Scotty Moore: 1931-2016

Sam Phillips always said that Scotty may have been the most honest man he ever met. That was as high a compliment as Sam could bestow. In fact, Sam almost went on to imply, if it came down to a choice between Scotty’s version of a story and his own, choose Scotty’s! Now don’t get me wrong – Sam never actually said that. But that was how much he thought of Scotty. And he wasn’t just talking about facts – he was talking about character.

That was one of the main reasons he put Scotty together with Elvis in the first place. Elvis was nineteen, Scotty was twenty-two, and Elvis referred to him as “the Old Man” almost from the start. Scotty was always the one to  provide a calming influence, even as all hell was busting loose around them in new and unpredictable ways.

But it wasn’t just a matter of temperament. His easy-going manner could not fully disguise the depth of his intellect or musical ambition. Of all the artists who found their way to Sam’s studio, Scotty was the one to whom Sam most readily revealed his vision of the future. They started meeting at Taylor’s Restaurant three or four afternoons a week, when Scotty was trying to get his own hillbilly group, the Starlite Wranglers, recorded, several months before Elvis Presley entered the picture. “By doing the record I became pretty good friends with Sam. He knew there was a crossover coming. He foresaw it, and practically every day after work [Scotty worked as a hatter at his brothers’ dry-cleaning business, which left his afternoons free] I would drift by the studio, and we would sit there over coffee at Miss Taylor’s Café and say to each other, ‘What is it? How can we do it?’”

There were times when I first met Scotty in 1976, when I wasn’t sure that he could even be lured into a conversation, let alone an interview. He was forty-four years old, and as proud as he was of his historic contributions and accomplishments, he had little interest in dwelling on them. He had his own friends, his own enthusiasms, his own tape-duplicating business, his own life. Why should he live in the past? In fact, were it not for the help of Gail Pollock, his employee at the time and devoted companion until her death in the fall of 2015, I’m not sure if he ever would have entertained the idea of doing a full-length interview, let alone a succession of them over a period of more than twenty years. But Gail persuaded him that I had a good track record (she checked) and an honest face (we soon became good friends, all  three of us). And once he started to talk, once he agreed to start scrutinizing the past, he gave it his full attention, just as he did with any of the endeavors upon which he seriously embarked: his guitar playing, his engineering, his producing –well, let me take it several steps further, just the whole manner in which he conducted his life.

“Ooh, you’re making my brain hurt,” he would say when we really got into it some years later, after I had started my Elvis biography. But he never dismissed any line of inquiry, no matter how far afield it might seem (or actually be); he took every question seriously and always provided the facts as he knew them, or, upon consideration, as he came to understand them. He never exaggerated his role, he never fabricated a connection,  he never  answered a question when he didn’t know the answer – he just gave the matter his careful, considered attention.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m making Scotty out to be some kind of brooding introvert. Nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, there are introverts, and there are introverts. Someone like Sam Phillips, for example, for all of the brilliant extroversion of his work, was at heart a solitary figure. But Scotty loved to have fun – there was no question about it, there was no piety about it, there was certainly never any boastfulness about it, but there was never any doubt that Scotty in his own quiet way – sometimes with a soft chuckle where from others you might expect a loud guffaw – always had a good time. It was no different from the day we first met: Scotty valued his life, he valued his music, above all he valued his friends.

Guitar players of every generation since rock began have studied and memorized Scotty’s licks, even when Scotty himself couldn’t duplicate them afterwards. (“It was all feel,” Scotty said of the early RCA sessions. “On 'Too Much’ we just got lost, but somehow or another we finally recovered!”) He lived long enough to see himself sought out and celebrated by rock icons from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen to Paul McCartney. Those tributes, both genuine and personal, certainly meant a lot to him. But I’m not sure if it wasn’t the informal “thumb-picking” sessions with old friends like Chip Young and Thom Bresh (maybe with Tracy Nelson singing!) that didn’t give him the most satisfaction.

He remained to the end a deeply thoughtful, deeply modest man with a twinkling manner and a dry sense of humor (“Very dry,” Scotty would say), whose intentions were to celebrate the moment, place no faith in the business part of the music business, and always maintain the kind of informal convivialities that make life worth living. I never saw Scotty seek out a public moment, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him happier than he was at his 80th birthday party at the Gibson Beale Street Showcase in Memphis (see accompanying photograph). There, in a packed room full of family and friends, for a moment the private became public, and despite a number of offers to see him back to his hotel room, Scotty stayed well into the early hours of the morning, when the party was finally over. That’s the way I like to remember Scotty – well, I like to remember him in so many ways – but always as a man surrounded by friends, happily enjoying not the limelight but a lifetime of shared experiences.

I Still Miss Someone: Roland Janes 1933-2013

Roland, Robert and me

I really loved Roland.

But then so did everyone else who really knew him.

I could try to be clever and say it was for his virtuosity (Roland, a master of mischievous word play, would undoubtedly frown on that), because he was indeed a brilliant guitarist, who provided all those carefully calibrated, arrestingly spontaneous solos and rhythm patterns on so many of the Sun Records classics.

But that, of course, is not what I am speaking of here.

I’m speaking, really, of a virtuosity of spirit, which no one who ever encountered the man could miss. A virtuosity – a generosity of soul that is universally praised, often sought after, but rarely attained. And in Roland’s case, like his guitar playing, it was achieved without visible effort, scarcely ever calling attention to itself.

If you ever visited the Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, you would know Roland Janes. He was there managing the studio, engineering sessions, greeting the world, every day more or less for the last thirty years, working with everyone from Charlie Rich to Memphis rappers Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone to Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, and anyone who might wander in off the street looking to cut a “personal” record, the same way Elvis once did at Sam’s original studio at 706 Union around the corner.

At that original Sun studio Roland played on just about every hit (and, he would be quick to point out with a dry chuckle, on even more misses) that came out on the label from mid-1956 on. He arrived with Jack Clement and Billy Lee Riley that summer, going on to play the blazing double-whammy solo on Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But it was, really, with Jerry Lee Lewis’ arrival at the tag end of the year that he would cement his place in rock ‘n’ roll history. How many times have you heard Jerry Lee’s exuberant shout, “Ro’ Boy,” as he exhorts the otherwise nameless guitarist to take yet another perfectly conceived, perfectly concise solo? It’s for his musicianship most of all, of course (along with his own short-lived but influential Rita label and his Sonic Recording Studio, one of the principal progenitors of the Memphis garage-band explosion of the ‘60s), that Roland was named to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame just last month.

But forget that. I mean, don’t forget the music – don’t ever forget the music. But forget the brilliant solos, and forget the accolades (as Roland said about fame, “I never really cared about any of that”) if you want to try to understand the spirit of the man.

Anyone who stopped by the studio, I don’t care for how long, could not miss that spirit. He was such a kind man. He was such a smart man. He was such a decent and committed man – and by “committed” I don’t mean to suggest anything like the quality that politicians often cite when referring to their own inflexibility. I mean, he was committed in the same way that Sam Phillips proved himself to be over and over again in the studio, committed to bringing out the best in you, committed to exploring the you of you, whoever you were, however you presented yourself, however sophisticated or unsophisticated your tastes. Not that Roland was above kidding around with you. Sometimes after a particularly bad pun, Roland might simply engage you with a quizzical look, as if to say, I hope you got that, it wasn’t really that hard. But mostly he was in the business of encouraging you to be the best “you” you could possibly be.

I’m not sure when I first met Roland – it must have been over thirty years ago - in the studio, of course – but there was no end to our meetings and, given Roland’s nature, I’m sure there will be no end. I remember when we were recording the Charlie Rich album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1991, it was Roland, who was second engineer on the session, who  was, really, the key to its success. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t have a lot to say; as Sam Phillips always said, it was almost as if he had too much to say, but given his deeply introspective nature too often it stayed bottled up inside. It was hard for Charlie – he had an intrinsic fear of letting go (he would tell you it was “anxiety panic disorder”), but even though Sam’s sons, Knox and Jerry, were present most of the time, and Scott Billington did a wonderfully sympathetic job of producing, it was only Roland who had the capacity to make Charlie feel – I’m not going to say at ease, but at home. And not just because they were old friends and colleagues. And not because of anything special that Roland said. It was just – Roland.

Just like Sam, whom he thought the world of (if Roland was everybody else’s mentor, Sam Phillips was his) he was a teacher – without all the big words that Sam used maybe but with the same sure sense of purpose. Every year his Christmas story provided an illuminating lesson. These were not conventional Christmas greetings – they were not just the usual well-intentioned summaries of family events over the last calendar year. They were more like real-life short stories with a strong moral underpinning. One of my favorites was 2011’s “House of Broken Dreams,” which began, “In my younger days I fancied myself to be a fine guitar player and singer” and then went on to paint a picture of the pawnshop owner who had given him a boost back in those early days. With another aspiring young musician, Roland (or the unnamed protagonist) had rented a room over the pawnshop, which was called “The House of Broken Dreams.” As Roland tells it, the name was something of a misnomer, if only because of the kindness of its owner, Mr. Oscar, a Holocaust survivor. Well, I’m not going to tell you the whole story, it’s more of a meditation, really, but it led Roland to his usual Christmas conclusion: “Let me wish a Merry Christmas to one and all – and to all A GREAT LIFE.”

We shot video interviews for the enhanced digital editions of my books in the studio this past spring. One of the highlights was a conversation with Roland – not an interview exactly, the intention was always conversation. But as we were talking about Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Roland has always cherished not just for his genius but for his fundamentally good-hearted character, Roland evidently decided it was time to turn the tables on me. If this was really a conversation, then he wanted to ask me some questions, too. “Well, how’d you get started, Peter?” he said. “How did you first get into this music?” And while we were at it, he wondered how I had come to write my first book. He imagined I must get quite a bit of satisfaction out of the writing, he said. And then we started talking about the satisfactions to be derived not just from writing or music but from any form of creative engagement.

The last conversation I had with Roland, when he first got sick last month, he wanted to know how the video project was going. I told him it was going great – it was really fun to work with my son, Jake, and Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon, and it was always great to work on any project with him. “So you feel good about it, Peter?” he said. I told him that I did. “That’s good,“ Roland said. “That’s good.”

My Travels

Trowbridge’s, Florence, AL (Sam Phillips’ Favorite Hometown Restaurant)

Sorry to have been out of pocket for so long.

One of the biggest reasons is that we (Alexandra and I, with Robert Gordon and Jake coproducing, and David Leonard and Robert shooting) have been doing video interviews for the enhanced digital versions of the various books, which are slated to start coming out in December.

We shot in Memphis, Florence and Muscle Shoals, Nashville, and Chicago – at Phillips Recording Studio, Lauderdale Courts, Audubon Drive, Fame, Stax, and Sun International. Much of the interview material was with me alone, talking about how the books came to be written as well as some of the different approaches that I took to the material (like the huge difference required – just from the standpoint of structure and style  – in telling the two contrasting stories of Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love).

But then we had conversations, too, with old friends like William Bell (straight from the White House celebration of Stax to the Stax Museum itself), Rick Hall, Dan Penn, Jerry Phillips, Roland Janes, L.C. Cooke, and Sleepy LaBeef, among others. It was really fun (with the one unavoidable downside the bittersweet memories of all those now gone), and here are just a few pictures from our trip.

With Roland and Robert at Phillips Recording

Roland, in case anyone doesn’t know, played guitar on every big Sun record from the arrival of Jerry Lee Lewis on. He has managed the Phillips studio for the last thirty years and writes the most wonderful short stories, which he sends out every Christmas. Around the middle of our conversation, Roland announced, “Now I’m going to interview you.” And he did. Robert’s new book on Stax, Respect Yourself, is at this moment just about to go to press

With Alexandra and Jake at 706 Union Avenue

The last time I had been here was with Steve Bing and John Fusco, who was researching the script for Last Train to Memphis at the time. Matt Ross–Spang was just beginning to put together recombinant versions of all the original Sun equipment then. Now he has it nearly assembled, with the equivalent of Sam’s RCA 76-D console and, I believe, two Ampex tape recorders. So for anyone who wants to record just like Elvis did, you can have your chance soon. And who knows, maybe we’ll even start shooting the movie before too long!

With Rick Hall at FAME Studios

A couple of nights after this interview we went with Rick to the Nashville Film Festival screening of the documentary Muscle Shoals, a vivid evocation of the music (produced by Stephen Badger and Greg Camalier) in which Rick was characteristically and irrepressibly himself. In fact, he pretty much stole the show, leaving the way wide open for a sequel focusing on some of the other aspects of the story. Rick’s still-unpublished memoir, Hell Bent For Fame, as told to Muscle Shoals historian Terry Pace and edited by Robert Gordon, is an even more amazing and graphic story, particularly of his early years, growing up in the desolate badlands of the Freedom Hills. He wanted it to be like a combination of Harry Crews and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, he told me when he first began work on it more than ten years ago – and it is

With L.C. Cooke at his home in Chicago

L.C.’s got a new album coming out only 48 years after its originally announced date. Well, that’s not quite true – I mean, not literally true in that it’s not exactly the same album as the one SAR Records would have released if his brother Sam hadn’t died. This one will have some of L.C’s pre-SAR Checker and post-SAR Destination sides as well. But, as you can imagine, it’s very cool – totally cool. There’s one song on it that as we listened to it, L.C. said, “That was probably the best song I ever did in my life – to me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen and you say, I could have done that better. But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I’d have sung that song about 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better. And that’s always been my favorite song.” And then we listened to it. Watch for a fall release on ABKCO!

Next up on Our Tour: Thomson, Georgia, Birthplace of Blind Willie McTell

Jack Clement

This is the talk I gave at the beginning of the Tribute to Cowboy Jack Clement at War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville the other night.

It was an incandescent evening of real music and true feeling (the reverse phrasing works just as well), pulled together in the best Tom Sawyerish, “You can’t imagine how much fun it is to whitewash this fence” fashion by Dub Cornett and David “Ferg” Ferguson. You can go elsewhere to read about all the highlights, musical, magical, and emotional – or you can just wait for the movie. Suffice it to say that at end of the evening, Jack, who in the face of serious illness has declared that he is “choosing music over medicine,” performed one of the most achingly beautiful (not to mention uplifting) sets I have ever seen, beginning with his recorded masterpiece, Sandy Mason’s “When I Dream (I Dream of You),” and including, of course, his rousing version of “Brazil,” along with the same haunting arrangement of “No Expectations” that he sang at Sam Phillips’ memorial service.

I’m going to include a YouTube clip of “When I Dream” here – but unless and until the film of this Tribute concert is released, you should all bombard Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville with demands to see the almost equally emotional performance that they filmed at the Country Music Hall of Fame for their documentary on Jack, which unfortunately didn’t make the final cut. (Don’t bombard them – implore them, at most pester them.)

Anyway, here are my remarks. And I should add, pay close attention to the penultimate paragraph, which T-Bone Burnett followed up on eloquently in his introduction to “Guess Things Happen That Way” toward the end of the show.

“Jack Clement’s not in the Country Music Hall of Fame?

“WHAT THE FUCK!“

—————————————————————

I first met Jack almost forty years ago at – where else but The Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa,on Belmont?

Like most of you, I’m sure, I felt as if I had wandered into some kind of enchanted land, a rich Shakespearean landscape in which Jack intentionally played the role of both king and fool.

Even then I knew one thing: it was a world from which I never wanted to escape. And I never have.

I’m sure you all know Jack’s movie – Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan – there’ll be a number of clips from it playing tonight, and it may well be the most purely entertaining movie I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it, several times in the company of Jack, and it has never failed to delight. Sometimes I think it may be the measure not just of the man but of his audience, too – but in some respects (and I probably don’t even need to say this among friends), like all of Jack’s work, it is a deeply serious enterprise.

Like Shakespeare, Jack recognized from the start that if you expect people to pay attention, first they need to be entertained. And I think all of us can attest: along with the music, along with the conceptual art (and believe me, there’s plenty of that), Jack has given us more than our fair share of entertainment over the years.

That’s probably what enabled him to recognize Jerry Lee Lewis’ finer qualities when Sam Phillips’ assistant, Sally Wilbourn, came back to the control room (Sam was out of town at the time) and announced, “There’s a man out there who says he can play ‘Wildwood Flower on piano just like Chet Atkins playing the guitar.”

Do you think Jack could resist that?

“I mean,” he said, “who WOULDN’T want to hear that? And then she brought him back, and he really did sound like Chet Atkins. So I went back in the control room and put on a tape.”

It was that same perspicacious quality – things just tickle Jack, to this day – that helped him see Johnny Cash’s lighter side, not to mention his broader potential appeal. I’m not sure too many people saw John’s lighter side at the time – but Jack saw this man, whom he recognized as a kindred spirit from the start (it was one of the great friendships of both men’s lives), as a pop star, a status that he almost immediately achieved with the “silly little song” that Jack wrote for him, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” (that’s Jack’s characterization: never forget that Jack, a life-long dévoté of P.G. Wodehouse, is the self-proclaimed King of Silly) as well as more ironic numbers like “Guess Things Happen That Way” and “Ring of Fire,” which Jack arranged and produced (think of those mariachi horns).

It’s undoubtedly how he could recognize without even a second thought not just the remarkable talent that Charley Pride possessed but the unlimited commercial potential. Like Sam Phillips, probably his one true mentor and one of the few people who could match Jack in eccentricity and the determination to exercise his individualism at all times, in all settings, Jack simply didn’t acknowledge categories, and in the end it was the strength of Jack’s belief that persuaded Chet Atkins to take a chance on so unlikely a prospect.

Jack was reciting Shakespeare when I met him, and he was planning his voyage to Alpha Centauri (he’s probably still planning it) – but, you know, it didn’t matter what was the idea of the day (one of Jack’s many visionary concepts, none of which necessarily entailed making money, was MTV – ten years before MTV came into being), it was the profusion of the ideas, the profundity of the ideas that just kept pouring out of Jack’s fertile imagination. His poetic­ sensibility was constantly at work.

Without meaning in any way to categorize, let me just state it plain. Jack, the most genial of genial fellows (except when he gets into a Hamletty mood) has his enemies. Jack is an enemy of the predictable, he is a fierce foe of convention, he opposes narrowly defined logic and linearity, he disdains the dull, he is bound and determined to defeat expectation – as much as any of his literary or musical heroes, he is committed to conveying hard truths.

But with a difference.

Because Jack, I think more than anyone else in this town – maybe more than anyone else you’ll meet in this life – believes in the spirit of play. He is a kind of holy fool, with the emphasis on both words, in the manner of both Shakespeare and the great Russian literary masters – but maybe with a little more emphasis on humor than some of those Russians. Because Jack has never shied away from – in fact he has embraced – the greater truth of the cosmic pratfall, what he has sometimes referred to as the universal joke. Which is probably best characterized by the highly evolved version of the uplifting reality show (another genre that he pioneered – though the networks may have failed to pick up on the uplifting part) that has been his life.

Jack will tell you he’s been lucky all his life. If all else fails, he always says, Get lucky. I mean, who else breaks into show business by getting himself arrested on Christmas Eve in Jonesboro, Arkansas? Unjustly, I might add – and he would, too. Which led in turn to his meeting Billy Riley, his first major artist, who picked him up hitchhiking back to Memphis on Christmas Day. Which led in fairly short order to his being hired by Sam Phillips. Which led to his being fired by Sam Phillips, another stroke of luck, because it set Jack free to start off down his own highways, byways, and divagations, without ever forsaking his lifelong friendship with Sam. The point is, for Jack luck is just another part of the great Wheel of Life – you simply don’t want to miss your chance to get on it.

Jack said of Sam Phillips: “Elvis was a star, but Sam was the superstar. Because he discovered all them stars.  And led them around by the nose.”

That’s a quote.

Well, the same could be said of Jack, except I don’t think he would accept the designation any more than Sam would. Because to Jack – and I don’t mean to get all corny here – it’s always been about family. I mean, you could say community, but I really think it’s the greater intimacy of extended family that means the most to Jack.

The Cowboy Arms was like a clubhouse to which everyone had the key. Johnny Cash, Jack said, had a key one time – but he lost it. But it didn’t really matter, because the doors at the Cowboy Arms were always open.

It would be easy to tick off all of Jack’s manifold accomplishments: the songs, the industry honors, the records sold, the studios built (he’s probably building one right now), all those friendships made and, more important, kept. But that would be kind of missing the point. It was the FUN of it. As he first learned in the Sun studio, if you weren’t doing something different, you weren’t doing anything. And it wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t big fun.

For Jack, like all true geniuses, life is a continuing adventure and a continuing education. Doesn’t matter if you lose all your money making a horror film that after you’ve finished editing it (which you never did before and never will again), nobody can understand. YOU LEARNED SOMETHING.

You know, I can’t enumerate all the things I’ve learned from Jack.

About grace, humor, honor, feeling, spontaneity – ACTION (you know – the word that Jack calls out from time to time, almost as if to mock the very concept that he is seeking most to promote: the need to be RELAXED if you ever want to accomplish anything).

But most of all it’s just been fun trying to keep up, as I’m sure it has for all of you. And for those of us who might have been just a little faint of heart, Jack has opened up not just new ways of looking at things but new and exciting (which is not to say safe and insured) paths to pursue.

You know, Jack is living testimony to the fact that if you don’t chase fashion, you will never go out of style.

People say – everyone­ says – that Jack should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame, he should be in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – and there’s no question that he should. But remember one thing: Jack is in the Cowboy Jack Clement Hall of Fame, and that’s the most important one of all.

And now as Jack might say (even though I know I can’t say it right – well, I’m going to call on Jack’s sidekick, Alamo, here): ACTION!

Rebecca Burns Phillips

Sam Phillips’ wife, Becky, died a few months ago, on September 13, 2012. She was eighty-seven, a wonderful woman, and a wonderful friend – and no one who knew her could fail to be inspired by her quiet dignity and dedication.

Although best-known, certainly, for her behind-the-scenes role as wife and mother to America’s first rock ‘n’ roll family (her husband was the visionary prophet of Sun Records, and her sons Knox and Jerry continued the tradition), she possessed a creativity of her own that found expression not only in her pioneering radio work but in the unfailingly nurturing and sustaining role she adopted for her family.

She was a woman of deep-seated religious faith, but it was her sweetness of spirit that communicated itself most of all to everyone she met, whether family, friends, or fellow workers in radio over the years.

She was a seventeen-year-old high school student, already doing a radio show with her sister, when she met her nineteen-year-old husband-to-be at station WLAY in her native Sheffield, Alabama. Sam had only recently gone to work there as an announcer in 1942, and the way she described it, “He had just come in out of the rain. His hair was windblown and full of raindrops. He wore sandals and a smile unlike any I had ever seen. He sat down on the piano bench and began to talk to me. I told my family that night I had met the man I wanted to marry.”

Becky, Sam said, was the inspiration behind WHER, his first radio station, the first All-Girl Station in the Nation, which went on the air on October 29, 1955, just as he was finalizing the deal to sell Elvis Presley’s contract. The idea of giving women a chance they had never had was “based on what I knew Becky could do. Becky was the best I ever heard,” he declared in a 1998 interview for the Peabody Award-winning Kitchen Sisters’ documentary on PBS, WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts. And what he meant by that had less to do with her exceptional gift for writing, for speaking, for presenting and organizing her thoughts in a cogent and compelling fashion, than what lay behind those thoughts, what Sam would call the innate spirituality of the presentation.

But you didn’t have to hear her on radio (where she continued to broadcast till the mid-1980s) to get the benefit of Becky Phillips’ unmistakable capacity for kindness and connection. Her on-air slogan, “A smile on your face puts a smile in your voice,” could just as easily stand for her chosen path in life. There was no better friend, there was no better partner, there was no better confidence-builder than Becky Phillips – though she would be the last to admit it.

One of my fondest memories of Becky is of holding hands with her. This was when we were making the A&E documentary about Sam in 1999, and Becky was, of course, an integral part of the story. She helped in every way possible, providing pictures, memories, stories, and personal memorabilia. She did everything in fact except cook us breakfast at five o’clock in the morning the way she always did for Elvis when he would come to visit Sam and her and the boys in the middle of the night. The only thing she wasn’t certain about was the idea of doing an on-camera interview herself.

Well, she was certain.

She just didn’t think it was necessary. She said she would be too nervous. She said she wouldn’t be comfortable without a script (she wrote wonderful scripts for all of her radio specials). What it came down to in the end was that, yes, she would be too nervous to do it – but she didn’t want to let us down. Most of all, she didn’t want to let Sam down, because although they had been separated for many years, she never considered herself in any way separate from him.

Knox got her to the interview. He got a really cool suite at the Ridgeway Hotel out east in Memphis, and he had it filled with flowers – and Becky got her hair done and looked really beautiful. But as we sat there, it became more and more clear how nervous she really was. And she grew even more nervous as the crew hurried to set up. She said, “I just don’t think I can do it.” I told her I knew she could, she’d be great. She said, “Maybe if I could just read something I’ve written?” But she knew that just wouldn’t be right. Finally she said, “Maybe if you could just hold my hand.” So we sat there holding hands for ten or fifteen minutes while they finished setting up – and then she did the most beautiful, eloquent, composed interview one could ever imagine, with all the warmth and assurance that informed every other aspect of her life.

We held hands one or two more times in similar situations over the years. And she always liked to act like I was the one giving her support. But the truth is, that was only part of it. Honestly, I don’t know anyone I’d rather be holding hands with than Becky Phillips. Because whatever you may have been doing for her, she could always do so much more for you. She could just do so much for your confidence in yourself, as any member of her family would readily attest – because she always made you feel like you really were something. Because she showed such an immeasurable and unreserved belief in you. The very qualities that Sam Phillips cited as her special gifts for radio could just as well be cited by friends and family, by everyone in fact who were the beneficiaries of that indomitable loyalty, that remarkable sense of order and communication not just of words but of deep-rooted emotion that this quietly remarkable and self-effacing woman sent forth into the world.

Sam, Knox & Becky circa 1957

The Kitchen Sisters excellent piece on WHER aired on NPR. Here’s a link to the archive of the audio story:
http://tinyurl.com/cw8xeq7