One of the most important offstage figures in 20th-century popular music, Sam Phillips has frequently been described as the father of rock’n’roll. Best known for discovering Elvis Presley, he also launched the careers of such stars as Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison.

In an era when the Deep South remained socially segregated, Phillips broke the colour barrier by opening his Sun Studio in Memphis to black and white musicians alike. By mixing blues, rhythm and blues, folk and country and western, he and his artists created a new sound that took first America and then the world by storm.

“God only knows that we didn’t know it would have the response that it would have,” Phillips said in 1997. “But I always knew that the rebellion of young people, which is as natural as breathing, would be a part of that breakthrough.”

The son of poor tenant farmers, Samuel Cornelius Phillips was born in 1923 at Florence, Alabama, birthplace of W. C. Handy, the father of the blues. As a child, he picked cotton alongside black labourers, later recalling: “A day didn’t go by when I didn’t hear black folks singing in the cotton fields. Did I feel sorry for them? In a way, I did. But they could do things I couldn’t do. They could outpick me. They could sing on pitch. That made a big impression on me.”

Drawn to the emerging medium of radio, he worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals and Decatur, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, before settling in Memphis in 1945. There, he got a job as a disc jockey with WREC and operated as a talent scout, recommending artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. In 1950 he opened his Memphis Recording Service studio at 706 Union Avenue.

To pay the bills, Phillips recorded weddings, bar mitzvahs and political speeches, and on one occasion he taped a car muffler and testified in court about its decibel range. Later renamed Sun Studio, the business’s motto was “We Record Anything, Anywhere, Anytime”.

Phillips soon began to audition some of the many local blues artists, including such future legends as Howlin’ Wolf and Bobby “Blue” Bland. In 1951, he recorded the local disc jockey and aspiring blues man B. B. King. Soon afterwards, he recorded Rocket 88, by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner, now regarded by many as the first rock’n’roll record.

At a time when smooth crooners such as Perry Como dominated the charts, Phillips discouraged musicians from polishing their sounds, and encouraged them to reproduce the raw passion of their live performances.

Although his Phillips label, begun in 1950, proved shortlived, he enjoyed some success in selling masters to leading independent labels such as Chess, Duke and RPM. After setting up Sun Records in 1952, he racked up a series of rhythm and blues hits with stars such as Rufus Thomas and Little Junior Parker’s Blue Flames.

Phillips, however, harboured much grander ambitions. According to a Sun receptionist Marion Keisker, he would often complain: “If I could find a white man who could sing with the natural feel and sound of a black man, I could make a million dollars.”

When he heard Elvis Presley sing, Phillips knew he had his man.

An 18-year-old truck driver, Presley had walked into Sun in the summer of 1953 to record a couple of sentimental songs which he said were for his mother’s birthday. At the end of the session, he paid his four dollars and left. Several months passed before Phillips listened to the tape. Always on the search for new talent, he was struck by something in the singer’s voice.

However, when Phillips eventually invited Presley back to Sun, the session started badly, a session of pop songs and ballads producing nothing of merit. Then Presley picked up a guitar and began to fool around with a blues song, That’s Alright, Mama. At that moment, the course of American popular music changed for ever.