Sam Phillips is dead. "If I could find a white man with the negro sound and the negro feel," Phillips remarked 50 years ago, "I’d make a billion dollars." Not long after, Elvis Presley walked through the door of Phillips’ Sun Records studio in Memphis. Although Elvis worked with Phillips for only about a year, without Sam’s vision, the former truck driver for Crown Electric may have ended up with a gold watch from the company instead of gold records and the crown as King of Rock and Roll.

If Elvis is the best monument to Sam Phillips’ vision, the best monument to Elvis is Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Guralnick’s latest project is a documentary film about gospel-soul singer Sam Cooke, which has been featured on NPR the last two mornings. It’s surprising how much of Cooke’s music is encoded in baby-boomer DNA: "You Send Me," "Chain Gang," "What a Wonderful World," "Twistin’ the Night Away," and "Havin’ a Party," just to name a few. Cooke was also one of the first artists to control the right to publish the songs he wrote, which doesn’t sound very sexy until you understand that publishing is where the real money is in the music biz. Many legends of the 50s and 60s were paid a one-time fee for their most famous performances, records that have represented a continuing river of cash for music publishers ever since. Thus Cooke might have become the first full-fledged performer/mogul, had he not been murdered under mysterious circumstances in December 1964. [posted 7/31/2003]