Dewey and Elvis
The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously “discovered” rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought the budding new music to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South’s most popular white deejay, “Daddy-O-Dewey” soon became part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley and, subsequently, to conduct the first live, on-air interview with the singer.
Louis Cantor illuminates Phillips’s role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. Phillips’s zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis’s subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and oral history collections, Cantor presents a personal view of the disc jockey while restoring Phillips’s place as an essential figure in rock 'n' roll history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two years before Alan Freed "discovered" rock 'n' roll, deejay Dewey Phillips was introducing white audiences to largely unfamiliar "race" music by Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and B. B. King and becoming Memphis's most popular white disc jockey as a result. Dewey was also the first major deejay to play Elvis on the air, sparking one of the greatest music careers of the 20th century. Cantor's study of the influential disc jockey begins roughly when Dewey launched his "Red, Hot and Blue" show on WHBQ in 1949, and the book is as much a biography of Memphis as it is of Dewey Phillips. Sam Phillips (no relation), founder of Sun Studio, is a central figure and Beale Street, Memphis, comes to life as a meeting point of black and white communities and the site of Home of the Blues Records. Cantor, who knew Elvis in high school, makes a case for further study of Phillips as a pivotal figure in the dissemination of early rock 'n' roll. Well-researched and meticulously annotated, his volume draws on personal interviews, secondary sources and preserved oral histories to create an authoritative, readable and lively portrait of both the person and the time that launched the sound of rock 'n' roll. 14 pages of b/w photos.
