Overview

From the author of the critically acclaimed Elvis Presley biography: Last Train to Memphis brings us the life of Sam Phillips, the visionary genius who singlehandedly steered the revolutionary path of Sun Records. The music that he shaped in his tiny Memphis studio with artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash, introduced a sound that had never been heard before. He brought forth a singular mix of black and white voices passionately proclaiming the vitality of the American vernacular tradition while at the same time declaring, once and for all, a new, integrated musical day. With extensive interviews and firsthand personal observations extending over a 25-year period with Phillips, along with wide-ranging interviews with nearly all the legendary Sun Records artists, Guralnick gives us an ardent, unrestrained portrait of an American original as compelling in his own right as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, or Thomas Edison.

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Reviews

With his latest book, Guralnick has penned his most intimate work yet. Over the course of 700-plus pages, Guralnick documents Phillips as both a musical visionary and a champion of a kind of humanist democracy--someone who sought to document the expressions of the poor and disenfranchised, those consigned to the narrow margins of society. In trying to understand Phillips' work, legacy and philosophies, Guralnick doesn't shy away from the more difficult aspects of his life. By doing so, Guralnick creates a complex, compelling and unflinching portrait. --Bob Mehr, Memphis Commercial Appeal When Elvis Presley stepped into a Memphis recording studio with producer Sam Phillips in 1954, they defined rock 'n' roll as we know it. Peter Guralnick already gave us Elvis's story in two landmark books. He now returns with a brilliant, intensely human look at Phillips, the endlessly fascinating figure who also recorded Johnny Cash, B.B King, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis. It's a bold, insightful work that tells us in novelistic detail about the obsessions and struggles of the man who presided over the uneasy birth of rock 'n' roll. --Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash What shines through this sympathetic but warts-and-all bio is that for Phillips it wasn't about the money or even just about the music. It was about music's ability to bridge the considerable racial divide that existed at the time....Compelling and even revelatory to those who thought they knew it all. --Curt Schleier, Minneapolis Star Tribune Thoroughgoing and thoroughly satisfying.... Guralnick has injected enough helium and momentum into the material to get it airborne and moving stately forward. --Peter Lewis, Christian Science Monitor The story of Sam Phillips is not just a musical journey; it's a portrait of a polymath, an incredibly driven Southern eccentric....Guralnick clearly delights in telling Phillips's tale. He is known for being an excellent and empathetic biographer: straightforward, never florid. ...Forty pages before the end of this tome, the author comes uncharacteristically clean. Hell, why not just come out and say it? I loved Sam. By that point, so do we. --Michael Barclay, MacLean's The book is a labor of love. Guralnick is passionate about the music, but he doesn't let his passion overinflate his prose, and he seems to know everything about everyone who was part of the Southern music world... It's natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism and good luck...and shape them into a heroic narrative....But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes -- which is why it's good to have Guralnick's book. --Louis Menand, The New Yorker Superb.... No one could tell Sam's story -- a complex mixture of music business reportage and personal narrative -- with the level of detail and affection that Guralnick brings to these 700-plus pages. Sam Phillips may well be the capstone to Guralnick's career.... This book gives Phillips and his judgments their due. Bridging American music's racial divide and transforming its pop, he was as much an original as the artists he nurtured. --Matt Damsker, USA Today Phillips's stories and philosophies light up these pages....By the book's end, the weight of Guralnick's mission comes into full view. Phillips had advised him early on, It ain't for you to put me in a good light. Just put me in the focus I'm supposed to be in. And that's exactly what Guralnick has done. His subject would no doubt be proud that he got it right. --James Reed, Boston Globe Phillips' rich and oracular storytelling permeates this book....He was huckster, trickster, dreamer and architect compressed in one roiling, flamboyant package. If he hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for Mark Twain to invent him. --Gene Seymour, Newsday Peter Guralnick tells it like it was. If you want to dig into the truth and read about what really went down in Memphis in the '50s, this is the definitive book. --Lucinda Williams Peter Guralnick isn't just a music writer or a biographer--he's one of the essential chroniclers of American popular culture, and his work illuminates some of the crucial components of our national identity: race, religion, fame, and the big business of having fun, among others. In this epic biography of Sam Phillips, Guralnick bears witness to the birth of rock and roll and the cultural revolution it inspired. It's not only an unforgettable portrait of an eccentric visionary, it's a testament to the power of ordinary people to change the world with nothing more than a beautiful idea and a handful of songs. --Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers One of the most profound biographies of recent years....Sam Phillips has many of the characteristics of a Sun recording session: epic but as intimate as sex...[and] delivering a figure so quintessentially American he might almost be a character in Mark Twain or Melville. --Brian Morton, Glasgow Herald Much-anticipated and long-awaited, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, is as much a labor of love for Peter Guralnick as Sun Records was to Sam Phillips. And that's saying something. --Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This Mr. Guralnick has conjured the magic of Elvis in the Sun studio as Presley's biographer, but his knowing Sam Phillips makes this the superior version... Mr. Guralnick takes you right to the room, and rather than gliding past a scene that has been written about many times, he immerses himself comfortably in it and revives its original intensity....[He] has produced the gold-standard Presley bio and now a complete portrait of his inspiration. Mr. Guralnick, the historian, writer and fan, has captured what was different, real and raw about a great artist. --Preston Lauterbach, Wall Street Journal Lovingly crafted.... With crisp prose and meticulous detail, Guralnick gives Phillips the same epic treatment he previously employed in acclaimed biographies of Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley.... An astonishing feat.... It is difficult to imagine a more complete or poetic account of his life than this remarkable volume.... 'I didn't set out to revolutionize the world, ' Phillips once told Guralnick in a moment of humility, but in this book [the author] convincingly argues that Phillips did just that. --Charles Hughes, The Washington Post Just as the two magisterial volumes of Guralnick's Presley bio paint a much more nuanced picture of Presley, The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll captures the complexity of the colorful Phillips....The author loves his subject and loves writing about him.... A book that can stand with his best, and that is [both] entertaining and lively....For that rock-and-roll fans should be eternally grateful. --Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer If his two-volume life of Elvis Presley, biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie, and trilogy on southern roots music haven't convinced you that Peter Guralnick is our finest chronicler of American music, [this] should do the trick....Magisterial yet lively....it's a book that places Guralnick in some pretty heady company. Arguably, he is to music what Robert Caro is to politics: a dogged researcher and graceful writer who has a genuine feel for his subjects and the knowledge to place them in a larger context.... A wonderfully nuanced and shaded portrait. --Best Classic Bands Guralnick's book is comprehensive, warm, thorough, captivating, and compulsively readable....It may just be the best music book of 2015. --Henry Carrigan, No Depression Guralnick's biography of Sam Phillips is a key work of Americana. --Downbeat Guralnick wrote definitive biographies of Elvis and now does the same for Phillips, a visionary who gave voice to a rich and diverse culture long marginalized.... Essential reading for music fans. --Ben Segedin, Booklist (starred review) Guralnick paints a detailed and sympathetic picture of Phillips as a relentless visionary, a talker, a loving but imperfect family man and a perfectionist who relished imperfections that could make recordings special. --Michael Hill, Associated Press Few biographies have anything like this degree of insight, rigor, or command of detail; crucially, it also drives you back to the music. Written with sensitivity and love, it captures more than any other book this writer can remember the Fifties' limitless possibilities, and is a gripping depiction of an empire in its pomp--not only Sun Records, but also America. --Paul Trynka, Mojo Essential reading. --Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly Epic, elegant and crisply told. --Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., BookPage Definitive...With Presley's story at its core, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll is in some ways the third volume [to] Guralnick's double-volume Elvis bio. What makes it more illuminating and arguably truer is seeing Elvis in the broader context of Phillips' career, [which was] in many ways a mission to transform [t]his nation's history of bigotry....You may come away born again. --Rolling Stone An accumulation of minute and fascinating details about apprenticeship, the glory, and the very assembly of a man who conjured spells out of valves, wrestled with small-time double-dealers, caught lightning, and swam against the tide to introduce the world to Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash, to name but three. An exceptional portrait of a singular force. --Elvis Costello Acclaimed music historian Guralnick has written landmark accounts of Elvis and the history of American roots music, and he now turns his considerable skills to the life of Sun Records producer Sam Phillips in this delightful and comprehensive volume. Guralnick energetically tells the must-read tale of a Southern boy intent on enacting his vision of freedom and justice through music. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) A sprawling, engaging biography stuffed with stories and tidbits. --Knoxville News A rollicking good time. Sometimes reading can rattle the cage and stomp the floor, and no one rattled the cages more than Sam Phillips. --Memphis Flyer A monumental biography of the larger-than-life loner who fought for the acceptance of black music and discovered an extraordinary group of poor, country-boy singers whose records would transform American popular culture.... A wonderful story that brings us deep into that moment when America made race music its own and gave rise to the rock sound now heard around the world. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) A large part of the book's appeal consists in Guralnick's easy, conversational style. With its frequent use of anecdote and reliance on reported conversation, Sam Phillips could have been sprawling and uneven. In the hands of a storyteller as deft as Peter Guralnick, however, it effortlessly engages the reader throughout. --Lou Glandfield, Times Literary Supplement A cornerstone addition to Guralnick's unmatched backlist of music history and biography. --Shelf Awareness A book so thoroughly steeped in its subject that it is almost an autobiography in the third person.... 'This is a book written out of admiration and love, ' Guralnick states frankly in an author's note. As such, it honors Sam Phillips elegantly, by devoting itself to the one subject Phillips seemed to admire and love as much as he did -music: Sam Phillips himself. --David Hajdu, New York Times Book Review Sam Phillips is an epic biography, at once sweeping and personal, in which the gifted writer Peter Guralnick captures the voice and life of a transformational figure in American music. --Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins With this book, Peter Guralnick brings popular music and the man who gave us so much of it, Sam Phillips, to the very centre of American social history. And he does it quite brilliantly. --Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments A deeply intimate portrait that never veers into hagiography....For Guralnick and for the reader, the book becomes the quintessential Phillips production: an altogether profound and revelatory experience. --Memphis Commercial Appeal New York Times Bestseller One of The Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2015 Mr. Guralnick is a sensitive biographer who has landed upon a perfect topic in Phillips, the brilliant Memphis producer who, in the 1950s, recorded the earliest work of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin' Wolf. This is vital American history, smartly and warmly told. --Dwight Garner, New York Times, Top Books of 2015 Sam Phillips is Guralnick's most personal book....The author injects himself into the book more than ever before--not only because he's part of the story in the later years but also because Phillips' credo of breaking down of class and race barriers through the 'extreme individualism' is so essential to Guralnick's life work--and his conception of American music. You can hear Phillips' evangelical fervor resonating in Guralnick's prose much as you could once hear it reverberating in Presley's vocals. --Geoffrey Himes, Paste

Just as the two magisterial volumes of Guralnick's Presley bio paint a much more nuanced picture of Presley, The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll captures the complexity of the colorful Phillips....The author loves his subject and loves writing about him.... A book that can stand with his best, and that is [both] entertaining and lively....For that rock-and-roll fans should be eternally grateful. Philadelphia Inquirer

Sam Phillips is Guralnick's most personal book....The author injects himself into the book more than ever before--not only because he's part of the story in the later years but also because Phillips' credo of breaking down of class and race barriers through the 'extreme individualism' is so essential to Guralnick's life work--and his conception of American music. You can hear Phillips' evangelical fervor resonating in Guralnick's prose much as you could once hear it reverberating in Presley's vocals. --Geoffrey Himes, Paste One of the most profound biographies of recent years....Sam Phillips has many of the characteristics of a Sun recording session: epic but as intimate as sex...[and] delivering a figure so quintessentially American he might almost be a character in Mark Twain or Melville. --Brian Morton, Glasgow Herald Few biographies have anything like this degree of insight, rigor, or command of detail; crucially, it also drives you back to the music. Written with sensitivity and love, it captures more than any other book this writer can remember the Fifties' limitless possibilities, and is a gripping depiction of an empire in its pomp--not only Sun Records, but also America. --Paul Trynka, Mojo Phillips' rich and oracular storytelling permeates this book....He was huckster, trickster, dreamer and architect compressed in one roiling, flamboyant package. If he hadn't existed, it would have been necessary for Mark Twain to invent him. --Gene Seymour, Newsday Just as the two magisterial volumes of Guralnick's Presley bio paint a much more nuanced picture of Presley, The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll captures the complexity of the colorful Phillips....The author loves his subject and loves writing about him.... A book that can stand with his best, and that is [both] entertaining and lively....For that rock-and-roll fans should be eternally grateful. --Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer Guralnick paints a detailed and sympathetic picture of Phillips as a relentless visionary, a talker, a loving but imperfect family man and a perfectionist who relished imperfections that could make recordings special. --Michael Hill, Associated Press The story of Sam Phillips is not just a musical journey; it's a portrait of a polymath, an incredibly driven Southern eccentric....Guralnick clearly delights in telling Phillips's tale. He is known for being an excellent and empathetic biographer: straightforward, never florid. ...Forty pages before the end of this tome, the author comes uncharacteristically clean. Hell, why not just come out and say it? I loved Sam. By that point, so do we. --Michael Barclay, MacLean's An accumulation of minute and fascinating details about apprenticeship, the glory, and the very assembly of a man who conjured spells out of valves, wrestled with small-time double-dealers, caught lightning, and swam against the tide to introduce the world to Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley, and Johnny Cash, to name but three. An exceptional portrait of a singular force. --Elvis Costello Phillips's stories and philosophies light up these pages....By the book's end, the weight of Guralnick's mission comes into full view. Phillips had advised him early on, It ain't for you to put me in a good light. Just put me in the focus I'm supposed to be in. And that's exactly what Guralnick has done. His subject would no doubt be proud that he got it right. --James Reed, Boston Globe What shines through this sympathetic but warts-and-all bio is that for Phillips it wasn't about the money or even just about the music. It was about music's ability to bridge the considerable racial divide that existed at the time....Compelling and even revelatory to those who thought they knew it all. --Curt Schleier, Minneapolis Star Tribune If his two-volume life of Elvis Presley, biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie, and trilogy on southern roots music haven't convinced you that Peter Guralnick is our finest chronicler of American music, [this] should do the trick....Magisterial yet lively....it's a book that places Guralnick in some pretty heady company. Arguably, he is to music what Robert Caro is to politics: a dogged researcher and graceful writer who has a genuine feel for his subjects and the knowledge to place them in a larger context.... A wonderfully nuanced and shaded portrait. --Best Classic Bands Thoroughgoing and thoroughly satisfying.... Guralnick has injected enough helium and momentum into the material to get it airborne and moving stately forward. --Peter Lewis, Christian Science Monitor Much-anticipated and long-awaited, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll, is as much a labor of love for Peter Guralnick as Sun Records was to Sam Phillips. And that's saying something. --Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This A deeply intimate portrait that never veers into hagiography....For Guralnick and for the reader, the book becomes the quintessential Phillips production: an altogether profound and revelatory experience. --Memphis Commercial Appeal A cornerstone addition to Guralnick's unmatched backlist of music history and biography. --Shelf Awareness Guralnick's book is comprehensive, warm, thorough, captivating, and compulsively readable....It may just be the best music book of 2015. --Henry Carrigan, No Depression Superb.... No one could tell Sam's story -- a complex mixture of music business reportage and personal narrative -- with the level of detail and affection that Guralnick brings to these 700-plus pages. Sam Phillips may well be the capstone to Guralnick's career.... This book gives Phillips and his judgments their due. Bridging American music's racial divide and transforming its pop, he was as much an original as the artists he nurtured. --Matt Damsker, USA Today With this book, Peter Guralnick brings popular music and the man who gave us so much of it, Sam Phillips, to the very centre of American social history. And he does it quite brilliantly. --Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments Peter Guralnick tells it like it was. If you want to dig into the truth and read about what really went down in Memphis in the '50s, this is the definitive book. --Lucinda Williams The book is a labor of love. Guralnick is passionate about the music, but he doesn't let his passion overinflate his prose, and he seems to know everything about everyone who was part of the Southern music world... It's natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism and good luck...and shape them into a heroic narrative....But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes -- which is why it's good to have Guralnick's book. --Louis Menand, The New Yorker Acclaimed music historian Guralnick has written landmark accounts of Elvis and the history of American roots music, and he now turns his considerable skills to the life of Sun Records producer Sam Phillips in this delightful and comprehensive volume. Guralnick energetically tells the must-read tale of a Southern boy intent on enacting his vision of freedom and justice through music. --Publishers Weekly (starred review) Guralnick wrote definitive biographies of Elvis and now does the same for Phillips, a visionary who gave voice to a rich and diverse culture long marginalized.... Essential reading for music fans. --Ben Segedin, Booklist (starred review) A monumental biography of the larger-than-life loner who fought for the acceptance of black music and discovered an extraordinary group of poor, country-boy singers whose records would transform American popular culture.... A wonderful story that brings us deep into that moment when America made race music its own and gave rise to the rock sound now heard around the world. --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Sam Phillips is an epic biography, at once sweeping and personal, in which the gifted writer Peter Guralnick captures the voice and life of a transformational figure in American music. --Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins When Elvis Presley stepped into a Memphis recording studio with producer Sam Phillips in 1954, they defined rock 'n' roll as we know it. Peter Guralnick already gave us Elvis's story in two landmark books. He now returns with a brilliant, intensely human look at Phillips, the endlessly fascinating figure who also recorded Johnny Cash, B.B King, Howlin' Wolf, and Jerry Lee Lewis. It's a bold, insightful work that tells us in novelistic detail about the obsessions and struggles of the man who presided over the uneasy birth of rock 'n' roll. --Robert Hilburn, author of Johnny Cash Lovingly crafted.... With crisp prose and meticulous detail, Guralnick gives Phillips the same epic treatment he previously employed in acclaimed biographies of Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley.... An astonishing feat.... It is difficult to imagine a more complete or poetic account of his life than this remarkable volume.... 'I didn't set out to revolutionize the world, ' Phillips once told Guralnick in a moment of humility, but in this book [the author] convincingly argues that Phillips did just that. --Charles Hughes, The Washington Post A book so thoroughly steeped in its subject that it is almost an autobiography in the third person.... 'This is a book written out of admiration and love, ' Guralnick states frankly in an author's note. As such, it honors Sam Phillips elegantly, by devoting itself to the one subject Phillips seemed to admire and love as much as he did -music: Sam Phillips himself. --David Hajdu, New York Times Book Review Definitive...With Presley's story at its core, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll is in some ways the third volume [to] Guralnick's double-volume Elvis bio. What makes it more illuminating and arguably truer is seeing Elvis in the broader context of Phillips' career, [which was] in many ways a mission to transform [t]his nation's history of bigotry....You may come away born again. --Rolling Stone New York Times Bestseller One of The Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2015 Mr. Guralnick is a sensitive biographer who has landed upon a perfect topic in Phillips, the brilliant Memphis producer who, in the 1950s, recorded the earliest work of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Howlin' Wolf. This is vital American history, smartly and warmly told. --Dwight Garner, New York Times, Top Books of 2015 A large part of the book's appeal consists in Guralnick's easy, conversational style. With its frequent use of anecdote and reliance on reported conversation, Sam Phillips could have been sprawling and uneven. In the hands of a storyteller as deft as Peter Guralnick, however, it effortlessly engages the reader throughout. --Lou Glandfield, Times Literary Supplement Essential reading. --Isabella Biedenharn, Entertainment Weekly Guralnick's biography of Sam Phillips is a key work of Americana. --Downbeat A sprawling, engaging biography stuffed with stories and tidbits. --Knoxville News A rollicking good time. Sometimes reading can rattle the cage and stomp the floor, and no one rattled the cages more than Sam Phillips. --Memphis Flyer Mr. Guralnick has conjured the magic of Elvis in the Sun studio as Presley's biographer, but his knowing Sam Phillips makes this the superior version... Mr. Guralnick takes you right to the room, and rather than gliding past a scene that has been written about many times, he immerses himself comfortably in it and revives its original intensity....[He] has produced the gold-standard Presley bio and now a complete portrait of his inspiration. Mr. Guralnick, the historian, writer and fan, has captured what was different, real and raw about a great artist. --Preston Lauterbach, Wall Street Journal With his latest book, Guralnick has penned his most intimate work yet. Over the course of 700-plus pages, Guralnick documents Phillips as both a musical visionary and a champion of a kind of humanist democracy--someone who sought to document the expressions of the poor and disenfranchised, those consigned to the narrow margins of society. In trying to understand Phillips' work, legacy and philosophies, Guralnick doesn't shy away from the more difficult aspects of his life. By doing so, Guralnick creates a complex, compelling and unflinching portrait. --Bob Mehr, Memphis Commercial Appeal Epic, elegant and crisply told. --Henry L. Carrigan, Jr., BookPage Peter Guralnick isn't just a music writer or a biographer--he's one of the essential chroniclers of American popular culture, and his work illuminates some of the crucial components of our national identity: race, religion, fame, and the big business of having fun, among others. In this epic biography of Sam Phillips, Guralnick bears witness to the birth of rock and roll and the cultural revolution it inspired. It's not only an unforgettable portrait of an eccentric visionary, it's a testament to the power of ordinary people to change the world with nothing more than a beautiful idea and a handful of songs. --Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers

Author Information

Peter Guralnick's books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. He is a recent inductee in the Blues Hall of Fame. Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; the novel, Nighthawk Blues, and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. His most recent book is Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll.

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