opportunity." —Sam Phillips
The first record issued on the new Sun label (March 27, 1952), Sun number 175, was an original instrumental, "Drivin' Slow," by alto saxophonist Johnny London.
"Even on this first release, all the hallmarks of a Sam Phillips Sun record were in place: the raw sound, the experimental origin, the dark texture, even the trademark echo. Phillips and London created the illusion of a sax heard down a long hallway on a humid night by rigging something like a telephone booth over London's head while he played. The record's appeal had more to do with feeling than virtuosity—in short, it offered everything music buyers could expect from Sun for the remainder of the decade." [listen]
The first recording on the Sun label considered to be a classic was Easy, an instrumental released in March 1953 by Walter Horton (1921-1981) (Little Walter, and later, Big Walter).
". . . Horton played the same theme five times, with mounting intensity. By the fourth chorus, he was playing with such intensity that his harmonica sounded like a tenor saxophone. Phillips' virtuosity with tape delay echo was rarely used to better advantage: he made three instruments [harmonica, guitar, drums] sound as full as an orchestra. Any other instrument would have been redundant." [listen]
Sun Records had its first national hit in the spring of 1953 with "Bear Cat," [listen] which went to number 3 on the national R&B chart. It was an "answer song" to "Hound Dog" by Big Mama Thornton aka Willie Mae Thornton (1926-1984), sung by local radio announcer Rufus Thomas. "Bear Cat" was the first record to make money for Sun Records and it put the company on the map. "Feelin' Good" by Little Junior's Blue Flames (released in July 1953), was also commercially successful, reaching number 5 on the national R&B chart.
Sun's next hit was "Just Walkin' in the Rain" [listen] by The Prisonaires, a black vocal group of five inmates from the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville. They sang close-harmony gospel style and came under armed guard to record at 706 Union on June 1, 1953. As part of the warden's rehabilitation program, they were allowed to perform on radio, in concerts, and at the Governor's mansion, but "Just Walkin' in the Rain" was their only hit.
Phillips recorded a number of important blues artists in the early 1950s, including "Sleepy" John Estes, Little Milton Campbell, Rosco Gordon, Dr. Ross, Harmonica Frank Floyd, Willie Nix, Billy "The Kid" Emerson, and Bobby "Blue" Bland.
". . . It's safe to say that the blues has never sounded as mean, raw, or intense as it did on countless days and nights at 706 Union Avenue. Amplifiers were cranked way past the point of distortion, guitars slashed like straight razors, rickety drum kits were pounded with fury and abandon, and the stories both sung and shouted spanned the gamut of the black Southern experience…
"Even if he'd never issued a record on the shining yellow Sun label, even if Elvis Presley had never entered his small recording studio..., Phillips would rank as one of the most visionary record producers of our time on the basis of his early fifties blues work." —John Floyd, Sun Records: An Oral History
In May 1954, Phillips recorded "Cotton Crop Blues" with James Cotton on vocals and Auburn "Pat" Hare on guitar. This was "one of the truly great blues recordings," but recording of traditional blues at 706 Union fell off in 1954 with the growing popularity of R&B music. Sun Records soon became synonymous with rock 'n' roll, overshadowing Phillips's role in blues recording "and the insight that [he] brought to recording the blues. He worked hard to get the best from his artists . . . Phillips would sit behind his tape deck until sunup if he thought the musicians on the studio floor might capture the sound that he heard in his head."
Phillips struggled to make money in the record business for almost six years. Eventually he saw that the market at that time was too small for the kind of music he was recording.
"The base wasn't broad enough because of racial prejudice. It wasn't broad enough to get the amount of commercial play and general acceptance overall—not just in the South . . . Now these were basically good people, but conceptually they did not understand the kinship between black and white people in the South. So I knew what I had to do to broaden the base of acceptance." —Escott, op. cit.
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley graduated from Humes High School in north Memphis on June 3, 1953 and went to work at M.B. Parker Machinists on July 1. Later that summer, he recorded a personal record at the Memphis Recording Service. Presley paid $3.98 for an acetate with two sides, both ballads. While he was there, Presley talked with Marion Keisker, a long-time Memphis radio personality who helped Sam Phillips run his businesses at 706 Union, and asked if she knew of a band that needed a singer.
He made an impression on Keisker which she later remembered well, especially his answer to her question about which hillbilly singer he sounded like: "I don't sound like nobody." At that time, Presley had a child's guitar that he played in the park, on his porch steps, and in a band with his buddies around their housing project. He soon aspired to be a member of the Songfellows, an amateur church quartet. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Presley dropped by 706 Union a number of times after that initial meeting to see if Ms. Keisker had any leads for him. In January 1954, Presley paid for a second personal record, and tried out for a professional band that spring. Eddie Bond (1933-2003), the band leader, told him to keep driving a truck because he would never make it as a singer. Presley later revealed that Bond's rejection "broke my heart." —Guralnick, op. cit.
". . . There is little question that he stepped through the doorway [at 706 Union] with the idea, if not of stardom . . . at the very least of being discovered. In later years he would always say that he wanted to make a personal record "to surprise my mother." Or "I just wanted to hear what I sounded like." But, of course, if he had simply wanted to record his voice, he could have paid twenty-five cents at W. T. Grant's on Main Street . . . Instead, Elvis went to a professional facility, where a man who had been written up in the papers would hear him sing." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Marion Keisker finally called Presley on Saturday, June 26 to set up an appointment, almost a year after he recorded his first personal disc. On a recent trip to Nashville, Phillips had gotten an acetate of a song that reminded him of Presley's voice. They worked on "Without You" [listen] for a long time that afternoon, and Phillips had Presley sing a number of other songs after his unsuccessful attempts with "Without You."
A week later, Phillips set Presley up with two members of the Starlite Wranglers [photos], Scotty Moore (guitar) and Bill Black (bass), and the three of them went to the studio on Monday, July 5 so Phillips could hear them on tape. Nothing special happened at the session until they took a break and Presley began fooling around and playing an old blues song by Arthur Crudup, "That's All Right [Mama] [listen]."
"Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup—nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced . . . And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded—it was "different," it was itself." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Phillips got his friend and kindred spirit, disc jockey Dewey Phillips, to play "That's All Right" [listen] on his radio show "Red Hot and Blue," then near the height of its popularity. The response was immediate—hundreds of phone calls and telegrams. Dewey played the song a number of times that night and also interviewed Presley during the show.
By the time the record was pressed and ready for release, there were 6,000 orders for it locally. Sun record number 209 was released on Monday, July 17, 1954. Phillips had been "looking for something that nobody could categorize," and this song did not sound exclusively black or white or country or pop. Initially, many people who heard the song thought that Presley was a black man. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Elvis Presley's first big public appearance with Scotty and Bill, the Blue Moon Boys, was on Friday, July 30 at Memphis's outdoor amphitheater in Overton Park [photos]. The show featured Slim Whitman, a star from the Louisiana Hayride, which some called the Grand Ole Opry's "farm club." He drew a hillbilly crowd, but they went wild when Elvis shook and wiggled his legs, his natural way of performing.
The new record made Billboard's regional charts by the end of August, but it was the B side that was more popular. Phillips backed "That's All Right" with an unorthodox version of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" [listen], a waltz that was a hit in 1946 for Bill Monroe, country music's elder statesman. By early September, "Blue Moon" was number 1 on the Memphis C&W chart and "That's All Right" was number 7. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Sun released Presley's second record in late September. "It was . . . an even bolder declaration of intent than the first, especially the strident blues number 'Good Rockin' Tonight' [listen], which rocked more confidently than anything they could have imagined in those first, uncertain days in the studio." The original jump blues version was written and recorded by Roy Brown in 1947 [listen]
Presley's growing popularity enabled Phillips to arrange a guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry for October 2, even though the Opry had never before scheduled a performer at such an early stage in his career. The performance of "Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill received a "polite, but somewhat tepid, reception," and the Opry's manager told Phillips that Presley "just did not fit the Opry mold."
It was a big disappointment for Elvis. But soon they were off to Louisiana for Presley's first appearance on the Louisiana Hayride, "the Opry's more innovative rival in Shreveport" that had a show every Saturday night. On the third Saturday of the month the show broadcast with a 50,000 watt signal that reached up to twenty-eight states.48 After only one guest appearance, Presley signed a standard one year contract to be one of the Hayride's regular members, and he and his band quit their day jobs. —Guralnick, op. cit.
For the next year, Elvis Presley and the Blue Moon Boys toured almost constantly... Presley took his first airplane flight and first trip to New York City on March 23, 1955 to try out for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts contest, but he did not pass the audition. [A] tour with Hank Snow/Jamboree Attractions began on May 1 in New Orleans, visiting twenty cities in three weeks, including a number of stops in Florida. There was a "riot" backstage after the concert in Jacksonville …
The audiences had never heard music like Presley played before, and they had never seen anyone who performed like Presley either. The shy, polite, mumbling boy gained self-confidence with every appearance, which soon led to a transformation on stage. People watching the show were astounded and shocked, both by the "ferocity of his performance,"49 and the crowd's reaction to it.
Even in the early days, Elvis almost always stole the show from the headliners, and concert lineups had to be rearranged accordingly. Nobody followed Elvis. Roy Orbison saw Presley for the first time in Odessa, Texas: "His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing . . . I just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it."—Guralnick, op. cit.
"'He's the new rage,' said a Louisiana radio executive… 'Sings hillbilly in R&B time. Can you figure that out? He wears pink pants and a black coat . . .'" —Guralnick, op. cit.
Elvis caused a great commotion everywhere he went. Throughout the South, Presley had girls screaming and fainting and chasing after him.
Sam Phillips was also on the road constantly after the Overton Park performance in July 1954, promoting the new records to distributors, disc jockeys, record store owners, and jukebox operators. His experiences, however, were entirely different. Time and again, disc jockeys who were old friends and/or long-standing business associates told Phillips they could not play the Presley records. A country deejay said "Sam, they'll run me out of town." To an R&B deejay, "That's All Right" was a country song. A major pop station disc jockey told Phillips, "your music is just so ragged. I just can't handle it right now. Maybe later on." —Guralnick, op. cit.
WELO in Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley's hometown, would not even play the record, in spite of many requests from teenagers, because the deejay did not like the new music. —Guralnick, op. cit.
Sam Phillips persevered in spite of all the rejection he was getting, and kept trying to turn it around. "I needed the attention that I got from the people that hated what I was doing, that acted like: 'Here is somebody trying to thrust junk on us and classify it as our music.'"—Guralnick, op. cit.
"He was a man swept up by a belief, in a sound and in an idea. And as discouraged as he might sometimes get, as harsh as the reality of selling this new music might be, he never strayed from his belief, he never allowed himself to be distracted from his main goal. Which was to get them to listen." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Phillips could feel a revolution was on the way. There were already lots of country boys coming to his studio to play the new music, which initially got the name rockabilly. "Sam knew that a day was coming . . . when the music would prevail." —Guralnick, op. cit.
Presley was still a regional sensation and unknown to the national market when he got the record industry's attention. By the summer of 1955, almost all the major and independent record labels were inquiring about him. Sam Phillips had mixed feelings about selling Presley's contract, but his operations could not accommodate the Presley phenomenon, his finances were very tight, and he had other artists who needed his attention.
Presley's parents signed a contract in August which soon forced the issue. Col. Tom Parker (1909-1997) became "special adviser to Elvis Presley." He was the head of Jamboree Attractions, one of the major promoters and bookers of country and western talent, and had booked Presley on the Hank Snow package tours earlier that year. At that time, Parker was known as the best promoter in the business. In October Parker asked Phillips to name his price for Presley's contract, and Parker made sure that it was met.
The deal was signed at 706 Union Avenue on November 21, 1955. RCA-Victor bought Elvis Presley's contract from Sun Records for $35,000, plus $5,000 in back royalties owed to Presley. The story ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar the next day:
"Elvis Presley, 20, Memphis recording star and entertainer who zoomed into big- time and the big money almost overnight, has been released from his contract with Sun Record Co. of Memphis . . . . Phillips and RCA officials did not reveal terms but said the money involved is probably the highest ever paid for a contract release for a country-western recording artist. 'I feel Elvis is one of the most talented youngsters today,' Phillips said, 'and by releasing his contract to RCA-Victor we will give him the opportunity of entering the largest organization of its kind in the world, so his talents can be given the fullest opportunity.'" —quoted in Guralnick, op. cit.
Sam Phillips never regretted his decision to sell Elvis Presley's contract. In many ways, Presley's departure was like a new beginning for Sun Records. Many country musicians aspiring to play rockabilly began to make their way to 706 Union Avenue. As Johnny Cash said many years later, "Elvis was a beacon that brought us all there." —Peter Guralnick, "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll," VHS (A&E Biography, 2000)
Sun Studio
After Sam Phillips moved his companies to the new location on Madison Avenue, 706 Union Avenue housed a number of different businesses in the 1960s and 1970s, including a barber shop, an auto parts store, and a scuba shop. The building was vacant in 1985 when it became the site of a family reunion of sorts. An album entitled “Class of '55: Memphis Rock 'n' Roll Homecoming“ was recorded here to celebrate and remember the "Class of '55" on their 30th "anniversary." Record producer Chips Moman convened Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Roy Orbison to record together for the first time at the Sun studio in September 1985.
Not long after that event, 706 Union Avenue became a stop for visitors on tours to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, which opened to the public in 1982. The building opened as the Sun Studio for tours in 1987—the name Sun Records and the original Sun record label design still belong to Shelby Singleton, who bought the company in 1969. The current property owner also purchased the adjacent two-story brick building that housed a café and a boarding house in the 1950s. That building now serves as a soda shop, gallery, and gift shop for visitors to Sun Studio.
The Sun Studio also operates as a full service 24-track recording studio for professional musicians, as well as anyone who wants to make a personal record, just like Elvis. In 1987, the Irish rock band U2 recorded several songs here for their album "Rattle and Hum," including "When Love Comes to Town" featuring B.B. King. Several hundred thousand visitors have made the pilgrimage to this extraordinary place.
• National Register # 03001031, 2003 • designated a National Historic Landmark, 2003
Fiction Week! Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho If you like MPoC, you’re probably going to like this novel. I consider it to be the second-best book of 2015. Why is that? Well, this is what happens when you take characters who are relentlessly marginalized in Alternate History genre novels and make them the center of the story, the Hinges of History, the Fate of the Universe resting in their hands, and a partridge in a pear tree. It’s A M A Z I N G. This book could have gone off the rails very easily at a few important plot points. Instead, it steers itself back to where it needs to be by introducing several painfully uncomfortable emotional questions and faces necessary moral quandaries, as well as showing how there really isn’t a difference to speak of between the two. Zacharias Wythe is the titular Sorcerer Royal, new-minted head of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, and inheritor of a very confounding problem. You see, there just isn’t as much magic around as there used to be, and it’s in the Society’s best interests if this problem is somehow fixed without anyone else ever finding out about it. Everyone around him is waiting for him to fail because he is Black and they are old, white racists with too much power. If he doesn’t ruin everything on his own, well, they’re ready, able and willing to ensure his failure by any means at their disposal. Zacharias is also in the very unfortunate position of having been named successor immediately after his benefactor/adopted “father”‘s death….death being not quite as final as most of us have been led to believe. Prunella Gentleman, meanwhile, is the mixed race and illegitimate daughter of a… well, a gentleman, and has grown up in a school of sorcery for women-in which the main objective is to make absolutely sure that none of the young ladies who graduate ever show the slightest hint of magical ability. Chafing under the restrictions she’s been living under and facing the reality of her own unprecedented magical abilities, she must uncover the secrets of her parentage and her inheritance before she can move forward to save her country, the world, and also fix racism and sexism while she’s at it. I’ve seen a lot of people comparing this book to Austen, Fforde, and Heyer because they’re fans of that type of work. I personally am not a fan of that type of work; I’m much more into Epic or Medieval Fantasy but let me tell you, I Loved. This. Story. If the whole Regency England Hoity Toity Drama of Manners thing puts you off, trust me, you still are going to want to read this. I don’t think it really comes off as that type of work at all, but I can still see how fans of that genre would find it very appealing. If you want that book that’s not too long or too short, not too wordy or too shallow, not overly ‘delightful’ and not too much of a downer; in short, if you want that novel that will be 100% just right, this is The One. Amazon | Goodreads | Barnes and Noble If you want to get into the content a little more, here are some other reviews: Magic, Murder, and Microaggressions in Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown by Alex Brown Sorcerer to the Crown Review at The Book Smugglers: thebooksmugglers.com/2015/09/book-review-sorcerer-to-the-...
St. Louis, MO (est. 1764. pop. ~300K) • Laclede's Landing
• Peper Building, aka Raeder Place Building • 6-story Victorian/ Italianate style tobacco warehouse, built on a site originally bought from American Indians for a yoke of oxen, plow, cow & 2 sows.• designed by Frederick Wiliiam Raeder (b.1832) for fellow German immigrant Christian Peper (1826-1903), founder of Christian Peper Tobacco Co., 1852
• a significant St. Louis cast-iron structure, one of the largest cast-iron front buildings in the U.S., listed in Source Book of American Architecture: 500 Notable Buildings from the 10th Century to the Present
• by the end of the 19th c., St. Louis was the largest processor of chewing & pipe tobacco in the U.S. • building’s plank floors were slanted so workers could roll large tobacco barrels down toward the Mississippi • in 1906, the company produced a series of racy cards for their Turkish brand Kadee cigarettes—one of the first uses of artistically-posed nude models for advertising [photo] • company was acquired by the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Co., early 1950s —Laclede's Landing Architecture
• Peper was the pioneer St. Louis tobacco merchant • had lived in the U.S. since age 13 • went into the grocery business then, in 1848, partnered in a tobacco firm which lasted 4 yrs. • founder & sole owner of Christian Peper Tobacco Co. • built an early cotton press [postcard, cotton compress c. 1905] • founded Peper Cotton Press Co. • St. Louis became a leader in the cotton trade • served as president of the Broadway street railroad for 35 yrs. • one of the 1st contributors to a fund to initiate the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904 St. Louis World's Fair) —Connie Nisinger, Find a Grave
Marker:
"On this site stood the Old Missouri Hotel [photo]. The first legislature convened here under the first state constitution on September 18, 1820. The year before Missouri was admitted to the Union. It was also the site of the inauguration of the first governor of Missouri, Alexander McNair and of the election of the state’s first U.S. Senators David Barton and Thomas Hart Benton."
• In 1831, the hotel’s owner, Major Thomas Biddle (1790-1831), engaged in a dual with U.S Congressman Spencer Pettis (1802-1831) on Bloody Island, a Mississippi River sandbar • both were mortally wounded —An Affair of Honor on the Western Frontier
• with the exception of cornice removal, the bldg. has remained intact [photo] • remodeled 1976 by architectural firm Kimble A. Cohn Associates as part of Laclede’s Landing redevelopment • recently housed Peper Lofts residential apartments, multiple options for loft living in Downtown in St. Louis, the Old Spaghetti Factory, & the offices of Abstrakt Marketing Group
• Christian Peper Building, City Landmark # 31, 1971
• Laclede's Landing Historic District, National Register # 76002262, 1976